Sailors are—or perhaps one should say used to be—very superstitious, and drew all sorts of omens from trifling incidents, while names were full of meanings that the ordinary landlubber would search for in vain. For instance, one day, when a ship was launched with the musical classical name of "Antiope" on her bows, the old shell-backs at once scented trouble. Perhaps only too naturally they pronounced it "Anti-hope," and asked one another what possible chance a craft could have that was deliberately so branded? The "Anti-hope!" Why, it was simply courting trouble to give her such a name! For once the sea croakers were mistaken, for, as one of her old commanders writes, "I think she was one of the luckiest ships afloat, for through all the mishaps with which she met she seemed to defy the elements and escape the snares of Davy Jones' locker." I quote Captain D. N. Campbell, of Waipu, that prolific home of good sailors, who commanded the old ''barky" from March, 1917, until he came ashore in September, 1919, on sick leave. Built by John Reid and Co., of Glasgow, in 1866, just three years before her great rival the Cutty Sark, the Antiope was originally owned by Joseph Heap and Sons, well known rice millers of Liverpool. That firm had a number of fine sailing vessels for carrying its own rice from Rangoon to the Mersey, and, as Captain Campbell puts it, they all had (according to Mercantile Jack) jaw-breaking names, such as Cassiope, Parthenope, and others from the classics.