Footnotes

• Launched from J. Reid’s Clydeside yard at Port Glasgow in August 1866, “Antiope” proved as fine a merchant ship as could be constructed at that time and gave her numerous owners over fifty years of stalwart service. Ordered by Joseph Heap & Sons, merchants and rice millers, and built entirely of iron, she was registered upon completion at 1,443 tons gross and measured 242½ feet in length with a 38½ foot beam. Like all Heap’s ‘Thames & Mersey Line’ vessels, “Antiope” was placed under the management of Thompson, May & Co. of Liverpool and began her life on her owners’ triangular route running emigrants and mixed cargo to Melbourne, then walers (horses) into the Bay of Bengal, and finally home from Rangoon with rice from Heap’s own mills. Generally sailing from Liverpool on the 10th of the month, “Antiope” soon acquired a reputation for speed and solid dependability, with her best passage out to Melbourne in 68 days in 1868. In an age when 75 days was considered a good Australian run, this was exceptionally fast; had she not been becalmed on the equator for fully ten days whilst en route however, she might have found herself immortalised as one of the fastest sailing ships ever.
  
  In fact, she turned in many other good passages throughout the 1870s and was still in prime condition when Heaps sold their entire fleet to Gracie, Beazley & Co. in 1883. Now sailing under the colours of the Australasian Shipping Company, “Antiope” continued running to Australia but less regularly than before and with other destinations, often San Francisco, interspersed with her usual route. Sold again in 1897, at which time she was converted to a more economical barque rig, she was not only captured by the Japanese during the Russo-Japanese War of 1905-06, whilst on a Russian charter, but soon afterwards narrowly escaped sinking during a particularly violent Pacific gale in 1908. Although sold for a coal hulk in New Zealand in 1915, the shortage of tonnage due to the war in Europe gave “Antiope” a new lease of life and she was expensively refitted and put back to work in the Southern Ocean. Driven ashore off Bluff Harbour, New Zealand, in rough weather in 1916, so valuable had she now become as tonnage grew ever more expensive that she was successfully salvaged despite being pounded by the surf for 96 days. The operation was extremely costly but, by 1917, she was back in service and continued to earn profits for her owners until 12th January 1921 when a serious fire as she lay in Delagoa Bay left her a burned out wreck. Even then she survived, and ended her days as a storeship for the Senna Sugar Company at Beira in Mozambique.