Foreign News: Junk de Luxe

While a great roll of blueprints was arriving at a Shanghai shipyard last week, a number of wealthy U. S. sportsmen were receiving in their morning mail an illustrated brochure entitled “A CRUISE FROM HONG KONG TO PARIS ABOARD AN OCEAN-GOING NING PO JUNK. It is the idea of a few men who have sailed together before. They need a few additional subscribing shipmates.” Subscription for a six-month cruise in the poop of a Chinese junk: $3,000 in advance. Not quite so mad as it sounded was the Ning Po Junk expedition. It was a bitter blow to the proud 18th Century shipbuilders of Britain and the U. S. to discover that the cliff-sided, lattice-sailed junks of China could outride a typhoon that would dismast a frigate. A Chinese junk, for all its uncouth lines, is one of the most seaworthy ships ever built. Most of them are also among the dirtiest ships ever sailed. That fact, however, need not worry Subscribing Shipmates. The plans that reached Shanghai last week were for a junk outwardly orthodox in every detail from the staring eyes on its squat prow to the curling dragons on its 30-foot poop, from the lacquered weathervanes on its raked masts to the enormous rudder. Inside it will be a junk de luxe, built of solid teak with cargo space subdivided into ten double staterooms with connecting baths, main saloon, dining saloon, galley with an electric refrigerator. The forecastle will quarter some 20 Chinese seamen. Subscribing Shipmates subject to seasickness may pay the extra cost of having their bunks hung on gimbals like a binnacle. There will be twin Diesel engines to propel the craft through the windless Red Sea, and a short-wave radio to broadcast its progress to the waiting world.

Master of the Chinese junk will be a Rhode Island Irishman named Thomas Francis (“Ted”) Kilkenny, who served as a Junior Lieutenant in the Navy during the War, has sailed square riggers to Alaska, lost his money in a tuna fishing com pany off Southern California and has al ready had one yacht built in China. Last winter he served as captain of another expedition, whose object was to dig up treasure supposedly buried near the island of Dominica by a political opponent of the late President Gomez of Venezuela. They never found the treasure ; the ship lost its rudder; the whole party was towed back to safety by the U. S. Coast Guard. Then Kilkenny sold his shipmates the idea of building a Chinese Junk, and sailing it the 10.000 miles from Hongkong through the Dutch East Indies around Cape Cormorin through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean and out again at Gibraltar, up the Seine and straight to the Paris Fair of 1937. Later, if all goes well, the craft will cross the Atlantic for the New York World’s Fair of 1939.

Kilkenny’s other shipmates include Count Ilya Tolstoy, cinema photographer, grandson of the novelist. Count Tolstoy is whiling away the time for the junk to be built by persuading his friends to invest in a concrete stadium for fighting-fish fights near St. Augustine.

“A junk,” explained Captain Kilkenny last week, “is duck-shaped rather than fish-shaped, so it can plunge into the trough of a wave and rise again almost vertically without shipping water.”