Today, if you want to buy like a $10 phone case
from across the globe, you can just pull out
your smartphone. Right. You just open an app.
Yeah. You track its journey across the Pacific
Ocean on a digital map and you know precisely
what day it will arrive. While the entire global
shipping industry today is highly regulated,
it's guided by synchronized satellite GPS and
meticulously optimized to avoid the slightest
delay. It's a marvel of invisible infrastructure.
I mean, we've simply been conditioned to expect
these massive logistical networks to work safely
and efficiently without ever really thinking
about the underlying mechanics. Exactly. But
if you roll the clock back just 150 years to
the late 19th century and the dawn of globalized
steam power, that illusion of control completely
vanishes. Yeah. Moving cargo back then essentially
meant taking an undersized iron boiler, dropping
it into a 100 -foot boat. filling the hull with
highly combustible rocks and sending it out blindly
into a fog bank. It was incredibly dangerous.
Welcome to today's deep dive. We're looking at
a single source today, a Wikipedia article detailing
the 20 -year history of a 19th century New Zealand
coastal trading ship called the S .S. Go ahead.
Right. And on the surface, the source document
reads like a pretty dry maritime timeline. It
lists launch dates, tonnages, corporate owners
and shipping routes. Right. But beneath those
statistics is this really fascinating historical
microcosm. OK, let's unpack this because what
we actually have here isn't just a boring timeline
of a boat. No, not at all. It is a wild, chaotic
story filled with sketchy sales tactics, absolutely
terrible navigation and a mechanical lemon of
a ship that seemingly had nine lives before meeting
a very tragic, foggy end. The go -ahead was just
one of thousands of vessels working the coastlines
during that era, but its 20 -year career spanning
from 1867 to 1887 perfectly encapsulates the
massive technological growing pains of the late
1800s. Yeah, you are seeing the real -time trial
-and -error reality of humanity trying to figure
out how to conquer the oceans with steam technology.
So let's start at the very beginning, April 1867.
The Go Ahead is launched in Scotland. She is
built for the Clyde Shipping Company, specifically
designed to be sailed all the way down to New
Zealand to run coastal trading routes. And her
initial design is a really fascinating bridge
between two eras. She's technically a top sale
schooner, meaning she has masts and sails, but
she's also a twin screw steamer. Right, and I
have to imagine that... building a hybrid vessel
like this was essentially an insurance policy
against early unreliable technology. Like if
the primitive steam engines inevitably fail,
you can still rely on the wind to get you to
port. That is a very astute deduction. Early
marine steam engines were notoriously temperamental,
and coal was heavy and expensive. The sails were
absolutely necessary for long -haul voyages like
that massive initial journey from Scotland to
Australia. Wow. The go -ahead was equipped with
high -pressure engines putting out 30, maybe
35 horsepower. Wait, 35? That's it? Yeah. To
give you some modern perspective, a standard
ride on lawnmower today easily produces 25 horsepower.
That is insane. Right, yet here was a heavy iron
ship 110 feet long at the keel meant to carry
cargo and passengers through the punishing ocean
swells of the southern hemisphere on just a fraction
more power. Which totally explains why her commercial
life immediately goes sideways. They sail her
out to Melbourne, Australia, arriving in November
of 1867. It does not go well. Not at all. The
owners try to sell her right there at the docks,
but nobody bites. They simply cannot unload this
brand new ship. Oh, no one wanted it. Because
the Australian market rejects her, they send
her onward to Westport, New Zealand. And this
is where the agents in Wellington, a firm called
AP Stewart & Co, put out an advertisement that
I could only describe as a masterpiece of absolute
fiction. Oh, it really is. It is one of the more
remarkable pieces of historical marketing in
the maritime archives. They advertise that the
go ahead has a draft of only four feet of water.
Which implies she can glide into incredibly shallow,
undeveloped colonial ports. Then they claim she
can carry 1 ,000 sheep. Just visualize that for
a second. A thousand sheep crammed onto a 110
foot boat. It's absurd. And they billedly call
her quote unquote, highly suited for coastal
trading, tacking on that classic desperate urgency
you see in classified ads. Must be sold. Owner
leaving the colony. Right, the classic excuse.
