My dad always used to sing a sea shanty about the decline in the use of tall ships, the first few verses of which go:

The War To End Wars ended and I told my friends at school / someday I'll sail around the world! They laughed and called me fool / But even as a youngster I was stubborn as a mule / I set out to be a sailorman.

I signed aboard my first ship with a bright and cheerful song / They said I was a nightingale who eased the work along / I learned the old mens' stories and the work-chants loud and strong / That's how I became a shantyman.

I screamed just like a banshee to be heard above the gale / To keep the watch in unison and help them reef the sails / The crew were tough as whipcord, the Skipper hard as nails / Still they needed this young shantyman.

But days of sail were ending and steamships coming fast / I watched them sail into the wind, no sail set at the mast / Black coal to drive them onward and no more the cool, clear blast / A cold wind blowing for the shantyman.

As you can see, the song seems to place the decline of the tall ship in commercial shipping well after the end of the First World War (i.e. the War to End Wars). I'm uncertain of the providence of the song (the above is from memory), and this seems to be a very late date to still find wind-powered ships still in common use.

Is the song an anachronism? Could a boy in 1918 still find the first ten to twenty years of a career on a tall ship? When and how did wind-powered ships finally stop being used for large-scale trading?