Nine Lives of the SS Go Ahead

0:00Every day, excessive delays and denials from big insurers keep patients from accessing the care they need. And when care is urgent, these delays can be disastrous. These practices cost billions in wasteful spending, driving up costs for American families. But while big insurers put up barriers, America's hospitals and health systems are in your corner. Navigating endless reviews and appeals to get you the care you need when you need it most. It's time to curb these harmful practices and put the focus back on patients. Brought to you by the Coalition to Strength in America's Healthcare. Today, if you want to buy like a $10 phone case from across the globe, you can just pull out your smartphone. Right, you just open an app. Yeah. You track its journey across the Pacific Ocean on a digital map and you know precisely what day it will arrive. Well, the entire global shipping industry today is highly regulated. It's guided by synchronized satellite GPS and meticulously optimized to avoid the slightest delay. It's a marvel of invisible infrastructure. I mean, we've simply been conditioned to expect these massive logistical networks to work

1:02safely and efficiently without ever really thinking about the underlying mechanics. Exactly. But if you roll the clock back just 150 years to the late 19th century and the dawn of globalized steam power, that illusion of control completely vanishes. Yeah. Moving cargo back then essentially meant taking an undersized iron boiler, dropping it into a 100-foot boat, filling the hull with highly combustible rocks and sending it out blindly into a fog bank. It was incredibly dangerous. Welcome to today's deep dive. We are looking at a single source today, a Wikipedia article detailing the 20-year history of a 19th century New Zealand coastal trading ship called the SS. Go ahead. Right. And on the surface, the source document reads like a pretty dry maritime timeline. It lists launch dates, tonnages, corporate owners and shipping routes. But beneath those statistics is this really fascinating historical microcosm. Okay, let's unpack this. Because what we actually have here isn't just a boring timeline of a boat. No, not at all.

2:02It is a wild, chaotic story filled with sketchy sales tactics, absolutely terrible navigation, and a mechanical lemon of a ship that seemingly had nine lives before meeting a very tragic foggy end. The Go ahead was just one of thousands of vessels working the coastlines during that era, but it's 20-year career spanning from 1867 to 1887 perfectly encapsulates the massive technological growing pains of the late 1800s. Yeah, you are seeing the real-time trial and error reality of humanity trying to figure out how to conquer the oceans with steam technology. Sice. So let's start at the very beginning, April 1867. The Go ahead is launched in Scotland. She is built for the Clyde shipping company, specifically designed to be sailed all the way down to New Zealand to run coastal trading routes. And her initial design is a really fascinating bridge between two eras. She's technically a top-sale schooner, meaning she has masts and sails, but she's also a twin-screw steamer. Right, and I have to imagine that building a hybrid vessel like this was essentially an

3:03insurance policy against early unreliable technology. Absolutely. Like if the primitive steam engines inevitably fail, you can still rely on the wind to get you to port. That is a very astute deduction. Early marine steam engines were notoriously temperamental and coal was heavy and expensive. The sails were absolutely necessary for long-haul voyages like that massive initial journey from Scotland to Australia. Wow. The Go ahead was equipped with high-pressure engines putting out 30, maybe 35 horsepower. Wait, 35? That's it. Yeah, to give you some modern perspective, a standard ride-on lawnmower today easily produces 25 horsepower. That is insane. Right, yet here was a heavy iron ship 110 feet long at the keel, meant to carry cargo and passengers through the punishing ocean swells of the southern hemisphere on just a fraction more power. Which totally explains why her commercial life immediately goes sideways. They sail her out to Melbourne, Australia, arriving in November of 1867. It does not go well.

4:04Not at all. The owners try to sell her right there at the docks, but nobody bites. They simply cannot unload this brand new ship. Oh, no one wanted it. Because the Australian market rejects her, they send her onward to Westport, New Zealand. And this is where the agents in Wellington, a firm called AP Steward & Co, put out an advertisement that I could only describe as a master piece of absolute fiction. Oh, it really is. It is one of the more remarkable pieces of historical marketing in the maritime archives. They advertise that the Go ahead has a draft of only four feet of water, which implies she can glide into incredibly shallow, undeveloped colonial ports. Then they claim she can carry 1,000 sheep, just visualize that for a second, 1,000 sheep crammed onto a 110 foot boat. It's absurd. And they buildly call her, quote unquote, highly suited for coastal trading, tacking on that classic, desperate urgency you see in classified ads must be sold owner leaving the colony. Right. The classic excuse.