I mean, this sounds exactly like buying a used
car on Craigslist where the seller writes, runs
great, just needs gas. But the reality is the
engine block is fundamentally cracked. The used
car analogy holds up perfectly when you look
at her maiden voyages in New Zealand. The reality
was an immediate logistical disaster. Oh, completely.
When the crew tried to sail from Westcourt down
to Wellington, they couldn't even complete the
trip as planned. The historical record explicitly
notes she couldn't maintain steam pressure because
of bad coals on board. OK, so when the historical
record blames bad coals, I am assuming they aren't
just complaining about dirty rocks, right? No,
it's a structural issue with the fuel. If you
load a ship with a batch of coal that has low
carbon content or incredibly high moisture, it
physically cannot burn hot enough to boil the
water. Exactly. And without that intense heat,
you can't create the necessary steam pressure
to turn the screws right. Precisely. Coal quality
in the 19th century varied wildly depending on
the mine it came from. In a steamship, your survival
entirely depends on maintaining a constant, intense
thermal output. If the coal is full of impurities,
the temperature in the furnace drops. The steam
pressure plummets, the engine stall, and suddenly
you are just a very heavy piece of iron drifting
helplessly in the ocean currents. Wow. The go
-ahead was forced to abandon her route and detour
to Nelson just to find better fuel. And even
when they finally limped into Wellington in January
1868, the problems didn't end. She just sat there
at Queens Wharf for months. Yeah, they attempted
to do a proper trial run in Evans Bay and they
made a devastating discovery. Her boiler was
literally too small for the ship. Oh! Structurally,
that is a fatal engineering flaw. The boiler
is the heart of any steam vessel. It is the sealed
vessel where water is heated to generate steam.
If the boiler is physically too small, it cannot
generate enough steam volume to feed those high
pressure engines, regardless of how pristine
your coal is. That makes sense. The builders
in Scotland had constructed a ship whose heart
could not support its muscles. It is no wonder
the buyers in Melbourne took one look at her
performance and walked away. So the original
owners are stuck with this mechanical woman.
She is stranded at the wharf, surrounded by swirling
rumors and legal strife over payments. Yes. But
because the ship was an unsellable disaster,
they had to find a market desperate enough to
completely overlook her glaring flaws. And luckily
for them, there was one. Yeah. Fortunately for
the owners, desperation was brewing right up
the coast. The Thames Gold Rush was taking off
near Auckland in the summer of 1868. And you
know, whenever you inject a gold rush into a
developing region, it creates absolute logistical
chaos. Suddenly, there is a voracious frenzy
to move thousands of prospectors, heavy mining
equipment, and basic survival supplies up and
down the rugged coastlines. And when there's
a gold rush... People aren't exactly picky about
the quality of their transportation. Not at all.
An Auckland company finally buys the Go Ahead
in August 1868. By September, she is taking her
first 25 passengers, and she quickly becomes
an absolute workhorse. Yeah, she really does.
In 1870, when a rival ship named the S .S. Touranga
tragically sinks, the Go Ahead simply slots right
into its vacated route. She is constantly moving.
She found her economic niche because the demand
for transport was entirely inelastic. But the
physical toll this heavy usage took on the ship,
and more importantly on the human beings operating
her, is staggering to consider. Oh, the numbers
are wild. We have records from 1875 showing that
in a period of just over three months, the Goahead
burned 289 tons of coal to cover over 6 ,600
miles. I want to stop right there and look at
those numbers because I did the math on this
while I was reviewing the source. That breaks
down to 97 pounds of coal burned for every single
mile traveled. It's hard to even picture. Yeah,
I really have to push back on this romanticized
steampunk vision we all seem to have of 19th
century maritime travel. The popular image is
gentlemen in top hats smoking cigars on a polished
wooden deck. Right, the luxury liner image. Exactly.
But down below the water line, the human logistics
of this operation are horrifying. Shoveling 97
pounds of coal into a furnace every single mile
for thousands of miles requires a level of physical
suffering that is hard to fathom. Stripping away
that steampunk romance is crucial to understanding
the era. There is zero automation in this process.
