TSS Camito
Encyclopedia
TSS Camito was a passenger-carrying banana boat
Banana boat (ship)
A banana boat is a ship that carries bananas as a primary cargo, or is otherwise engaged in the banana trade. As the main produce of the West indies was bananas they were also used as a form of cheap transportation and the English cricket team that toured the West Indies in 1959–60 used banana...
of the Fyffes Line
Fyffes Line
Fyffes Line was the name given to the fleet of passenger-carrying banana boats owned and operated by the UK banana importer Elders & Fyffes Limited.-History:...
. At 8501.73 tons gross, 3878.90 tons nett, 448 feet long and with a cruising speed of 18 Knots, she was the second ship to bear the name.
History
She was built in 1956 by Alexander Stephen and SonsAlexander Stephen and Sons
Alexander Stephen and Sons Limited, often referred to simply as Alex Stephens or just Stephens, was a Scottish shipbuilding company based in Linthouse, Govan in Glasgow, on the River Clyde.-History:...
, of Glasgow
Glasgow
Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland and third most populous in the United Kingdom. The city is situated on the River Clyde in the country's west central lowlands...
, Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
, and scrapped at Taiwan
Taiwan
Taiwan , also known, especially in the past, as Formosa , is the largest island of the same-named island group of East Asia in the western Pacific Ocean and located off the southeastern coast of mainland China. The island forms over 99% of the current territory of the Republic of China following...
in 1973.
Accommodation
She had three passenger decks with cabins for 96 first class passengers, public rooms and open-air deck spaces, centered between four large refrigerated cargo holds, two forward and two aft, that could handle 140,000 stems (1,750 tons) of bananas.Trade
Her main trade was general cargo outwards (mostly British manufactured goods), returning with bananas.Routing
She was routed on 4-5 week voyages from SouthamptonSouthampton
Southampton is the largest city in the county of Hampshire on the south coast of England, and is situated south-west of London and north-west of Portsmouth. Southampton is a major port and the closest city to the New Forest...
(rarely Avonmouth) in England to Trinidad
Trinidad
Trinidad is the larger and more populous of the two major islands and numerous landforms which make up the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. It is the southernmost island in the Caribbean and lies just off the northeastern coast of Venezuela. With an area of it is also the fifth largest in...
(for bunkers); up to 5 ports on Jamaica (Kingston, Port Antonio, Montego Bay, Oracabessa and Bowden). She always started her run round the Jamaican coast by arriving at Kingston; and always finished at Port Antonio, which was an unusual loading port because she went alongside a dock. The intermediate Jamaican ports were less sophisticated then; and most of them loaded bananas through side-shell doors in the ship while she anchored in the bay (mostly at Oracabessa and Montego Bay) from lightering craft that were sculled out under one-man power. Loading took place 24 hours a day.
Camito berthed in Southampton as regularly as clockwork at 0600 every fourth Sunday: the dockers loved her because they got a regular source of full Sunday pay for getting the passenger baggage off, which could sometimes take only an hour or two but almost always in time for the pubs opening at noon: if there was a bit more baggage than usual they would stretch things out until a few minutes past 5pm (after taking a two-hour pub-break at lunchtime) so that they got a full night of pay for Sunday night plus the day off on Monday (and we wonder why the docks went broke!).
Banana discharge used to start at 0800 on Monday, using a system of continuous-belt elevators that were dropped down the hatches and she was, thus, able to discharge all decks concurrently to the shore. There were four cargo decks in the forward two hatches and three decks in the aft two hatches. Discharging generally finished by Tuesday night or Wednesday morning; then outward passenger baggage was loaded on Wednesday, the ship sailing for Trinidad/Jamaica/Bermuda on Wednesday afternoon or evening.
The biggest glitch in the system would come about if the dockers had a strike: they would always open the hatches (breaking the temperature control seal in the cargo hatches) and put the banana elevators down the hatches so they could not be re-sealed; then go on strike. This way, if the owner did not give in to the demands of the dockers, the whole cargo would go ripe in only a very few days and would have to be dumped on the way back across the Atlantic to the West Indies.
Passengers on the Fyffes' ships were fiercely loyal; and they needed to be. A round-trip suite in 1969 cost £549.19.6d (549.97 in today's money) and until the late sixties this was not even air-conditioned. She and her fellow Fyffes' ships also carried a lot of consular staff to and from the West Indies, together along with all their belongings.
Sister ship
There was a similar but much older vessel, the TSS GolfitoTSS Golfito
TSS Golfito was a passenger-carrying banana boat of the Fyffes Line. She was 8687 tons and long.-History:She was built in 1949 by Alexander Stephen & Sons, Glasgow and scrapped at Faslane in 1972.-Accommodation:...
, which was broadly of the same design. Together they provided a regular fortnightly service between Southampton Empress Dock (straight across from the Ocean Terminal, where the Queens docked regularly), to and from the West Indies.