5:05That sounds exactly like buying a used car on Craigslist where the seller writes, runs great, just needs gas. But the reality is the engine block is fundamentally cracked. The used car analogy holds up perfectly when you look at her maiden voyages in New Zealand. The reality was an immediate logistical disaster. Oh, completely. When the crew tried to sail from Westcourt down to Wellington, they couldn't even complete the trip as planned. The historical record explicitly notes she couldn't maintain steam pressure because of bad coals on board. OK. So when the historical record blames bad coals, I'm assuming they aren't just complaining about dirty rocks, right? No, it's a structural issue with the fuel. Like if you load a ship with a batch of coal that has low carbon content or incredibly high moisture, it physically cannot burn hot enough to boil the water. Exactly. And without that intense heat, you can't create the necessary steam pressure to turn the screws, right? Precisely. Full quality in the 19th century varied wildly depending on the mine it came from. In a steamship, your survival entirely depends on maintaining a constant, intense, thermal

6:09output. If the coal is full of impurities, the temperature and the furnace drops. The steam pressure plummets, the engine stall, and suddenly you are just a very heavy piece of iron drifting helplessly in the ocean currents. Wow. The go ahead was forced to abandon her route and detour to Nelson just to find better fuel. Even when they finally limped into Wellington in January 1868, the problems didn't end. She just sat there at Queen's Wharf for months. Yeah, they attempted to do a proper trial run in Evans Bay. And they made a devastating discovery. Yeah. Her boiler was literally too small for the ship. Oh. Structurally, that is a fatal engineering flaw. The boiler is the heart of any steam vessel. It is the sealed vessel where water is heated to generate steam. Okay. The boiler is physically too small. It cannot generate enough steam volume to feed those high pressure engines, regardless of how pristine your coal is. That makes sense. The builders in Scotland had constructed a ship whose heart could not support its muscles.

7:09It is no wonder the buyers in Melbourne took one look at her performance and walked away. So the original owners are stuck with this mechanical woman. She is stranded at the Wharf, surrounded by swirling rumors and legal strife over palmints. Yes. The ship was an unsellable disaster. They had to find a market desperate enough to completely overlook her glaring flaws. And luckily for them, there was one. Yeah. Fortunately for the owner's desperation was brewing right up the coast. The Thames Gold Rush was taking off near Auckland in the summer of 1868. And you know, whenever you inject a gold rush into a developing region, it creates absolute logistical chaos. Suddenly, there is a voracious frenzy to move thousands of prospectors, heavy mining equipment and basic survival supplies up and down the rugged coastlines. And when there is a gold rush, people aren't exactly picky about the quality of their transportation. Not at all. An Auckland company finally buys the go-ahead in August 1868. By September, she is taking her first 25 passengers and she quickly becomes an absolute

8:12workhorse. Yeah. She really does. In 1870, when a rival ship named the SS Terenga tragically sinks, the go-ahead simply slots right into its vacated route. She is constantly moving. She found her economic niche because the demand for transport was entirely inelastic. But the physical toll this heavy usage took on the ship, and more importantly, on the human beings operating her, is staggering to consider. Oh, the numbers are wild. We have records from 1875 showing that in a period of just over three months, the go-ahead burned 289 tons of coal to cover over 6,600 miles. I want to stop right there and look at those numbers, because I did the math on this while I was reviewing the source. That breaks down to 97 pounds of coal burned for every single mile traveled. It's hard to even picture. Yeah, I really have to push back on this romanticized steampunk vision we all seem to have of 19th century maritime travel. The popular image is gentlemen in top hats smoking cigars on a polished wooden deck. Right.

