Forty years since first containership started a revolution

Forty years since first containership started a revolution

Exactly 40 years ago – at sunrise on June 23, 1971 – a distinctive red-hulled vessel called Columbus New Zealand berthed at Auckland’s Fergusson Wharf on its maiden voyage. It was a ship unlike any that had called before – a containership, designed to carry cargo sealed inside big metal boxes.

Columbus New Zealand was built in Hamburg and Kiel and operated by Columbus Line, part of the German-owned shipping company Hamburg-Sud, which had been running conventional shipping services between Auckland and the West coast of the United States for 11 years before it pioneered containerisation services in New Zealand. Columbus New Zealand was the first of a trio of containerships launched by Hamburg-Sud, the others being Columbus Australia and Columbus America.

“This year marks a double celebration for us – 40 years of running container services and 50 years as a company in New Zealand,” said Simon Edwards, General Manager- Commercial of Hamburg Sud New Zealand Ltd. “Neither of these milestones can be matched by any other shipping company in New Zealand.”

Mr Edwards said Hamburg Sud’s long association with Auckland and its port owed much to the foresight of the early directors like Vince Kean and Captain Richard Snushall and later Rex Brown and Richard Turner. The company’s longevity is matched by a number of the staff, especially sales manager Roger Giles and intermodal coordinator Don Shepherd, who were both employed by Hamburg Sud at the time of the historic first containership call 40 years ago.

Over the years, Hamburg Sud has increased both the size of its vessels and the number and frequency of its services. “When we started running containerised services in 1971, Columbus New Zealand had a capacity of 1187 TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units) and operated in a new container service to the east coast of North America complemented by a conventional service to the west coast, which was later also containerised in 1973,” Mr Edwards said. “Today our ships have a 35-3600TEU capacity and we operate containerised services to North and South Asia and the Pacific Islands as well as three services to North America from the region.“

In 1971, Fergusson Wharf -- built for the Auckland Harbour Board by Fletcher Construction Ltd -- was the first fully operational container wharf in New Zealand. The red-hulled ship berthed at the new wharf marked the beginning of Auckland’s participation in a world-wide shipping industry revolution as conventional ships were replaced by a new class of larger containerised vessels operated by small crews and a lot of automated controls.

Before the advent of containerisation, ships’ cargoes were an unwieldy mixture of individual items in a variety of sizes and shapes that had to be loaded by a large force of stevedores or waterside workers – colloquially called “wharfies” in New Zealand – using ships’ derricks and wharf-side lifting equipment that had hardly changed since the previous century. A typical cargo ship in the 1950s might have 200,000 individual items to be loaded – a hugely labour-intensive and costly process.

Then one day, an American truck company owner, Malcolm McLean, had a brilliant idea as he watched a team of US dockers unload a cargo piece by piece off one of his trucks and transfer it onto a ship. “Why couldn’t they just lift the trailer off my truck and put it on the ship?” he wondered.

From this inspiration, Malcolm McLean developed the first container shipping service. Critics said it would never work. But in April 1956 McLean did a trial shipment of 58 aluminium containers loaded onto a converted war-surplus oil tanker at a dock in Newark, New Jersey. It worked spectacularly well. The cost comparisons were startling. Loading loose cargo onto an average ship in 1956 cost $US5.86 per ton. Container ports could load a ton for just under 16 cents.

Today the vast majority of the world’s 6 billion tons of shipped goods are carried by containerships, including 85% of the cargo handled by Ports of Auckland Ltd – a total of almost 900,000 standard TEU (twenty-foot equivalent unit) containers a year.

Over the last 50 years, the capacity of ports and their equipment has improved significantly. In 1971, Auckland’s new container wharf was equipped with one twin-lift Portainer crane, built at a cost of $1 million by Vickers Hoskins Pty Ltd, of Perth, Western Australia, under licence to Pacific Coast Engineering Company (Paceco) of California. The crane was an example of the latest technology at the time, capable of lifting two containers with a combined weight of up to 45 tons.

The New Zealand Herald reported that it took one-and-a-half days (30 working hours) to unload 174 containers from Columbus New Zealand and load 168 containers for export, using both the AHB’s container crane and the ship’s own deck-mounted crane.

Today, by comparison, if Ports of Auckland used two of its high-tech Shanghai-manufactured ZPMC cranes to service the Columbus New Zealand, the entire job of shifting 342 containers would be completed in about six hours.

Containerships, too, are increasing in size every year. To date, the biggest containership to call at Auckland had a capacity of 5500 TEU, and 4100 TEU ships are regular visitors here. Overseas, vessels with a capacity of more than 8,000TEU are common, and there are at least eight ships that can carry more than 14,000TEU.

Ports of Auckland Chief Executive Tony Gibson said the company was enormously proud to join Hamburg Sud in celebrating such a significant anniversary. “However, in the 40 years since 1971, we have had to be continually on our toes to keep up with the advances in port technology. That first portainer crane has been succeeded by several generations of new, improved cranes, and we now have a suite of five 21st Century 65-ton twin-lift cranes on Fergusson. We are in the final stage of a reclamation project adjacent to the wharf to create 10 hectares of additional container-handling land, and we continue to push through high-tech innovations such as our INTERACT container tracking system.”

“We know we can never rest on our laurels but must continue to work hard to ensure that as New Zealand’s busiest container port we remain internationally competitive.”

Hamburg Sud is also focused on remaining at the forefront of the shipping industry in New Zealand. Mr Edwards said it was “all about understanding customers’ demands, understanding our cost base, and making sure we have the best people to serve the market, whether it be commercial, operations or logistics. Container shipping is an expensive model to serve the New Zealand market and it is through true partnerships with the New Zealand port industry that we are able to make sensible long-term investment decisions that are needed to keep the shipping industry efficient and the export sector globally competitive.”

A model of the Columbus New Zealand, with its dashing red hull and sleek, handsome lines, has pride of place in the reception area of Hamburg-Sud’s Auckland premises. On the wall is a giant photograph of the ship at Fergusson Wharf on her maiden call, which was presented to Hamburg-Sud in 2007 by Ports of Auckland Limited. The ship itself lasted longer than many of today’s container ships but was scrapped in India in the late 1990s.
ENDS

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