Maritime Historical Studies Centre, University of Hull
Earles Yard and the Steamships in the Clouds: The
Inca and Ollanta at 12500 Feet Above Sea Level
FAR HORIZONS – to the ends of the Earth | Robb Robinson
Earles Yard and the Steamships in the Clouds: The Inca and Ollanta at 12500
Feet Above Sea Level
High in the Andes mountain range, a huge lake straddles the borders between
Bolivia and Peru. Lake Titicaca is one of the largest lakes in South America being
more than 115 miles in length and over fifty miles across at its widest point. Although
over 12,500 feet above sea level and at least 200 miles from the coast, it is also
home to a small fleet of ships which makes it the highest navigable waterway in the
world. The two largest steamships to ply their trade across these remote waters in
the twentieth century were the Inca (1800 tons) and the Ollanta (2000 tons). The
Ollanta is still there, a testament to the engineers who designed and built her.
Although these ships are part and parcel of Lake Titicaca’s rich history, their origins
lie far from the Andes or indeed from South America. Both began life on the Humber
foreshore, no more than a stone’s throw from the mouth of the River Hull, in the
vicinity of what is now the Victoria Dock Estate. This is the story of these vessels and
the men who built them.
The Ollanta, sailing on Titicaca in the 1930’s
(from William Reginald Smale's Photograph Album)
The Ollanta, October 2008 on the slipway
(Courtesy of Andrew King)
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Earles Yard and the Steamships in the Clouds: The Inca and Ollanta at 12500
Feet Above Sea Level
Earles Shipbuilding & Engineering Company
Both of these ships were constructed by Earles Shipbuilding & Engineering
Company of Hull. The firm had been started by the brothers Charles and William
Earle in 1853 and, after a spell building ships in Victoria Dock, the firm took over
more extensive yards along the Humber foreshore, along the edge of what is now
part of the Victoria Dock estate. The firm was restructured as a joint stock company
in 1871 and Sir Edward James Reed (1803 – 1906), formerly naval architect and
chief constructor to the Admiralty, was for a short period the chairman and managing
director. During the period Reed was in charge, the yard acquired an international
renown. Earles won a series of orders for naval vessels for both the Royal Navy and
overseas countries. These included the ironclad, Almirante Cochrane, built in 1874
for the Chilean government and its sister ship, El Blanco Enscalada which in 1891
acquired the dubious accolade of being the first armoured warship to be sunk by a
self propelled torpedo. The firm also built the steam yachts Slavanka and Czarevna
for the Tsarevitch, later Tsar Alexander VI of Russia. They were launched in 1873
and 1874 respectively. Another yacht, the Bosphorous, was also built for the Khedive
of Egypt and others were later constructed for the Duke of Malborough and various
wealthy patrons.
The company was in many ways in the forefront of marine engineering technology
and amongst the first to embrace the development of the triple expansion steam
engine and produce them on a commercial scale. The new design of engine was
initially installed into the liner Draco which Earles built for the Wilson Line in 1882
and proved far more efficient in terms of fuel consumption than her forerunners
which used compound engines.
The company won a number of orders from the Admiralty, including the cruisers
Endymion and St George, built in the early 1890s, as well as many commercial
orders from the Wilson Line and later steam trawling firms. However, the firm
struggled with a combination of labour and cash flow problems during the later 1890s
and in June 1900 it went into voluntary liquidation. The following year Charles Wilson
of the Wilson Line bought the yard for around £170,000 and formed a new limited
liability company. After this hiatus, shipbuilding resumed and a few years later, in
1904, the yard embarked on what must rank as one of its most unusual projects
when it secured an order from the Peruvian Corporation to build the 220 foot long
steamer Inca. What made the contract so unusual is that this substantial ship was
not intended for service on the high seas but for far higher waters. The Inca was
destined to ply its trade amongst the Andes mountain range, on the waters of Lake
Titicaca, more than two miles above sea level..
The Inca and Ollanta
In the latter part of the nineteenth century British investors had invested heavily in
Peruvian railways but the combination of a war with Chile and a series of natural
calamities meant that by the end of the 1880s Peru was saddled with immense and
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Earles Yard and the Steamships in the Clouds: The Inca and Ollanta at 12500
Feet Above Sea Level
seemingly unsustainable foreign debts. The Peruvian Corporation was formed in
London in 1890 to take over the main government railways in Peru in return for the
cancellation of the debt owing to British creditors. A large number of lines were
transferred to the company, initially for a period of 66 years. The Corporation also
committed to building more railway lines and soon became involved in trade on Lake
Titicaca.
