by John Martin

The history of Canadian Pacific’s foray into the business of forest product maritime transport in the 1960s is inextricably bound up with the formation of Canadian Pacific (Bermuda) Ltd. This company had been founded in 1964, specifically as a means to provide entry into a wider world of competitive ship-owning, a world not governed by conference rules or threatened by the looming demise of the trans- Atlantic passenger ship trade. Post-war Canadian Pacific shipping interests outside of actual Canadian waters had recently become concentrated on a mixed bag of cargo vessels serving mainly European and Eastern Canadian routes, and their two remaining and graceful passenger liners, known as the ‘White Empresses’. A radical shift in emphasis was needed, and the Bermudan registered fleet was to be the solution.This fleet eventually grew hugely and included VLCCs, oil product carriers and bulkers of all shapes and sizes, but the forest product and log carriers were amongst the very first, beginning initially with the purchase of a 15,000 dwt geared bulk cargo ship. The vessel acquired was second hand tonnage purchased from Norwegian owners, and it was not to be an auspicious start for the fledgling company. Given the name of one of the founders of the Canadian Pacific Company, she was the R. B. Angus, and sank whilst on passage from Chemainus, on Vancouver Island, to Japan in 1967.

Briefly, she had been loaded with a part cargo of zinc concentrates in New Westminster, and had then proceeded to the tiny port of Chemainus on Vancouver Island, for a deck cargo of timber before setting sail. The weather on passage was truly dreadful, and she eventually foundered on the 17th December 1967, still some 700 miles from her intended destination. The second officer on board at the time is now a liveryman of the Honourable Company of Master Mariners, and in 2012 he, Robin Mallam, gave a lecture on all of the circumstances of the loss, on behalf of the Wellington Trust, which was both concise and very well received. A reading of the text of the lecture confirms that the advent of modern weather reporting techniques and the introduction of ‘optimum ship routing’ or ‘weather routing’ instructions for vessels transitting the oceans of our world would have removed at least some of the root causes of the loss. However, no one should underestimate the need for vigilance when carrying deck cargoes of timber and deadweight cargoes such as zinc concentrates. Thankfully, all the crew were rescued, and the incident demonstrates clearly the risks that mariners regularly face in their sea going environment.

This portion of the C P Bermuda Fleet was soon augmented by the introduction of a group of three dedicated forest product carriers, all of which were constructed at the Mitsubishi Heavy Industry yard at Hiroshima between 1967 and 1969. They were the H. R. Macmillan, the J. V. Clyne and the N. R. Crump. For a company which had previously given their ships either relatively romantic names (such as the ‘Empress’ Liners) or ‘green’ sounding titles (such as Beaverfir, Beaveroak), this prosaic labelling of ships with those admittedly historic names of Canadian Pacific directors and managers was a radical departure, and a practise which continued with the later additions to the fleet!

They were all placed on a 10 year time charter initially to a subsidiary of the MacMillan-Bloedel Company of Vancou-ver called the Canadian Transport Company, and an aerial photograph of the first one, the H. R. Macmillan whilst on trials, shows the CTC logo on the funnel rather than the Macmillan Bloedel one, which was adopted shortly afterward. Interestingly, the ships side in this photo also shows the company livery prior to the rebranding exercise to C P Ships.

Technically, they were innovative in many ways, most obviously in their cargo handling equipment. The cargo deck was dominated by the installation of three 75 ton Munck Loaders. These three gantry cranes which were electrically powered, ran in the fore and aft line on hardened steel rails from the forecastle to the after accommodation module, and served all six cargo holds. They were the product of a Norwegian company, and had already been proven in the maritime carriage of timber product by their use on the ships of the ‘Star’ bulk shipping company and others. However, Canadian Pacific decided that initially the loaders were to be equipped with Canadian manufactured attachments, rather than the bespoke Munck designed components. The decision proved flawed from the outset due to compatibility problems, and once the ships entered service, the result was frequent cargo handling delays, especially in the movement of wood pulp, newsprint and paper products from shore to ship and vice versa. The Canadian built attachments sometimes failed under load, and the cargo product on occasion was dropped from a great height, narrowly missing ship and shore personnel underneath.

