Sea Life 1951. The Modasa. Homeward Bound.

First draft:
We left Lourenco Marques heading for Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar where we were to pick up our first passengers. We would also picked up more cargo, what it was I can no longer remember. Then onwards to Mombasa where we picked up the majority of our passengers and more cargo. Our ports of call were more or less the same as on our outward voyage with the exception of Marseilles, in southern France.

We then passed through the Suez Canal again and back into the Mediterranean. Following the north African Coast we made our way to to the island of Malta an additional port of call to pick up even more cargo and maybe an extra passenger or two.

Malta
. We stayed here only 12 hours. We were berthed close to the old town so, to stretch our legs, a few of us had a short exploratory walk through the old town with its narrow cobbled streets, small shops and cafes. I remember the buildings were high in these narrow streets  but the light coloured stone of the buildings seemed to reflect the daylight down into the streets making them quite bright. Leaving Malta our next call was Tilbury docks in London.

Notes and thoughts.

Now, remembering Malta I wish we could have stayed longer. There is much history here, going back to ancient times. As a school boy and later I did not care for History much at all, although I did enjoy Geography very much. As a boy, I would often dream of those faraway countries.


During my early 50s I became interested in genealogy and then the history of the county of Cumberland which is now Cumbria were I was born. This lead to the history of its peoples through the ages. My fathers people were yeoman farmers in the Wigton and Carlisle areas and I was able to get back to the late 1700s before I started to be unsure who was who. My mothers line was much easier to trace. They had not moved far going back to about the mid 1600s. They were in the main yeoman farmers and stonemasons.