The General Cargo Vessel Balclutha

A regular visitor to Lyttelton in the last decades of the nineteenth century was the Balclutha. At Gladstone Pier she would load wool and tallow for London via the tip of South America.

Renamed Star of Alaska in 1902, she became a floating Salmon cannery on the Alaskan coast. In this trade she accommodated more than two hundred crew and passengers, as compared to a complement of twenty six carried on the New Zealand run.

Renamed Pacific Queen in 1933, she appeared in the film Mutiny on the Bounty, with Clark Gable and Charles Laughton.

Acquired by the San Francisco Maritime Museum in 1954, the Balclutha is now a designated National Historic Landmark.

Third in a series about surviving ships of significance to Canterbury history.