Third Officer Michael Gibson displays the Royal Mail pennant. It is the stuff of history.
The RMS St. Helena II - islanders or ‘Saints’ just call her the RMS - could well be the last of her line. ‘Royal Mail Ships’ were once as emblematic of Empire as cricket, statues of Queen Victoria and punkah wallahs. For all practical purposes, the RMS is now the only working Royal Mail Ship.
This is one of her ancestors.
This is one of her ancestors.
In my September 3 posting, I mentioned the dusty old ship models in the little Cape Town museum. For generations, the Union-Castle’s lovely, lavender-hulled vessels paused at St. Helena on runs between Southampton and South Africa. They carried mail, supplies and passengers. Islanders were sometimes tendered out to the ships to watch the latest movies.
That ended in 1977. Passenger liners, ships that actually took you on regular routes like a train, were consigned to the same place as pith helmets and colonial pigsticking. The RMS and her immediate predecessor, an old coaster they found in British Columbia, have since been St. Helena’s lifeline. Bar diesel and gas, they've ferried in all that a community of 4,000 people and a few tourists require. It is worth repeating that thought in another way: since 1502 every person not born and every object not made on the island have come by sea.
This the Northland Prince, before she became the St. Helena I, passing under Vancouver's Lions Gate Bridge. It is, by the way, the bridge that led to my childhood home.
Here she is on a St. Helena stamp. She is remembered for what a former B.C. passenger said were ‘peculiar stability habits.’
I'm on her successor, launched in 1989 and already described as ‘pensionable.’ Her destiny is dictated by the airport. If regular planes do arrive, the RMS will be sold or scrapped. A ship or ships, presumably not for passengers, will bring in heavy cargo. However, the RMS St. Helena's officers and crew - mostly Saints - will be out of a job.
