WHENEVER I think of the historic seaside suburb of Stockton, I think of sand erosion and shipwrecks.
But perhaps I should also think of the foreign soil dumped here back in the 19th century from hundreds of windjammers awaiting coal cargoes.
Thousands of tons of earth and rock, even rubble from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, once came to Newcastle Harbour in the bowels of sailing ships as ballast. Heavy materials were needed to stabilise wooden and iron ships to stop them from capsizing on their long voyages. After they discharged their ballast overboard here in port, they were ready to take on coal cargoes, often to distant ports in South America.
Discarded ballast built the whole western edge of Stockton (now parkland) by the Hunter River, and I recently came across a rare insight into those days, 125 years ago, from an old salt. But more about his memories soon.
Around 1900, the overseas bulk coal cargo trade worldwide was mainly left to large, obsolete sailing vessels, as it was still a profitable business to them, along with bulk wheat cargoes bound for Europe. Hundreds of such vessels came here up to about 1914 (the start of World War I) wanting coal cargoes. In 1896, during a coal strike, there were about 100 vessels stranded in port awaiting coal, a sight we'll never see again. Modern bulk colliers can take so much more cargo at one time.
About 1986, and the era of 'Wran's navy', 50 bulk carriers patiently anchored off Newcastle awaiting coal cargoes for global markets. Stockton maritime historian, the late Peter Callen, said that back then, the capacity of those 50 vessels equalled about 1000 earlier average-sized sailing ships.
Let's go back to about 1900, when steamers were taking over the lucrative NSW coastal trade. That's when the old-fashioned wind ships, or windjammers, came to Newcastle, their cargo holds empty and in ballast, desperately trying to secure coal for American ports. Some, of course, famously didn't make it as the entrance to the port of Newcastle was very dangerous. The rusting skeleton of the wrecked barque Adolphe (from 1904), now embedded in the northern breakwater, is testimony to the hazards.
Once safely in port, each large wind-driven ship might dump between 1000 and 1200 tons of ballast overboard in anticipation of soon replacing it with coal.
But it wasn't always that way. Ship ballast was once regarded as a potential health hazard. For many decades, from the 1850s, our harbour authorities forbade ship captains from disposing of ballast "from infected ports" into the harbour. Instead, moored ships had to take their ballast out to sea in barges. That expensive policy finally changed, and so by 1907, the bulk of about two million tons of ballast coming in ships to NSW came to Newcastle. That's why Stockton's entire western foreshore (now parkland) is made from ballast.
Where golfers now practise their swings, engineers built the first training wall from dumped ballast stone. Steam dredges then pumped silt behind the wall onto low-lying land to raise it above the highwater mark, but also created 'foul swamps' there for a while. Rock from Scandinavia, Melbourne bluestone, broken green roof tiles from China, plus London flint and soil from Chile, Peru and Ecuador were later top dressed.
According to retired sailor Mr T. E. Ellwell in a forgotten Newcastle Herald report from the 1940s, the dumped Stockton ship ballast was also rich in fossils, including fossilised shark teeth.
Ellwell first came to Newcastle from Liverpool in 1897, when he was 14 years old. He sailed as an apprentice on the four-masted barque Glenogil, and, by the time he was 18, he had his second mate's square-rig ticket. When Ellwell reached Newcastle after 81 days at sea to load coal for 'Frisco in 1897, our city was celebrating its centenary, and there was "a huge arch built of coal" spanning Hunter Street (near Darby Street).
Back then, he said there were windjammers galore, at the Dyke and on the Carrington side (loading coal), and at Stockton discharging ballast and at the busy farewell buoys in the river. The ferry was run by a man named Boyce who used to start his launch engine, come up and collect passenger fares and then steer. If he saw a sailor like Mr Ellwell, he took no fare, but got him to work his passage as helmsman instead.
The Seaman's Institute was then near Stockton ferry landing, and the chaplain went from ship to ship in a rowing boat trying to save souls.
Ellwell described the newly formed Stockton ballast ground as a "classic example of cosmopolitan country". The former seaman also explained the extreme danger of sailing a ship only partially loaded with ballast (and with no cargo). Tall masts under canvas were prone to tipping the vessel over, as there was no central weight to provide counterbalance. With such ships at risk of disaster in a big sea, it was difficult to sail them, Ellwell said.
Helmsmen became very anxious as so little of the ship's rudder was under the water.
To sail more safely, the captain might decide to have, say, 40 buckets of ballast taken from the forward hold and dumped aft. Even this small amount could have a 'surprising result' with the weight transferred from one end of the ship to the other, which could greatly improve steering. However, it was likely that half of the transferred ballast would have to be returned the next day, depending on ocean conditions.
And the ship's rock and soil ballast had a character all its own. Ellwell said the holds of sailing ships were "without doubt the strangest of kitchen gardens" with vegetables growing amid the fertile soil on long voyages. Even stranger, Ellwell reported that a glance down an open aft hatch sometimes revealed the captain's hens scratching on the ballast, absorbing grit for shell formation in the middle of a voyage.
But Ellwell's most memorable tale concerned a stay in Newcastle when the port was "plagued with mosquitoes", especially in ponds behind Stockton's ballast walls. About 2am on this trip, and maddened with mosquitoes, he ran naked down the ship's gangway and leapt into one of the pools the tide left in the ballast ground. But he hadn't noticed the mosquitoes hovering in a "foot-deep layer" above the swampy water, leaving his body swollen with bites.
"The ballast in which I took my plunge is an area of international earth," Ellwell said. "But the mosquitoes were definitely Australian."