Our elevated shipping correspondent Angus Young takes a trip to the Andes and beyond.
They were constructed next to the Humber in a Hull shipyard standing just a few feet or so above sea level. However, the SS Inca and the SS Ollanta were destined for much higher waters. Both ships were built by Earle’s shipyard at Victoria Dock to operate on Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world which lies in the Andes mountains between Peru and Bolivia.
Earle’s made ships for the British, Japanese and Chilean navies, the Hull-based Wilson Line and yachts for the Russian aristocracy. But the orders by the British-owned Peruvian Corporation were undoubtedly its most unusual contracts.
The British takeover of Peru’s state railway company in the late 19th century was part of a deal allowing Peru to pay off crippling debts caused by war and a series of natural disasters. In 1904 with traffic increasing on the 118-mile long lake, Earle’s secured a contract with the company to build the 220 foot-long steamer Inca. The ship was twice the size of the largest vessel sailing on the lake and when it was completed each section was carefully marked before the whole ship was dismantled. All parts of the vessel were then placed in packing crates, including the engines and boilers which had been manufactured separately.
The crates were shipped from Hull in 1905 and on arriving in Peru they were transported 200 miles by railway to the lake where all the sections were re-assembled before the ship entered service.
Twenty five years later Earle’s won a second contract for an even larger vessel, the 260ft-long Ollanta, to operate on the lake. The ship was built and then dismantled in the same way as the Inca and this time the company sent one of its top engineers to Peru to supervise its re-assembly. William Smale’s task was not easy. As well as the challenge of piecing the vessel back together, he had to rely on local labourers who not only spoke little English but also possessed few skills related to modern shipbuilding and engineering. Lacking many tools for the job, Smale improvised by adapting existing railway machinery while pressing ahead with the construction of a new slipway from scratch where the ship could be launched.
His original instructions were that he should wait for the arrival of a team from Hull to help with the launch but Smale and his Peruvian workforce cracked on and Ollanta was already in the water when his colleagues finally arrived. The steamer had a deadweight capacity of 950 tons and her four oil-fired engines gave her a top speed of 14.5 knots. Accommodation was also provided for 86 first and second-class passengers.
Smale stayed on in South America for a number of years, taking on a senior engineering job with the Peruvian railway company. He later worked in India before returning to Hull and spent part of the Second World War working on the construction of the famous portable Mulberry harbours used in the D-Day landings. The Inca survived until the 1990s before being scrapped. Her original Earle’s builders’ plate is displayed in a ticket office at the lake.
Today SS Ollanta is berthed in Puno harbour on the lake. No longer in regular service, she is reportedly used for occasional passenger cruises.