9:12The luxury liner image. Exactly. Home below the waterline, the human logistics of this operation are horrifying, shoveling 97 pounds of coal into a furnace every single mile for thousands of miles requires a level of physical suffering that is hard to fathom. Stripping away that steampunk romance is crucial to understanding the era. There is zero automation in this process. Every single one of those 289 tons of coal was moved by human muscle. The stokers worked deep in the bowels of the hull. It was pitch black lit only by the glare of the furnace. I bet the air was just awful. The air was incredibly thick with airborne poll dust, which instantly coats your lungs in your eyes. The ambient temperature standing next to a roaring ship's boiler is suffocating, easily sitting well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. And while you were dealing with the heat and the dust, the ship itself is pitching and rolling violently in the open ocean. Right. You are trying to maintain your footing on slippery steel grates, swinging a heavy iron shovel and throwing nearly 100 pounds of jagged rock into a raging fire for every mile

10:16the ship advances. Sounds like a nightmare. If your muscles give out and you stop shoveling, the ship loses pressure and stops moving. It was brutal, relentless, punishing labor. Those stokers literally fueled the economic boom of the colonial era with their own bodies. Well, all that relentless heavy duty coastal work eventually caught up with the hardware of the ship itself. By the time we reached the 1870s, the go-ahead enters an era I like to call her bumper car phase. That is a very apt description. The narrative shifts sharply away from her economic utility and highlights a staggering lack of basic safety protocols. She just starts crashing into things. On stately. In September 1870, she collides with a ship called the Ivano. The historical report explicitly states she was going full speed and they crashed because the go-ahead had absolutely no forward lookout posted, none. A subsequent court of inquiry actually assigned blame to both shipmasters for that collision. What's fascinating here is how these frequent incidents highlight the incredible tolerance

11:19for risk and damage in early commercial shipping. Oh, for sure. We have to remember that there were no universal, internationally enforced rules of the road for the oceans yet. Furthermore, these heavy iron ships were notoriously underpowered, making them incredibly slow to respond to the helm. Right. They had tiny engines. If an obstacle appeared in the mist, a 30-horsepower engine couldn't reverse the momentum of a fully loaded haul in time. That tolerance for risk is fully on display in 1877. The go-ahead gets stranded on the south spit while trying to leave Gisbert. From a major stranded. Yeah, the grounding is so severe that the initial reports claim she has been abandoned. Everyone thinks she is entirely beyond salvage a total loss. But then. A few weeks later, they managed to drag her back to Auckland and she gets repaired for 1400 pounds. But here is the critical economic detail. She was insured for 4000 pounds. Why? The owners were perfectly covered. Oh, and the captain who drove her into the spit, he kept a certificate.

12:19The court decided his mistake wasn't severe enough to suspend his right to command. If we connect this to the bigger picture, we see a massive moral hazard introduced by the early marine insurance industry. Oh, absolutely. When a ship owner can repair a vessel for a fraction of its insured value or completely recoup their capital if it sinks, they are financial incentive to invest in rigorous safety protocols drops to near zero. It's just bad business to be safe, basically. Exactly. Furthermore, competent navigators, even the ones who occasionally ran their ships around, were a scarce resource in the colonies. The economic system simply needed them back out on the water moving cargo. But the go ahead wasn't done playing bumper cars. In 1878, she breaks down entirely in a storm. In 1879, she snaps a propeller. It just keeps going. Later that exact same year, she collides with yet another ship, recorded as either the Hura or the Huia. Once again, both captains are blamed and neither is suspended. Unbelievable. It reminds me of having a smartphone with a terrible degraded battery that keeps randomly

13:23shutting down. Okay, I see where you're going with this. Instead of throwing the defective phone away, you pry it open, haphazardly solder in a massive act of market battery, and bolt a heavy industrial metal case around the outside to force it to keep running. They didn't scrap the ship. They physically hacked its hardware to keep it alive. That analogy perfectly captures the extreme mechanical interventions of 1879. The owners at the time, Johnston and come, decided against scrapping her. Instead, they authorized a massive structural overhaul. They didn't just repair her, they literally lengthened the ship's hull. I have to pause here, because the phrase lengthened the ship's hull sounds so casual in the Wikipedia source, but the actual engineering behind that in 1879 must have been a monumental undertaking. How do you physically stretch a heavy iron steamship? It is a phenomenal feat of 19th century engineering. They would place the ship on a dry slipway, carefully drill out the iron rivets around