Every single one of those 289 tons of coal was
moved by human muscle. The stokers worked deep
in the bowels of the hull. It was pitch black,
lit only by the glare of the furnace. And I bet
the air was just awful. The air was incredibly
thick with airborne pull dust, which instantly
coats your lungs and your eyes. The ambient temperature
standing next to a roaring ship's boiler is suffocating,
easily sitting well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
And while you are dealing with the heat and the
dust, the ship itself is pitching and rolling
violently in the open ocean. Right. You are trying
to maintain your footing on slippery steel grates,
swinging a heavy iron shovel, and throwing nearly
a hundred pounds of jagged rock into a raging
fire for every mile the ship advances. Sounds
like a nightmare. If your muscles give out and
you stop shoveling, the ship loses pressure and
stops moving. It was brutal, relentless, punishing
labor. those stokers literally fueled the economic
boom of the colonial era with their own bodies.
Well, all that relentless heavy -duty coastal
work eventually caught up with the hardware of
the ship itself. By the time we reach the 1870s,
the go -ahead enters an era I like to call her
bumper car phase. That is a very apt description.
The narrative shifts sharply away from her economic
utility and highlights a staggering lack of basic
safety protocols. She just starts crashing into
things. Constantly. In September 1870 she collides
with a ship called the Ivanhoe. The historical
report explicitly states she was going full speed
and they crashed because the go -ahead had absolutely
no forward lookout posted, none. A subsequent
court of inquiry actually assigned blame to both
ship masters for that collision. What's fascinating
here is how these frequent incidents highlight
the incredible tolerance for risk and damage
in early commercial shipping. Oh for sure. We
have to remember that there were no universal,
internationally enforced rules of the road for
the oceans yet. Furthermore, these heavy iron
ships were notoriously underpowered, making them
incredibly slow to respond to the home. Right,
they had tiny engines. If an obstacle appeared
in the mist, a 30 horsepower engine couldn't
reverse the momentum of a fully loaded hull in
time. That tolerance for risk is fully on display
in 1877. the go -ahead gets stranded on the South
Spit while trying to leave Gisborne. What a major
stranding. Yeah, the grounding is so severe that
the initial reports claim she has been abandoned.
Everyone thinks she is entirely beyond salvage,
a total loss. But then? Yeah, three weeks later,
they manage to drag her back to Auckland, and
she gets repaired for 1 ,400 pounds. But here
is the critical economic detail. She was insured.
for 4 ,000 pounds. Why? The owners were perfectly
covered. Oh, and the captain who drove her into
the spit, he kept his certificate. The court
decided his mistake wasn't severe enough to suspend
his right to command. If we connect this to the
bigger picture, we see a massive moral hazard
introduced by the early marine insurance industry.
Oh, absolutely. When a ship owner can repair
a vessel for a fraction of its insured value
or completely recoup their capital if it sinks,
Their financial incentive to invest in rigorous
safety protocols drops to near zero. It's just
bad business to be safe, basically. Exactly.
Furthermore, competent navigators, even the ones
who occasionally ran their ships aground, were
a scarce resource in the colonies. The economic
system simply needed them back out on the water
moving cargo. But the go ahead wasn't done playing
bumper cars. In 1878, she breaks down entirely
in a storm. In 1879, she snaps a propeller. It
just keeps going. Later that exact same year,
she collides with yet another ship recorded as
either the Hurra or the Huya. Once again, both
captains are blamed and neither is suspended.
Unbelievable. It reminds me of having a smartphone
with a terrible degraded battery that keeps randomly
shutting down. OK, I see where you're going with
this. Instead of throwing the defective phone
away. You pry it open, haphazardly solder in
a massive aftermarket battery, and bolt a heavy
industrial metal case around the outside to force
it to keep running. They didn't scrap the ship.
They physically hacked its hardware to keep it
alive. That analogy perfectly captures the extreme
mechanical interventions of 1879. The owners
at the time, Johnston and Combe, decided against
scrapping her. Instead, they authorized a massive
structural overhaul. They didn't just repair
her, they literally lengthened the ship's hull.
