It has been a long time coming, but it appears that the historic sailing ship Falls of Clyde will finally be removed from Honolulu Harbor to be sunk about 12 miles south of the harbor. The ship has been threatened with scuttling twice before in her long history, but this time it is likely to come to pass.
The Hawaii Department of Transportation (HDOT) announced that Shipwright LLC, a Florida-based maritime technical consulting firm, has been hired to prepare the ship for disposal. The $4.9 million removal project includes removal of debris from the ship and hull strengthening and reinforcement to allow the vessel to be safely towed to be sunk in late November.
Falls of Clyde is the world’s only surviving iron-hulled, four-masted, fully-rigged ship and the only surviving sail-driven oil tanker. She was built in Glasgow in 1878, during a shipbuilding boom inspired by increased trade with the U.S., and she made several voyages to American ports while under the British flag.
In 1898, she was purchased by Captain William Matson of the Matson Navigation Company and reregistered in Hawaii. From 1899 to 1907, she made over sixty voyages between Hilo, Hawaii, and San Francisco, California, carrying general merchandise west, sugar east, and passengers both ways. She developed a reputation as a handy, fast, and commodious vessel, averaging 17 days each way on her voyages.
She was sold to San Francisco-based Associated Oil Company, which installed large steel tanks in the hull, allowing her to carry 750,000 gallons of liquid bulk. For decades, the ship would bring kerosene to Hawaii and molasses back from Hawaii to California. The ship served as a floating petroleum barge in Alaska from 1922 to 1958. In 1963, she was to be sunk as part of a breakwater at Vancouver, British Columbia, before being saved by a group of preservationists.
Falls of Clyde was towed to Honolulu, Hawaii, where she was given to the Bishop Museum and opened to the public as a museum ship in 1968. By 2008, the ship had deteriorated due to limited funding. The nonprofit Friends of the Falls of Clyde took over ownership of the vessel from the museum, hoping to drydock and restore it; however, they were unable to raise the necessary funds to do so.
The ship continued to deteriorate. In 2016, HDOT took over custody of the vessel after the Harbors Division impounded it. Around the same time, a Scottish heritage group, the Falls of Clyde International, formed with the mission of bringing the ship back to Scotland to rebuild it, but the group couldn’t meet the state’s requirement to secure a performance bond after being selected in 2021 to remove the vessel.
Falls of Clyde was delisted from the National Register of Historic Places on February 1, 2024, and its landmark designation was removed in December 2024.
After a long and fruitless fight to save the ship by a number of organisations in both America and Scotland this result can only be described as cultural vandalism. The dollars being paid to Shipwright LLC would have been better spent transporting this historic vessel to the Clyde in Scotland where she was wanted but where the money was never available to get her there.
As I say Cultural vandalism the Bishop Museum trustees and Hawaii Harbour Board generally should bow their heads in shame for the way that they particularly have treated this old lady of the sea. I was lucky to be in Oahu and board and photograph her in 1997.
It is sad to see such an esteemed ship end this way, however, if it gives life anew then her transformation has benefit. These ships are extremely expensive to rebuild and maintain. That is the hard reality of life, and there is no end of other projects that also demand attention. Thanks to all who tried to save her.