Lot Essay
Ordered by George Milne's Inver Line of Aberdeen, Invermark was the second of a notable group of steel barques added to the company's fleet during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Built by Russell & Co. at Port Glasgow in 1890, she was registered at 1,436 tons gross and measured 235½ feet in length with a 36 foot beam. A strong and a splendid sea-boat like her sisters, she survived a particularly stormy pasage during the winter on 1907-08 when, outward bound from Port Talbot carrying best Welsh coal, she was six weeks rounding Cape Horn in weather "enough to sink any vessel except an Inver barque" according to her officers. Winner of a 1913 race from Montevideo to Melbourne in a remarkable 44 days, she was posted "missing" whilst en route from Fremantle, Western Australia, to Iquique, Chile, in 1916 and never heard of again.