Great stuff, curmudgeon! The name "Beck" has resonances to a colleague so I'm passing the quote along.
Barry, when you wrote you "met George Herbert (the "Master Rigger from Geelong", as I later can to know him as). He started out as a cabin boy in the Baltic trades around 1912 or 14 at age 12 or 13, he later ended up in the Cape Horn trade before promising his bride to be that he'd swallow the anchor in Aust., he then began his trade as a rigger (his work is to be seen on the Elma Dopa"
you started me thinking. I used to live 30 miles out of Geelong (Australia) at Steiglitz; is that the one you mean? If so, did you mistake the "Elma Dopa" for the "Alma Doepel", a resuscitated ship now at Melbourne, that was built on the Bellinger River not far from Bellingen in northern NSW?