14:24the midsection, and physically cut the ship in half. They just cut it in half. Literally in half. Using heavy winches, they would pull the bow and the stern apart, creating a gap in the middle. Then shipwrites would build an entirely new central section, plating it with iron and riveting the entire vessel back together. This process increased her cargo capacity, and crucially, provided the physical space needed to correct her original fatal design flaw. They finally installed a newly designed, properly sized boiler and upgraded her to significantly more powerful 45 horsepower engines. Local papers actually described her as almost a new ship. She basically was. She goes back out into the coastal trade, running routes to Wellington, Napier, and Denenden. But here's the tragic reality of early technology. You can upgrade the internal hardware all you want, but you cannot patch out human error. No, you can't. You certainly cannot engineer your way out of the sheer force of nature. Because all of this leads us to May of 1887. The final voyage into the fog.

15:26May 20, 1887. The go ahead is navigating off the coast to keep kidnappers at two o'clock in the morning. The historical reports describe terribly thick weather. Very dense fog. The fog is so dense that the true has absolutely no visual references. In fact, the visibility was so non-existent that the ship was already inside the breaking waves of the coastline before anyone on board even realized something was wrong. That specific scenario is the ultimate nightmare for Mariner. On the ocean, by the time you can actually hear the sound of the surf crashing over the relentless mechanical noise of your own steam engines, it is already too late. Even with her upgraded 45 horsepower engines, you simply have no time to arrest the forward momentum of the ship or turn the rudder to change course. The source notes that Captain Plumley was navigating by dead reckoning at the time of the crash. I've heard that term used in movies, but mechanically speaking, dead reckoning essentially means navigating entirely blind, right? Yes, essentially. It's navigation without any external, visual, or celestial reference.

16:28You take your last known GPS free position, you factor in your estimated speed, you look at your compass heading, and you basically just guess where you are on the map. Exactly. The fatal flaw of dead reckoning is what it cannot account for. Your compass and your speed might tell you that you are safely out in deep water, but dead reckoning cannot measure the hidden ocean currents. It can't account for heavy winds silently pushing your whole sideways in the dark. Oh, wow. So you think you're going straight, but you're actually drifting diagonally? Precisely. That is exactly why relying on it in a blinding fog bank near a jagged coastline is so incredibly dangerous. And the danger caught up to them. She grounded hard on the rocks. The ship turned bottom upwards in the surf, and the hole finally break apart. A total loss. Here's where it gets really interesting, or rather incredibly tragic, because the human cost of all this systemic risk taking finally comes due. A stoker, one of those exact men we talked about earlier, working down in the dark, sweltering

17:33hundred degree belly of the ship. Yes. And the man named James Gunning drowned in the wreck. The ensuing wreck inquiry paints a very stark picture of the guesswork involved in that era. Captain Plumley testified that he firmly believed he was making eight and a half to nine knots, and he was confident he was safely six miles north of the Cape. But the court found him unequivocally guilty of negligent navigation. Their specific phrasing was that he was trying to, quote, unquote, cut the headland to fine in foggy weather. He was actively trying to shave a few miles off his route to save time and coal by hugging the dangerous coastline when he couldn't see ten feet in front of the bow. I have to say, looking at the outcome of this inquiry, I am firmly pushing back on the idea of justice here. I don't blame you. The leniency of the maritime court is unbelievable. It is definitely a jarring conclusion for anyone looking at it through a modern lens. Think about the facts of the case. A crew member, James Gunning, is dead. A heavily upgraded steamship, insured for 5,500 pounds, is completely destroyed, lying

