Historic Ships Military Or Non-Military Or Ghostly

...........   She was a ship of the old school, rather small if anything; with an old fashioned claw-footed look about her.
Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull's complexion was darkened like a French grenadier's, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia.
Her venerable bows looked bearded.
Her masts... stood stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne.
Her ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Beckett bled.
But to all these her old antiquities, were added new and marvellous features, pertaining to the wild business that for more than half a century she had followed         ..........