Alster mermaids
 |
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
.svg){kind=small}
The Alsternixe was a German four-masted barque that was declared lost by the Hamburg Maritime Administration in 1907 .
She was built in 1892 by Harland & Wolff, Belfast , and put into service under the name Lord Templemore by Irish shipowners under the management of T. Dixon and Sons, Belfast. The barque was bought by the stock corporation "Alster" in Hamburg in 1898 and measured at 3,038.87 GRT . Her distinguishing signal was "RKWF" and she was baptized in the name of Alsternixe . The name is derived from the combination of the Alster river and the legendary figure of the mermaid .
history
As early as 1903, the barque was considered a total loss when it ran aground on February 9th on the sands of the Cape Disappointment lighthouse in Washington state , a notorious ship graveyard . Since it swam free by itself, contrary to the original assumption, it could be recovered after a few weeks. Human losses did not occur.
On November 26th, 1906, the Alsternixe started a trip from Callao / Peru to Sydney Heads / Australia in ballast with a crew of 30 under Captain Ludwig Althaber (born June 27, 1871 in Stralsund ) . She should then load wheat in Melbourne , Geelong or Sydney . The crew consisted for the most part of sailors and ordinary seamen aged 16 to 21 years. The ship was never sighted again after leaving Callao. At the hearing of the Hamburg Sea Office on December 3, 1907, the barque was declared missing. The cause of the accident was assumed, on the one hand, to be too high dammed ballast and, on the other hand, to be a cyclone on January 18, 1907 in the southern Pacific , to which several other sailing ships had fallen victim.
literature
- Four-masted barque "Alsternixe" from Hamburg. Lost. Seeamt Hamburg, December 3, 1907. In: Decisions of the Ober-Seeamt and the Maritime Offices of the German Reich. Vol. 18, 1910, ZDB -ID 706485-8 , pp. 211-216.
- David Ritchie: Shipwrecks. An encyclopedia of the world's worst disasters at sea. Facts on File, New York NY 1996, ISBN 0-8160-3163-0 .