There were already steamers on Lake Titicaca at the time the Peruvian Corporation
was established. The oldest of these, the Yavari, had been built on the Thames in
the 1860s and then shipped to the Peruvian coast in bits before being carried up the
Andes on the backs of mules to the edge of the lake where the ship was
reassembled and launched in 1870. A sister ship, the Yapura also followed it in bits
up the tortuous mountain trails.
During the 1890s the Peruvian Corporation supplemented this small fleet by ordering
another vessel, named the Coya, which was constructed by William Denny of
Dumbarton. By 1904, however, traffic on the lake had increased to such an extent
that the Peruvian Corporation contracted with Earles Shipbuilding and Engineering
Company for the construction of a much larger vessel, to be named the Inca. The
new vessel was to be some 220 feet in length. Under the terms of the contract,
which was signed on behalf of Earles by Charles and Guy Wilson, the vessel was
initially erected at Earles yard on the Humber then each section was marked and the
whole ship taken to pieces. The engines and boilers were also assembled but the
contract did not require these to be fitted in the ship at this stage. They were erected
in the shipyard’s engine shop before also being marked and dismantled. All the parts
of this ship were then placed in packing cases. No part of the dismantled ship
weighed more than 12 tons and the largest packing case did not exceed ten feet in
breadth and eleven feet in height.
The vessel cost £22,285 when delivered in boxed parts to the South American
bound steamer in Hull docks in 1905. After arrival in South America the packages
were transported by railway up to the Lake and the vessel was assembled and
launched in the first half of 1905. The Inca soon made a substantial impact to the
traffic on the Lake and was the mainstay of the Titicaca fleet during the following
decades. In the late 1920s, Earles constructed a replacement bottom for the vessel
which was prefabricated in Hull before being shipped in sections to South America.
Although global economic depression and even competition from road transport was
already having an adverse effect on the Peruvian railway system by the late 1920s,
traffic on Lake Titicaca was still very buoyant. The 1930 AGM of the Peruvian
Corporation noted with approval that the total tonnage of goods carried by the Lake
Titicaca steamers continued to increase but by now the little fleet was really showing
its age. Even the Inca, the newest of the steamers, had been working for almost a
quarter of a century. The Corporation’s answer was to order a new and even bigger
vessel and once more the contract came to Hull and to the Earles Shipbuilding &
Engineering Company.
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Earles Yard and the Steamships in the Clouds: The Inca and Ollanta at 12500
Feet Above Sea Level
The new vessel was to be named Ollanta and at 260 feet from stem to stern she was
forty feet longer than the Inca. Like her older sister, the Ollanta was first assembled
in Hull: her keel was laid down by Earles on the banks of the River Humber in June
1930 and within five months all sections had been fabricated and then bolted
together, masts and derricks were all fitted; engines and boilers were also
assembled. The vessel was then stripped down, packed in cases and shipped out of
Hull’s King George Dock on board the Pacific Steam Navigation Company’s motor
vessel, La Paz*. After arrival at the South American port of Mollendo, the packing
cases containing the ship were carried by railway up to Puno on the shores of Lake
Titicaca. The man tasked with the re-assembly of the ship was William Reginald
Smale, perhaps one of the most innovative, talented and practical engineers at work
in the first half of the twentieth century. Born in the West Country, William Smale had
started his working life as an apprentice at Earles in Hull and later became an
engineer on various ships including the Melrose Abbey which used to sail between
Hull and continental Europe.
Construction of the Ollanta on Lake Titicaca
Larger, detailed images available at: http://www.hull.ac.uk/mhsc/FarHorizons/farhorizons.htm
(from William Reginald Smale's Photograph Album)
Smale’s task was quite formidable. At first, he watched over every stage of the
vessel’s initial assembly in Earles yard but for the South American reconstruction he
had to recruit a lot of local labour, many of those people available high in the Andes
were unskilled in the business of modern shipbuilding and engineering. He even had
to construct a suitable slipway from scratch from where he could reassemble and
then launch the vessel. The lack of locally available machinery up in the Andes
meant he sometimes had to improvise, often using old railway equipment to make
suitable drilling and milling machinery. Despite everything, Smale’s team made
remarkable progress. The first plate was laid on the 24th March 1931 and the ship
was completed and launched on Lake Titicaca on the 18th November of the same
year. Smale’s original instructions were that he should wait until a team arrived from
England to assist with the launching but by then he had such great confidence in his
locally recruited team, and not least his own ability, that he did not wait. The Ollanta
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Earles Yard and the Steamships in the Clouds: The Inca and Ollanta at 12500
Feet Above Sea Level
was safely in the water and in the final stages of being fitted out before the launch
team sent from England arrived.