The ships themselves were 29,000 deadweight, 594 feet in length and nearly identical. They were powered by the famous Sulzer RD7 series engine, of some 10,500 BHP, built under license in Japan, and were the first modern dry cargo ships to be built in Japan for the company.

In line with other multinational companies of the time, the ships, because of their foreign flag status, were not subject to any restrictive labour policies on board, and so, as expected, agencies were used to recruit the ‘non officer’ component of the crew. In the case of these three ships and many others of the Bermudan Fleet, this resulted in Spanish crews being employed on board under the direction of British Officers, a manpower amalgam which by and large functioned well, after the initially chaotic maiden voyage of the H. R. Macmillan, which was the first of the class. Unlikely as it might seem now, an entire Spanish crew had been flown out to Hiroshima mere hours before the ship was to be handed over, and virtually none had any grasp of the English language whatsoever!

Between communicating with the MHI Hiroshima yard staff, few of whom had any command of English, and the ship’s own willing but ‘Spanish only’ speaking crew, the vessel’s trials were interesting to say the least. The departure after handover, through the Inland Sea of Japan in darkness was fraught, as navigating officers struggled with their hastily purchased Spanish-English phrasebooks to find and then pronounce the required words for ‘starboard or port’ steering commands on the bridge, whilst in the engine room, the engineering officers were reduced to sign language only.

The maiden voyage of the H. R. Macmillan proved to be anything but routine, as the ship encountered very severe weather conditions during the Pacific passage to Vancouver Island. A landfall off the western coast of the island was achieved with only the use of a magnetic compass, a direction finding loop aerial and dead reckoning, since overcast skies had not permitted the taking of sights with a sextant for many days. All other navigational aids, including the gyro compass, the two radar sets and the Loran navigator had been knocked out by the severity of the ships motion in bad weather.

On arrival at Nanaimo, on the East Coast of the Island, the ship immediately became victim of a longshoremen’s blockade, aimed at the owners and charterers of the vessel. A group of them paraded somewhat half-heartedly at the bottom of the ship’s gangway, carrying placards which proclaimed – “H. R. Macmillan (the ship). Canadian Owners. Canadian Charterers. British Officers. Spanish seamen. Built in Japan. Registered in Bermuda. Don’t work on a foreign flagged ship. We demand Canadian jobs on Canadian ships”. The blockade lasted all of twelve hours, but was indicative of the militancy of the British Columbian longshoremen’s union at that time.

Weeks later, on arrival at Tilbury with a full cargo of British Columbian timber products, the worst of disasters occurred with a serious operational failure of the ship’s forward- most Munck Loader. Two ship’s crew lost their lives in the accident, and whilst no further fatalities occurred, a string of more minor incidents continued to occur in the early months of the ship’s life.

The ten year time charter that the ships were placed under with the Macmillan Bloedel Corporation was structured around the certainty of cargo produced by the company’s own timber processing facilities. The most notable was situated at Port Alberni, on the West Coast of Vancouver Island. It remains a pretty little town, at the head of a long fjord-like inlet, and there they maintained a large pulp and paper mill, and also a sawmill producing the very best of finished timber products. In addition, the three ships would call at other small ports on the East Coast of the Island, such as Chemainus, Crofton and Campbell River, where further product would be waiting for shipment. The ships nearly always finished off by taking on board a large deck cargo of packaged cut timber, which by and large was more easily secured and stable than the deck cargo of logs carried by one of the other C P ships of that era, the Pacific Logger.

The homeward passage saw the vessels normally sail straight to Tilbury in England via the Panama Canal, with occasional diversions to Newport in Wales, and one or two Danish ports. Cargo would be fully discharged, and they would sail in full ballast condition, bound for Jacksonville in Florida, Great Inagua Island in the Bahamas, or the New Orleans/Baton Rouge area on the Mississippi for a cargo of grain. Phosphates or concentrates saw the ships then proceed through the Panama Canal bound for the terminal at Port Moody, on the outskirts of Vancouver, whereas the grain cargoes that were shipped would often require a passage to Japan. Those grain cargoes often changed hands several times whilst on board the ship, and for this reason a final destination port was often unknown until the ships were nearing the Japanese mainland. After discharge in Japan, it was often impossible to secure an onward cargo for British Columbia, and so a further ocean passage in a full ballast condition would be again required, which was not something ship’s staff looked forward to, especially in the wintry wastes of the North Pacific Ocean!

