The early morning watch - The wool clipper Salamis

Described by the noted maritime author Basil Lubbock as "virtually an iron copy" of the immortal Thermopylae, Salamis was built by Walter Hood & Co. at Aberdeen in 1875. Lubbock also maintained that Thermopylae's designer Bernard Waymouth even adapted his own plans to suit an iron successor and, whether this was the case or not, Salamis was practically identical to the legendary racer except for being 10 feet longer overall. Registered at 1,130 tons gross (1,079 net), she was 221½ feet in length with a 36 foot beam and made an excellent reputation for herself even if not in the trade for which she had been ordered.

Her owners, George Thompson & Co. of London, had intended that she should run general cargo out to Australia and from there go to China to load tea for the homeward passage. By the time she was completed however, the China tea trade was already beginning the changeover to steamers and after a remarkably fast 68-day maiden voyage from Start Point (Devon) to Melbourne, Salamis came straight home with her holds crammed with Australian wool such were the prevailing freight rates. On her second voyage, she made Shanghai only 32 days after leaving Sydney but again could not find a tea cargo and brought home 18,000 sacks of sugar instead. Her third voyage proved the same and after two fruitless runs to Shanghai, she finally sailed back with yet another cargo of good colonial wool. Abandoning any further attempts to load tea, Salamis rapidly became one of the fastest and most successful of the wool clippers, making thirteen consecutive outward passages to Melbourne averaging 75 days, pilot to pilot. Eventually sold to Norwegian owners in 1899, she was wrecked on Malden Island, in the South Pacific, on 20th May 1905.