The new vessel was in many respects the epitome of 1930s steamship travel. She
had a deadweight cargo capacity of 950 tons and her four oil fired engines gave her
a top speed of 14.5 knots. Accommodation was provided for 66 first class
passengers in a large deckhouse on the upper deck and there were also twenty
second class berths forward. Large dining saloons and smoking rooms were
provided on the upper and promenade decks. Electric lighting and steam heating
was installed throughout the vessel.
The Inca survived until the early 1990s when the vessel was finally scrapped and
today her Earles builder’s plate adorns a ticket office on the lake. However, the
Ollanta is still very much around, a substantial reminder of travel 1930s style. In the
1980s the vessel featured in the BBC programme Great Railway Journeys and
hopefully its long-term future is assured.
The Ollanta was the 679th ship to be built by Earles. Only three more ships were
constructed before the yard fell victim to the 1930s depression and a government
sponsored rationalisation of the shipbuilding industry. The yard was taken over by
the Shipbuilders Security Company, the tools and machinery were sold off in 1932/3
and the large Earles crane, together with much of the remaining equipment, was
dismantled and shipped out east to Kowloon. Under the terms of its closure, no
shipbuilding could take place on the site for at least sixty years.
After the Ollanta project was finished, William Smale stayed on in South America for
a number of years occupying a senior engineering position on the Peruvian railway
system. He eventually made his way back to Britain in the mid-1930s but not by the
easiest of routes. Together with a colleague from Doncaster, he made an epic
overland horse journey across South America to a port on the Atlantic coast. Later,
he worked on a major engineering project in India but by the time of the blitz he was
back in Hull, helping to keep the city’s infrastructure functioning during the worst of
the bombing: afterwards, he played an important role in the Mulberry Harbour project
for the D-Day landings.
William Smale died in the early1990s but the story of the Inca and Ollanta lives on,
testimony to the ingenuity and engineering skills of the both the Humber and
Peruvian workforces that played such a crucial role in their design and construction.
Robb Robinson, February 2009

Author’s note: My great uncle, Anthony Stipetic, made his first trip on that
voyage of the La Paz. He was as a galley boy and after unloading the steam
ship parts in South America the ship is believed to have called in to the
Falkland Islands amongst other places.
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Earles Yard and the Steamships in the Clouds: The Inca and Ollanta at 12500
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Select Bibliography
J. Bellamy, The Trade and Shipping of Nineteenth Century Hull (UK: EYLHS, 1971).
J. Bellamy, ‘The History of C. And W. Earles Shipbuilding and Engineering Co. Ltd’,
Business History, vol. 6. No 1, Dec 1963.
J. Bellamy, ‘Some Aspects of the Economy of Hull in the Nineteenth Century with
Special Reference to Business History’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis (Hull University
1966).
Ben Box, Steve Frankham, Footprint Peru (Footprint Travel Guides, 2007)
Fred Albert Carlson, Geography of Latin America (Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1936)
Arthur Credland, ‘Notes on Ollanta and Inca’, The Mariner’s Mirror, vol. 67, no. 3,
August 1981.
Arthur Credland, Earles of Hull: Iron and Steel Shipbuilding on the Humber 1853 –
1982 (UK: Kingston upon Hull Museums, 1982)
H. Dowins, ‘Sail and Power on Lake Titicaca’, Sea Breezes, April 1968.
William Reginald Smale Photograph Album: 1930s (in private possession of Colin
Verity).
On-line References
http://www.yavari.org/
The Yavari Project
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HFf3iX7A18
You Tube – Three Miles High on the Andean Railway
http://www.merseyshipping.co.uk/photofeatures/worldshipping/titicacaships2008/titic
acaships2008.htm
The Classic British Ships of Lake Titicaca
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