Harland and Wolff - Shipbuilding and Engineering Works

The story off the "Horse and cart".

The tanker Iroquois, with propelling machinery aft, had a housing on the poop in which there was a towing winch with a drum capacity of 500 fathoms of seven-inch wire. A steam valve controlled the winch, easing a taut wire and then picking up the slack again. With engines of 5,000 Indicated HP she could travel at 11-12 knots. They where known all these years as the “Horse and Cart”.

The Navahoe (Ship No. 389) was rigged as a six-masted “bald-headed” schooner. She had quite powerful engines powered by a large Single-ended boiler, the uptake from the furnaces being through the foremast. The engines were not for propelling, but for pumping and heating. As with the Iroquois, steam was also supplied to a towing winch and there was also a steam winch at each mast for hoisting sails, The six masts-fore, main, mizzen, jigger, spanker and driver-each carried a fore and aft sail. The boom length was sixty-five feet, the gaffs sixty feet.

The first voyage of the pair began on 1st March, 1908, from Belfast to the United States and, with but one exception-that of a voyage to Colon and Sabine-the partnership continued in the North Atlantic until 30th May, 1917-nine and three-quarter years. Up to that time 148 crossings were made, averaging sixteen each year at a speed of just under 9 knots. But the long period of nine and three-quarter years had to be broken, for the First World War was then at its peak, with stringent convoy organisation, hardly suitable for a big-ship tow such as the Iroquois and Navahoe, So the ships were withdrawn and placed on a Texas-Halifax, Nova Scotia, run, averaging just over 10 knots in the sixteen voyages made between June 1917 and November 1918. By the end of the war some 290,000 tons of oil had been moved for the Admiralty in just under eighteen months. With the end of the war came release front Admiralty service and the two vessels left Baton Rouge on 24th December, 1918, bound for London. With other tankers they continued working in the Baton Rouge-London River service, although at the end of 1925 there were the beginnings of the great world depression, with all types of shipping laid up in countless rivers and backwaters and including many tankers. However, the Iroquois and Navahoe were able to continue their work, mainly between Baton Rouge and Thames Haven, until their last arrival on 17th September, 1930. Then, after nearly twenty-three years, the Navahoe went off to act as a floating oil store at the mouth of the San Juan River in Eastern Venezuela. The oil terminal was at Caripito, some sixty miles up river where the ever-larger tankers were too deep to load down to their marks. So they topped off from her 90,000 barrels storage before sailing on to deep seas. But this was only a temporary measure. Loading conditions improved and after completing the cargoes of hundreds of tankers, she was towed out by one of the tankers in the summer of 1936 and scuttled in 400 fathoms.

December 1946 She was scrapped by Armon, Young & Company, Dalmuir.