I have to pause here because the phrase Lengthen
the ship's hull sounds so casual in the Wikipedia
source, but the actual engineering behind that
in 1879 must have been a monumental undertaking.
How do you physically stretch a heavy iron steamship?
It is a phenomenal feat of 19th century engineering.
They would place the ship on a dry slipway. carefully
drill out the iron rivets around the midsection
and physically cut the ship in half. They just
cut it in half. Literally in half. Using heavy
winches, they would pull the bow and the stern
apart, creating a gap in the middle. Then shipwrights
would build an entirely new central section,
plating it with iron and riveting the entire
vessel back together. Wow. This process increased
her cargo capacity and, crucially, provided the
physical space needed to correct her original
fatal design flaw. They finally installed a newly
designed properly sized boiler and upgraded her
to significantly more powerful 45 horsepower
engines. The local papers actually described
her as almost a new ship. She basically was.
She goes back out into the coastal trade, running
routes to Wellington, Napier and Dunedin. But
here's the tragic reality of early technology.
You can upgrade the internal hardware all you
want, but you cannot patch out human error. No,
you can't. And you certainly cannot engineer
your way out of the sheer force of nature. Because
all of this leads us to May of 1887. The final
voyage into the fog. May 20, 1887. The go -ahead
is navigating off the coast to keep kidnappers
at two o 'clock in the morning. The historical
reports describe terribly thick weather. Very
dense fog. The fog is so dense that the True
has absolutely no visual references. In fact,
the visibility was so nonexistent that the ship
was already inside the breaking waves of the
coastline before anyone on board even realized
something was wrong. That specific scenario is
the ultimate nightmare for Mariner. On the ocean,
by the time you can actually hear the sound of
the surf crashing over the relentless mechanical
noise of your own steam engines, it is already
too late. Even with her upgraded 45 horsepower
engines, you simply have no time to arrest the
forward momentum of the ship or turn the rudder
to change course. The source notes that Captain
Plumlee was navigating by dead reckoning at the
time of the crash. I've heard that term used
in movies, but mechanically speaking, dead reck
- essentially means navigating entirely blind.
Right. Yes, essentially. It's navigation without
any external visual or celestial reference. You
take your last known GPS free position. You factor
in your estimated speed. You look at your compass
heading and you basically just guess where you
are on the map. Exactly. And the fatal flaw of
dead reckoning is what it cannot account for.
Your compass and your speed might tell you that
you are safely out in deep water. Right. But
dead reckoning cannot measure the hidden ocean
currents. It can't account for heavy winds. silently
pushing your hull sideways in the dark. Oh, wow.
So you think you're going straight, but you're
actually drifting diagonally. Precisely. That
is exactly why relying on it in a blinding fog
bank near a jagged coastline is so incredibly
dangerous. And the danger caught up to them.
She grounded hard on the rocks, the ship turned
bottom upwards in the surf, and the hull finally
break apart. A total loss. Here's where it gets
really interesting. Or rather... incredibly tragic
because the human cost of all this systemic risk
taking finally comes due. A stoker, one of those
exact men we talked about earlier, working down
in the dark sweltering hundred degree belly of
the ship. Yes. A man named James Gunning drowned
in the wreck. The ensuing wreck inquiry paints
a very stark picture of the guesswork involved
in that era. Captain Plumlee testified that he
firmly believed he was making eight and a half
to nine knots and he was confident he was safely
six miles north of the Cape. But the court found
him unequivocally guilty of negligent navigation.
Their specific phrasing was that he was trying
to quote -unquote cut the headland too fine in
foggy weather. Right. He was cactively trying
to shave a few miles off his route to save time
and coal by hugging the dangerous coastline when
he couldn't see ten feet in front of the bow.
