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

A Time Magazine journalist wrote: 'They are paid from $5 to $10 a month and some even pay for the privilege of signing up even though they know that one in 20 of them will be lost over the side. 'None of the ships has a radio and few plan to show lights at night. And the future for them if they do survive the voyage? Probably a trip to the break-up yard to become razor blades and sardine cans.'

Making Military History - Despite such pessimism, the clipper fleet survived and it took the Second World War to scupper the grain race for good - and for Pamir to make military history by being seized . . . by New Zealand. The barque, a Finnish neutral, was unloading guano at Wellington when she was judged to come from 'territory in enemy occupation' and so was a legitimate prize of war.

Taken over by the Union Steamship Company, Pamir was part of the New Zealand merchant fleet for the next seven years, making regular trips with grain, wheat and coal to the US and Canada with a New Zealand crew. Her final voyage under the Kiwi flag was a circumnavigation, during which 300 youngsters qualified as naval personnel. Docking in London, Pamir was visited by the Queen, then Princess Elizabeth, and the Duke of Edinburgh.

By the time the ship was formerly returned to Eriksons in 1948, Gustav Erikson had died, aged 75. Her former skipper, Captain Verner Bjorkfelt, made the doleful voyage back to Finland where Gustav's son, Edgar, had managed to reclaim a few of his father's ships, including Passat, Viking and Pommern, in the hope that there was still profitable work for them to do. There wasn't. Technically and economically, ships trading under sail had become the dinosaurs of the sea, and Edgar Erikson lacked the ingenuity and determination which had kept his father's windjammer fleet afloat for so long.

But he did seem to have inherited Gustav's canny instinct for publicity and suspected that to the public the romance of the windjammers was a heady as ever. He remembered that in the depth of world recession his father had kept his ships at work and in the headlines, largely by staging well-publicised grain races to Europe from Australia.

It was worth a try. In the spring of 1949, with the rest of his fleet idle in Mariehamn, Edgar Erickson sent his two most seaworthy barques, Pamir and Passat, in ballast to Australia to load barley in Port Victoria and bring it home to Britain in the very last grain race in the age of sail.