Lot 644: Lai Fong of Calcutta (fl.1890-1910)

The four-master County of Edinburgh at sea
signed, inscribed and dated 'Lai Fong/Calcutta 1895' (lower right)
oil on canvas
18 x 23 1/4 in. (458 x 59.1 cm.)

The iron four-master County of Edinburgh was almost the last in a fleet of splendid commercial sail - known affectionately as Craig's 'Counties' - completed for R. & J. Craig of Glasgow between 1863 and 1887. County of Edinburgh, like all her sisters from 1875 onwards, was built on the Clyde by Barclay, Curle & Co. and launched from their yard in 1885. Registered at 2,160 tons gross, she was an enormous vessel and measured 285 1/2 feet in length with a 42 1/2 beam. Ordered for the jute trade, the last three 'Counties' were all designed with their stowage capacity receiving as much attention as their speed, with the result that County of Edinburgh regularly loaded at least 16,000 bales of jute on every homeward passage. Often seen racing in company with her own sisters, County of Edinburgh was the fastest in the Craig fleet and did the run from Cardiff to Bombay in 92 days on her maiden voyage and thence home from Calcutta to Dundee in a speedy 123 days. The years from 1899 - 1902, under Captain Tode, were probably her best when she took to carrying oil from Philadelphia to the Orient or coal from Cardiff to Cape Town, after which she was sold to German owners in 1903. Reduced to a barque and renamed Frieda, she sailed under German colours until just before the Great War when she was resold to Finnish owners, and was last recorded as a casualty of the Alabama (Mobile) hurricane which drove her ashore on 5 t h July 1916.

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