Old Ships As Marine Museums

THE old-time barquentine City of Papeete is to become a Marine Museum, says Tahiti reports.

Interested in the old ship, Oscar Nordman wrote from Papeete to the lady-owner, asking if she would give him one of the name boards from the bow. She replied that they no longer exist but she would be very glad to give him the old ship, which she had fitted out as a house-boat for week-end vacations.

The vessel, of course, is a derelict and sits on piles off Sausalito, USA, its hold flooded at high tide.

Now comes advice that the vessel has been donated as a marine museum.

Reporting this, Mr. Nordman suggests that another suitable vessel for a marine museum, its

history closely linked with Tahiti, would be the brigantine Galilee, which also sits on piles in San

Francisco Bay and is the perl manent home of a former Britisll Army captain, John Quinn, now ail antique dealer.

Galilee was built in 1891 by Capl tain Matthew Turner, creator of many a famous old-time South Seas sailing craft. Quinn purchased the vessel in 1936, when she had ended her useful life. The piles which support her are linked with the shore by a narrow wharf which is illuminated at night by old! fashioned gas lamps. Aboard, she is stocked with marine curios picked up from all over £he world.

The 132-ft, 328-tons wooded vessel had a good turn of speed in her day, once making a run of 305' miles in 24 hours, fully laden. She ran supplies to a Tahiti mission for some years; then, from 1905 to 1908, she made a magnetic sur4 vey of the Pacific for the Carnegie Institute. For this voyage all her steel wire rigging was substituted by hemp, to reduce magnetic effects in the ship. The 64,000-mile survei voyage was by way of the Islands to New Zealand, Japan and back to San Francisco.

The Brigantine Galilee, as she lay in Papeete Harbour in 1897.