Call me Ishmael! He’s at it again! Our cub reporter Angus Young just can’t help digging up obscure tales of random connections to the city.
There was a special reason for film fans to flock to Hull’s cinemas in November 1956 to see the latest Hollywood blockbuster Moby Dick. Starring alongside Gregory Peck as the obsessed Captain Ahab in the adaptation of Herman Melville’s famous novel was a very familiar ship. Two years earlier companies at St Andrew’s Dock normally engaged in maintaining Hull’s distant-water steam trawling fleet had been chosen by the film’s director and producer John Huston to help convert a three-masted schooner into Ahab’s whaling ship Pequod. Huston himself would later visit Hull to check on the progress of the work.
Originally built in 1866 in Lancaster and named the Ryelands, the vessel spent most of her working life transporting cargo around the British coast. However, in 1948 she was sold to film company RKO Pictures to be used as Long John Silver’s pirate ship Hispaniola in the Walt Disney adventure film Treasure Island. Treasure Island was a box office hit and Scarborough Council cashed in by purchasing the ship and mooring it at the harbour, converting the lower decks into an aquarium full of tropical fish.
By then, the council had also commissioned a quarter scale replica of the galleon to sail on Scarborough Mere as another visitor attraction. This mini Hispaniola was built in Hull by engineering firm Charles Pearson Ltd. and made its maiden voyage on the Mere in the summer of 1949. In its first summer season, it carried nearly 46,000 passengers to an island in the middle of the Mere where buried plastic doubloons were waiting to be discovered.
A few years later with Huston’s Moby Dick on its production schedule, Elstree Studios bought the Hispanioloa and hired the expertise of the company behind its replica to oversee its conversion from an 18th century English pirate ship into a 19th century American whaler. The resulting refit was extensive and involved a number of specialist firms based at the fish dock and in Hull.
The sails were made by ship chandlers and sail makers E.E. Sharp & Sons whose former premises in High Street is now part of the Sailmaker’s Arms pub. The rigging was made and fitted by Hall’s Barton Ropery which had a factory on St Andrew’s Dock while a team of carpenters and skilled craftsmen from engineering firm Humber-St Andrews not only created an entirely new cork deck for the ship but also designed and made numerous period features. They included the type of small boats used in close-quarters whale-hunting and the ship’s large wooden figurehead reputedly based on a real-life female chief of a 17th century Native American tribe although not the same tribe that gave the ship its name.
Peck’s performance as the Pequod’s captain divided opinion at the time of the Moby Dick’s release but is now regarded, along with the film itself as being the definitive big screen adaption of Melville’s novel.
The ship later appeared as the Sultana in the 1956 TV series The Buccaneers starring Robert Shaw as the captain of a swashbuckling crew of pirates. Four years later the ship was back in the same dock in Lancaster where it had been built after being bought by businessman Peter Latham. It was moved her to Morecambe to operate as a museum.
In 1972 the ship was sadly destroyed by a fire but the story doesn’t quite end there. Back in Scarborough, the Hull-built mini Hispaniola is still taking tourists for pleasure trips having relocated from the Mere to the town’s seafront.