Court Line - the company and its ships

Halcyon Wave

 

Halcyon Wave was launched in 1959 and had a 28 year service life before being broken up in 1987. She had changed name and ownership between being launched and completion and was to change her name five more times during her life.

Basic Data

Type: Tanker

Registered owners,managers and operators:

Naessholm Shipping Co. Ltd. Hamilton Bermuda

Builders: Eriksberg Mekaniska Verkstad A/B

Yard: Gothenberg

Country:  Sweden

Yard number: 257

Registry: N/K

Official number: 301100

Signal letters: N/K

Call sign: GGHQ

Classification society: N/K

Gross tonnage: 16,492

Net tonnage: 9,989

Deadweight: N/K

Length: 615.73 ft

Breadth: 79.25 ft

Depth: 33.27 ft

Draught: N/K

Engines: 9 Cylinder B&W oil engine

Engine builders: Eriksberg Mekaniska Verkstad A/B

Works: Gothenburg

Country: Sweden

Power: N/K

Propulsion: Single  screw

Speed: 16 knots

Capacity: N/K

Crew: N/K

 

Origin of the Name Halcyon Wave

 

Halcyon is an old name for kingfisher birds - especially those of the genus Halcyon. Also a mythical bird, usually identified with the kingfisher, said to breed about the time of the winter solstice in a nest floating on the sea, and to have the power of charming winds and waves into calmness. And hence as an adjective Halcyon means calm, peaceful, joyful, carefree etc.

 

I don’t honestly know where the name Halcyon Wave came from, but it crops up fairly frequently in poems - here is one - there is another example from Hazlitt but it is not reproduced here as I don’t want to be accused of pretentiousness!

 

To Cardinal Richlieu

 

(Francois de Malherbe translated into English by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

 

Thou mighty Prince of Church and State,
Richelieu! until the hour of death,
Whatever road man chooses, Fate
Still holds him subject to her breath.
Spun of all silks, our days and nights
Have sorrows woven with delights;
And of this intermingled shade
Our various destiny appears,
Even as one sees the course of years
Of summers and of winters made.

 

Sometimes the soft, deceitful hours
Let us enjoy the halcyon wave;
Sometimes impending peril lowers
Beyond the seaman's skill to save,
The Wisdom, infinitely wise,
That gives to human destinies
Their foreordained necessity,
Has made no law more fixed below,
Than the alternate ebb and flow
Of Fortune and Adversity.          

Has made no law more fixed below,
Than the alternate ebb and flow
Of Fortune and Adversity.

Images

 

1.  Image #1 from The Allen Collection

 

Image 1

Service History

 

Very little specific information is currently available apart from changes of owners and name.

 

A judgment was made against the representatives of the ship on 3 December 1968 - see Ext. Ref. #19. The judgment relates to an appeal against a penalty of $1,000 dollars per head in respect of “alien members of the crew” who had not been granted Conditional Landing Privileges; four Chinese crew members had gone ashore in a lifeboat. The judgment reduced the penalty to $200 per head on the grounds that there had been five professional guards and a supervisor employed round the clock to prevent these people landing.

 

She was also laid up in Avonmouth in 1975 but the circumstances of this are not known.