Last of "Four Aces" Steams Off To Knacker's

Texas City Sun -- June 13, 1993

By MAX RIZLEY, Jr.

Doff your caps and sound eight bells, ye toilers of the sea! The Texas Clipper's long watch is finally coming to an end.

If you happened to glimpse the majestic maroon-and-white Texas A&M University at Galveston training ship as she stood out to sea Friday, I hope you paused to take a long, hard look: You'll see her like never again.

Provided she overcame the fuel oil leak that had delayed her departure from Tuesday until Friday, the Clipper is on her last 10-week summer cruise, giving her contingent of Sea Aggies the experience and sea hours they need to get their mate's licenses when they graduate the Pelican Island-based school.

It is her 28th yearly cruise.

Texas Clipper's brass engine telegraph rang up "Finished With Engine" for the last time in 1993

When she returns in August, her last A&M crew will disembark, there will be hugs and kisses at the dockside and felicitous remarks from the podium.

And then, quietly, softly, one still morning, the Clipper will slip her lines and steam off into the swirling mists of time, her only passengers the ghosts of a long-gone age of luxury, speed and pride -- the Golden Age of the Steamship.

It was an era when, in 1952, the SS United States made the fastest crossing ever of the Atlantic: Just over three days, averaging 35 knots (a ship four city blocks long, at that!) -- and she only lit off three of her four boilers! The record still stands.

This was the Texas Clipper's age -- or, rather, the Excambion's, as she was known then.

Launched as the troopship Queens in 1944, she was extensively rebuilt and re-named in 1948 for American Export Lines as a passenger-cargo vessel -- fast, comfortable overseas transportation for tourists and businesspeople who had to get to Europe, but couldn't swing the price of a berth on one of the fabled Cunarders or White Star liners.

One of four crack ships on a U.S.-Mediterranean run, Excambion and her sisters -- Exeter, Excalibur, and Exochordia -- were dubbed "The Four Aces" by their crews. They were all fast, graceful ships, with sharp, steep bows and ladylike, high and deeply undershot sterns, and a pleasingly symmetrical deck layout, with the various levels of their superstructures stairstepping in from bow and stern, to a pinnacle at the middle where the smokestacks rose.

But their reign was short. Like their predecessors the sailing ships, who reached their pinnacle of speed and size and efficiency even as steam engines were making their graceful clouds of canvas obsolete, the steamships achieved their greatest development just in time for the postwar era's capacious, long-range airliners to doom them to memory. Before the turn of the decade of the '60s, Excambion and her sisters had been retired.

It was in 1965 that Excambion was called forth from the mothball fleet, given her third name, and embarked on a post-"retirement" career that would last longer than her original service; indeed, she would sail with the Aggies for longer than most of today's ships are designed to last, from launching to scrapping.

The Aggies re-named her, they coated her with maroon-and-white paint, and she patiently bore 28 years of "student drivers" and the inevitable scrapes and bangs. And she aged.

But she never forgot from whence she came. Her lines were still those of an Ace, and not the bluff-faced, flat-decked containerships and bulkers she tied up next to.

Inside, her pilothouse was all polished brass and varnished wood, her course guided by a big wooden ship's wheel little different from the ones aboard her sailing ancestors. A glass-faced, brass-handled engine telegraph relayed orders to the engineers many decks below with an authoritative jingling of bells. Brass speaking tubes stood ready to communicate with vital areas, should some catastrophe knock out the phones.

Where Aggie cadets now took their meals, a room-wide mural depicting world travel remained from the Glory Days. At the head of her curving, 1950s brushed-aluminum grand staircase, the deck for years still bore the legend, "Promenade Deck."

In the first-class saloon, the bar still dispensed liquid refreshment (even if it was just soda) and students chatted, studied, or played ping-pong where once the elite came to see and be seen.

But the stately, if faded, grace above decks couldn't make up for increasing problems below, as the 40-year-old steam engine began to show its age, needing more and more maintenance -- and wearing out parts that weren't made any more.

So it is that next June, the Sea Aggies will set sail in the Texas Clipper II, a much newer, just-retired Navy research vessel formerly named Chauvenet.

As before, the bands will play, parents and sweethearts will dab their eyes, the ship's whistle will blast (and, no doubt, someone will run a string of bras and panties up a signal-flag hoist), and the Aggies will steam toward the horizon.

And the first Texas Clipper, ex-Excambion, ex-Queens, will vanish like summer mist into the ages -- into an age which will not be again.

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