Volume Eight - Pre-Victorian to the present day - more aspects - Pamir and Passat - the end of an era . . .

Ruthless Businessman - Gustav Erikson was a strange mixture of romantic and ruthless businessman. He had a deep love of sail and the way it built character and made men, but his ships had to work hard for their living.

He manned them with tiny crews of young-adventurers, many of whom were amateurs who paid for their passages, and he denied them all but the essentials of canvas and cordage. Usually they had to supplement a spartan diet with their own food.

Under the command of Captain Karl Sjogren, Pamir became part of Erikson's 'grain fleet', taking outward cargoes of timber and coal to Australia and returning with grain around Cape Horn. They were years of hard unbroken servitude for Pamir. She carried rough cargoes and spent much of her time in ballast, facing Southern Ocean storms and bitter competition from the steamships which by now dominated the main trade routes.

With a canny instinct for publicity, Erikson made sure that whenever possible his grain ships left Australia together, and the ensuing 'grain races' invariably made newspaper headlines. And in her first year under new ownership Pamir got the glory. She won the 1932 grain race in 92 days, two days ahead of her nearest rival. Pamir, skippered by the redoubtable Captain de Cloux.

But the glamorous image of 21 crack windjammers racing home across half the world had a less romantic side. Some of the steel hulls had rusted so badly that sailors couldn't chip them for fear of their hammers going clean through the plates.

Built up to 50 years earlier and sailed on a capital representing scrap value, Erikson's ships were uninsured. Compared with a steamship's one able seamen for every 100 registered tons, the clippers averaged one to every 1,000 tons - most of the crews were teenagers doing the trip to qualify as officers in the merchant service.