Those frequent passages in ballast meant that the ships could only be described as being moderately profitable at times for Macmillan Bloedel, and by the end of the ten year charter period it was clear that the problems within the timber processing industry of British Columbia required vigorous cost cutting, including the way in which ships were to be chartered.

Canadian Pacific persevered with the ships for only a short time thereafter, and by 1979 all three had been disposed of to foreign owners.

The remaining ‘wood ship’, was not strictly just a replacement built for the loss of the R. B. Angus, and was named the Pacific Logger. Built in Osaka, she entered service in 1969, and was placed on a ten year time charter with the C. Itoh Corporation of Japan, for the carriage of logs from the western seaboards of Canada and the USA to Japan. This charter again required frequent full ballast passages from Japan east bound, since cargoes were scarce in that direction for ships of her design. And so, at the end of the 10 year charter period, she too was disposed of after a brief period of operations under the new name of Fort St. John.

The North Pacific frequently challenged the Pacific Logger just as it had the R. B. Angus, and in 1969 after departing from Coos bay with a cargo of logs, she was forced to limp back into Astoria with a flooded hold and the need to re-stow her badly disarranged deck cargo of logs. In 1974, she was again disabled during a severe gale, and had to be towed away for repair, as once more the waters of the North Pacific proved challenging.

It is a fact that shore based personnel with responsibility for the shipment of those log cargoes were often puzzled by what they perceived as ultra cautious loading practises by ship’s officers. The charterer’s representative would often witness that the ship had not been loaded ‘to her marks’, and would demand to know why several hundred more tons of deck cargo could not be placed on board. A patient explanation of the rules surrounding ship stability and the dangers of water absorption by logs on deck frequently proved fruitless, and it was not unusual for the ship’s chief officer to be offered financial inducement to load extra cargo, at least until the ship’s load line was brought close to immersion. In these days, draught marks were not yet metric, and on two separate occasions whilst chief officer on board, I was challenged by the unblinking stare of the charterer’s agent as he bellowed at me in broken English, “one hundred dollar one inch”, a not inconsiderable amount of money in the early nineteen seventies! At least on British ships, I can think of no circumstances where an officer would have deliberately put his fellow crewmen at risk by overloading in such a way, but no doubt it will have happened, sadly sometimes with tragic consequences.

The days of the C.P. ‘wood ships’ were therefore relatively brief, from the first voyage of the R.B. Angus in 1966, to the last by the Pacific Logger/Fort St. John no more than 15 years elapsed. However, the ships in their own way left their mark in British Columbia and the U.S. States of Washington and Oregon. 35 years after her final voyage for C P ships, and standing prominent amongst the world famous murals of Chemainus (a small ‘timber’ town on Vancouver Island which has now re-invented itself as a charming cultural and tourist centre), one can see a magnificent panoramic mural of the motor vessel H.R. Macmillan underway. Meanwhile, just over the horizon on the mainland of the province, the name also lives on in the shape of Vancouver’s famous planetarium.

Of these five ships, three were fated to suffer untimely demises. The R.B. Angus as previously noted was lost in the North Pacific Ocean in 1967. The N. R. Crump ran aground in the Caribbean Sea in 1983 whilst operating under the Mexican Flag as the Texistipec. After some fruitless attempts to repair her, she was eventually towed to Cartagena de Indias, Columbia, where she was finally scrapped in 1985. The Pacific Logger/Fort St. John also had an undignified end, when as the Shanta Rohan of the Hede (India) Corporation, she was the subject of frequent litigation in ports around the Indian Ocean area, usually because of unpaid bills! Eventually, she became partially flooded whilst laid up at Mumbai, and was declared a constructive total loss before being scrapped locally in 1991.