Qualla: Edwin Fox

Edwin Fox: Introduction

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Edwingfox, CC BY-SA 4.0. The price was one shilling. In 1965, a group calling themselves the Edwin Fox Society bought one of the oldest surviving merchant sailing ships in the world for a coin worth about ten cents. By then, the ship had been rotting at her berth in Picton for fifteen years, stripped of masts, rigging, and most fittings, with holes cut through her hull where workers had improvised doorways during her years as a floating freezer and coal store. That she survived at all is the kind of accident that only happens to objects nobody considers valuable enough to dismantle completely. Built of teak in Calcutta in 1853, the Edwin Fox is now dry-docked at the Edwin Fox Maritime Centre on the Picton waterfront, the only intact hull of a wooden deep-water sailing ship built to British specifications surviving outside the Falkland Islands.

Read more: Edwin Fox on Qualla

Image: Edwingfox | CC BY-SA 4.0

Edwin Fox: From Calcutta to Crimea

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Egghead06 at English Wikipedia, Public domain. The Edwin Fox was built during a period when Calcutta's shipyards were producing some of the finest wooden vessels afloat, using teak harvested from the forests of Burma and Bengal. Teak resists rot, repels insects, and holds fasteners without splitting, qualities that would prov...

Read more: Edwin Fox on Qualla

Image: Egghead06 at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Edwin Fox: 751 New Lives

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andy king50, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1867, the Edwin Fox was converted from a full-rigged ship to a barque, reducing her sail plan and crew requirements. From 1873, she served on the emigrant route to New Zealand, making four voyages and carrying a total of 751 settlers to what promotional materials described as ...

Read more: Edwin Fox on Qualla

Image: Andy king50 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Edwin Fox: The Freezer and the Coal Bin

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DarkShadowSpectrum, CC BY 2.0. Steam made the Edwin Fox obsolete. By the 1880s, the age of sail was ending, and the ship was refitted as a floating freezer hulk for New Zealand's booming sheep export industry. She was towed to Picton in the South Island on 12 January 1897, where she initially continued process...

Read more: Edwin Fox on Qualla

Image: DarkShadowSpectrum | CC BY 2.0

Edwin Fox: One Shilling, One Ship

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Szilas, Public domain. The Edwin Fox Society's purchase in 1965 began a preservation effort that would take decades. The ship was towed to Shakespeare Bay in 1967 and sat there for nineteen more years while the society raised funds. In 1986, she was refloated and moved to a purpose-built dry dock on th...

Read more: Edwin Fox on Qualla

Image: Szilas | Public domain

Edwin Fox: The Hull Remembers

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nickm57, CC BY-SA 3.0. Visitors to the Edwin Fox Maritime Centre can walk two of her decks, looking up at the teak frames that Calcutta shipwrights shaped in 1853. Some of the original copper plating still clings to the hull below the waterline, green with verdigris. In 2016, a 3D laser scanning projec...

Read more: Edwin Fox on Qualla

Image: Nickm57 | CC BY-SA 3.0