In 1908 the Anglo-American Oil Company put an unusual tractor into service. It consisted of a tanker with a six-mast tanker as an attachment. The team became known as "Horse and Cart" in the following years. Both vehicles were built by the Belfast shipyard Harland & Wolff .
The tanker Iroquois was one of the largest tanker units in the world when it was built and was basically designed as a conventional tanker with a deckhouse far forward and an aft machinery. The propulsion system produced around 5000 horsepower, which enabled a solo speed of eleven to twelve knots . In addition, the ship had a steam towing winch to take up a tow line around 18 centimeters thick. The towline tension was controlled by a steam valve system.
The tank sailor Navahoe was a six-masted schooner without a top sail. The Navahoe also had a steam engine system, but this did not act on a drive system, but was only intended to operate the cargo pumps and tank heating as well as to drive the steam-powered sail winches. The sails, for their part, were not intended for regular sailing operations, but rather in the event of a break in the towing connection.
The tug made its first voyage from Belfast to the United States on March 1, 1908. For almost a decade, until the end of the 148th voyage on May 30, 1917, the Horse and Cart remained on this route. The tow train reached average speeds of around nine knots. Due to the unsuitability for operation within the convoys of the First World War, Iroquois and Navahoe drove from June 1917 to November 1918 for sixteen trips on the route from Texas to Halifax, with an average of ten knots being reached. On Christmas Eve 1918, the Horse and Cart began its first post-war voyage from Baton Rouge to London and remained on the route from Baton Rouge to the Thames until September 17, 1930.
More careers
After 23 years, the two remarkable ships parted ways. The Navahoe was then used for a few years as a floating tank farm at the mouth of the San Juan River in eastern Venezuela, where it served as an upstream station for the Caripito oil terminal. Large tankers first loaded in Caripito and then topped up their load on the Navahoe . After an improvement in the Venezuelan transhipment facilities, the Navahoe was no longer needed, whereupon it was towed out to sea in the summer of 1936 and sunk there.
The Iroquois continued to operate until the end of the Second World War, although it was often used during the later solo career for sea abductions or special tasks such as laying pipelines off Tripoli and Haifa. In December 1946, the shipbreaker Arnott Young from Dalmuir finally acquired the long-serving ship and scrapped it in the first quarter of 1947 at his subsidiary West of Scotland Shipbreaking in Troon.
literature
Brennecke, Jochen: Tanker: From the petroleum clipper to the super tanker . Koehlers Verlagsgesellschaft, Herford 1975, ISBN 3-7822-0066-7 .