I have to say Looking at the outcome of this
inquiry, I am firmly pushing back on the idea
of justice here. I don't blame you. The leniency
of the Maritime Court is unbelievable. It is
definitely a jarring conclusion for anyone looking
at it through a modern lens. Think about the
facts of the case. A crew member, James Gunning,
is dead. A heavily upgraded steamship ensured
for 5 ,500 pounds is completely destroyed, lying
bottom up in the surf. All of this happened because
the captain was recklessly trying to cut corners
blindly in a fog bank. Yes. And what is Captain
Plumlee's punishment for all of this destruction
and loss of life? A three -month suspension of
his master certificate. Three months. Got a slap
on the wrist. The Wikipedia source casually notes
that by September of that exact same year, just
four months later, he was already commanding
another steamer, the Wallaby. This raises an
important question about the stark priorities
of the 1880s. We have to confront how the colonial
economy valued human life versus capital. They
clearly valued the capital more. Absolutely.
The owners were insured for 5 ,500 pounds, meaning
their financial capital was entirely protected
from the captain's negligence. The loss of a
stoker, as tragic as it is, was viewed by the
systemic powers of the time as a highly replaceable
labor loss. That's just incredibly dark. And
as we discussed with the 1877 stranding, the
colonial supply chain was so desperate for experienced
ship masters to keep the goods flowing that the
court simply refused to sideline a captain for
long, even one who had just proven to be fatally
reckless. The endless economic demand for moving
goods completely trumped the demand for safety
or accountability. Meanwhile, the physical remains
of the mighty go -ahead were basically worthless.
The ruined hull and the upgraded machinery were
auctioned off for a measly 13 pounds. 13 pounds?
Salvage attempts were made. Ships with names
like the Fairy and the Bella sailed out to try
and pull valuable metal out of the surf, but
poor weather ruined the attempts. They managed
to recover a ship's bell and a compass, but the
rest of the vessel was surrendered to the sea.
Which leaves us looking back at the entire chaotic
20 year lifespan of this single vessel. So what
does this all mean? We started our timeline with
a 30 horsepower, heavily flawed, limit of a boat
failing to sell in Melbourne, and we ended with
a tragic, fatal shipwreck on the rocks of Cape
Kidnappers. Looking at the whole picture, what
is the ultimate takeaway here for you? Well,
if we connect this to the bigger picture. The
SS Go Ahead serves as the perfect microcosm of
the industrial era. It shows you firsthand how
trial and error defined early technology. Humanity
didn't arrive at the sleek, GPS -guided, highly
regulated maritime system we enjoy today through
pure, flawless theory. We got here by making
terrible, expensive, and often fatal mistakes.
We learned the hard way. Engineers learned about
the strict mathematical necessity of correctly
sized boilers by failing miserably in Evans Bay.
The industry learned about the critical need
to standardize fuel because bad coals were stalling
ships in open water. Regulators realized the
absolute necessity for mandatory forward lookouts
and universal right -of -way rules by watching
ships crash into vessels like the Ivanhoe. And
tragically, we learned the sheer limits of coastal
navigation and dead reckoning through fatal wrecks
like the one at Cape Kidnappers. That's a heavy
thought. Every modern safety standard and every
modern regulation that protects maritime workers
today is essentially written in the wreckage
of ships exactly like the... Go ahead. It is
the physical rusted cost of progress. And there
is one final incredibly haunting image from the
source material that I want to leave you with
today. Go for it. After the wreck in 1887, the
salvagers couldn't retrieve the massive iron
boiler, the brand new one they had just installed
during that massive engineering overhaul in 1879.
It was simply too heavy and the breaking surf
was too violent. So they just left it. Decades
later... A local New Zealand newspaper noted
that the boiler was still sitting there, highly
visible on the beach in 1937. And reportedly,
as recently as 2011, pieces of that exact same
iron boiler were still visible in the sand at
Cape Kidnappers. Wow. Over a century later, a
piece of that Scottish engineering is still holding
its ground against the Pacific Ocean. It is a
rusted monument to a wild, chaotic era of trial
and error. So I want you to think about the device
you're using to listen to this deep dive right
now, or maybe the cutting -edge electric car
sitting in your driveway. Oh, I like this. What
massive rusted pieces of our own modern, quote
-unquote, perfect technology will be sitting
abandoned on some distant coastline 140 years
from now, slowly being swallowed by the sea?
It is definitely something to think about. A
very powerful perspective on the impermanence
of our own technological marvels. Until next
time, keep digging deeper.