18:36bottom up in the surf. All of this happened because the captain was recklessly trying to cut corners blindly in a fog bank. Yes. And what is Captain Plumley's punishment for all of this destruction and loss of life? A three month suspension of his master's certificate. Three months. At a slap on the wrist. The Wikipedia source casually notes that by September of that exact same year, just four months later, he was already commanding another steamer. The Wallaby. This raises an important question about the stark priorities of the 1880s. We have to confront how the colonial economy valued human life versus capital. They clearly valued the capital more. Absolutely. The owners were insured for 5,500 pounds, meaning their financial capital was entirely protected from the captain's negligence. The loss of a stoker, as tragic as it is, was viewed by the systemic powers of the time as a highly replaceable labor loss. That's just incredibly dark. And as we discussed with the 1877 stranding, the colonial supply chain was so desperate for experience shipmasters to keep the goods flowing, that the court simply refused

19:40to sideline a captain for long, even one who had just proven to be fatally reckless. The endless economic demand for moving goods completely trumped the demand for safety or accountability. Meanwhile, the physical remains of the mighty go-ahead were basically worthless. The ruined hull and the upgraded machinery were auctioned off for a measly 13 pounds. 13 pounds. Salvage attempts were made. Ships with names like the fairy and the bella sailed out to try and pull valuable metal out of the surf before weather ruined the attempts. They managed to recover a ship's bell and a compass, but the rest of the vessel was surrendered to the sea. Which leaves us looking back at the entire chaotic 20-year lifespan of this single vessel. So what does this all mean? We started our timeline with a 30-horsepower, heavily flawed, limit of a boat, feeling to sell in Melbourne, and we ended with a tragic, fatal shipwreck on the rocks of Cape kidnappers. Looking at the whole picture, what is the ultimate takeaway here for you? Well, if we connect this to the bigger picture, the SS Go-ahead serves as the perfect microcosm

20:44of the industrial era. It shows you firsthand how trial and error defined early technology. Right. We didn't arrive at the sleek GPS guide at a highly regulated maritime system we enjoy today through pure flawless theory. We got here by making terrible, expensive, and often fatal mistakes. We learned the hard way. Engineers learned about the strict mathematical necessity of correctly-sized boilers by failing miserably in Evans Bay. The industry learned about the critical need to standardize fuel because bad coals were stalling ships in open water. Regulators realized the absolute necessity for mandatory forward lookouts and universal right-of-way rules by watching ships crash into vessels like the Ivanhoe. And tragically, we learned the sheer limits of coastal navigation and dead reckoning through fatal wrecks like the one at Cape kidnappers. Heavy thought. Every modern safety standard and every modern regulation that protects maritime workers today is essentially written in the wreckage of ships exactly like the Go-ahead. It is the physical, rusted cost of progress.

21:47And there is one final, incredibly haunting image from the source material I want to leave you with today. Go for it. After the wreck in 1887, the salvagers couldn't retrieve the massive iron boiler. The brand new one they had just installed during that massive engineering overhaul in 1879. It was simply too heavy and the breaking surf was too violent. So they just left it. Decades later, a local New Zealand newspaper noted that the boiler was still sitting there, highly visible on the beach in 1937. But reportedly, as recently as 2011, pieces of that exact same iron boiler were still visible in the sand at Cape kidnappers. Wow. Over a century later, a piece of that Scottish engineering is still holding its ground against the Pacific Ocean. It is a rusted monument to a wild chaotic era of trial and error. So I want you to think about the device you're using to listen to this deep dive right now, or maybe the cutting edge electric car sitting in your driveway. Oh, I like this. The massive rusted pieces of our own modern, quote unquote, perfect technology will be sitting abandoned on some distant coastline 140 years from now, slowly being swallowed

22:51by the sea. It is definitely something to think about. A very powerful perspective on the impermanence of our own technological marvels. Until next time, keep digging deeper. Every day, excessive delays and denials from big insurers keep patients from accessing the care they need. And when care is urgent, these delays can be disastrous. These practices cost billions in wasteful spending, driving up costs for American families. But while big insurers put up barriers, America's hospitals and health systems are in your corner, navigating endless reviews and appeals to get you the care you need when you need it most. It's time to curb these harmful practices and put the focus back on patients, brought to you by the Coalition to Strength in America's Health Care. You're listening to a podcast right now, driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're into podcasts, chances are you have something to say too. With RSS.com, starting your own is free and easy. Upload an episode, and we distribute it to Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and hundreds more. Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads like this.

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