Carl Kircheiß

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Carl Kircheiß (1920)

Carl Kircheiß , also Kircheiss , (born July 17, 1887 in Harburg (Elbe) , † December 6, 1953 in Hamburg-Othmarschen ) was a German captain , circumnavigator , whaler and polar explorer .

Life

Carl Kircheiß was born as the son of an innkeeper and hotelier in Harburg (Elbe), which was still independent at the time, as the fifth of six children. In his youth the family moved several times: In 1890 his father sold the inn "Zum Schwarzen Roß" in Harburg and bought a hotel in Hausbruch on Cuxhavener Strasse. From there, Kircheiß attended elementary school in the village of Neugraben , which was about an hour away. A few years later, the father sold the hotel again and leased the restoration in the Unterelbe train station in Harburg, and later (1897) the Sennhütte on the north side of the Harburg mountains in Hausbruch. So it was possible for the children to attend the grammar school first citizen school. He finished this at the age of 14 and went on board the Hamburger Bark Nürnberg as a cabin boy in the summer of 1901 , where he was trained as a sailor until 1904. After a trip from Hamburg via Montevideo and Buenos Aires to Riga , he was promoted to ordinary seaman in the summer of 1902. From Riga, the Nürnberg sailed with a load of wood from Hudiksvall to Melbourne , with ballast on to Newcastle and from there with coal to South America.

In the following years he went to sea, including in July 1907 he was with the iron hull barque Fürst Bismarck near Cape Horn . In 1908, after attending the navigation school, he took out his license to become a navigator, and at the end of the year he was already sailing as a third officer on the full- rigged ship Maipo through Le-Maire-Strasse near Cape Horn. The captain's license followed in 1912. This made the 25-year-old one of the youngest captains in Germany. In the following years Kircheiß drove for the Hamburg South American Steamship Company (HSDG) as an officer in the coastal service off Argentina and was trained as a lieutenant in the reserve of the Imperial Navy . At the beginning of July 1914 he experienced the Hamburg-Süd shipwreck near Cape Punta Mogotes as a second officer on the steamship Mendoza , after which he was transferred to another steamship of the shipping company at the end of July, just before the outbreak of the First World War .

When the war broke out, the decision was made to return to Germany and serve as a soldier. On August 2, 1914, Kircheiß and other reserve officers left Buenos Aires on the Italian steamer Tomaso di Savoia with false papers and arrived in Germany via Italy. There he took over the command of a small outpost boat of the North Sea fore flotilla on August 30, 1914 in Wilhelmshaven .

Sea eagle by Christopher Rave (reproduction)

Captain Felix Graf von Luckner selected him as an artillery and navigation officer for his auxiliary cruiser Seeadler . From December 1916 on he was a lieutenant at sea . After the shipwreck on August 2, 1917 on a reef off the South Pacific island of Mopelia (Society Islands), he sailed with Luckner and four other sailors around 2,300 nm in an open boat six meters in length through the Pacific (stations: Atiu , Aitutaki and capture Wakaya ). He was interned on Motuihe Island in New Zealand's Hauraki Gulf . From their internment, Luckner and Kircheiß managed to escape on December 13, 1917 in the island commander's hijacked motorboat Pearl . They boarded the schooner Moa , but were captured again shortly afterwards by the steamer Iris near Macauley Island . He was transported back to Motuihe and interned again. In 1919 Kircheiß was released from captivity and returned to Germany with the Willochra . Later he was one of the three ghostwriters of Luckner's publication Seeteufel .

After the war, he founded a tobacco wholesaler with a partner from Bremen . As part of a cure in Bad Wildungen to cure his war injuries, he was discovered as a speaker. Numerous lectures all over Germany, promoting understanding between the former warring parties and the revitalization of German shipping, followed. The idea arose to hold the lectures worldwide.

The circumnavigation of the world with the cutter Hamburg

The means of travel should be a sailing ship, the sporting challenge was to travel through all the lake areas in winter. On March 30, 1925, Kircheiß bought the Cuxhaven- based Spitzgattfischkutter Holstentor HH 177 from the Hamburg shipowner Cordes & Peters for 25,000 marks. In the second quarter of 1925 he was at the Fritz Frank shipyard on Reiherstieg under the direction of Dipl.-Ing. Pichon rebuilt. The ship was renamed Hamburg in June , and a test drive in the Baltic Sea followed. After a few modifications to the ship and final travel preparations, the circumnavigation began on January 2, 1926. When he returned to the port of Hamburg on December 29, 1927 as the first German to return to the port of Hamburg with great media coverage, Kircheiß became famous.

The cutter Hamburg

The ship was designed by Max Oertz in 1921 as a fishing boat with a Spitzgatt and built at the shipyard at Reiherstieg in Hamburg. It was 22 m long, 6.4 m wide and had a draft of 2.8 m. The 48-ton ship had a 50 HP crude oil engine from the Hanseatische Motorengesellschaft and a 5 HP crude oil engine for electric light and pumps; the cutter was rigged as a ketch . The crew consisted of Captain Kircheiß and the helmsman Fritz Kunert, the two sailors Spengemann and Knoke and the smut Emil Niemann. In the 1930s the boat was available to the German High Seas Sports Association HANSA for sailing training as part of the organization Kraft durch Freude .

Stations of the circumnavigation

January 2, 1926 departure from Hamburg
January 3 to 10, 1926 Cuxhaven
January 22nd to February 3rd, 1926 Vigo
February 7-15, 1926 Lisbon
February 19, 1926 Gibraltar
February 22-27, 1926 Málaga
March 18 Ischia , repairs for a few weeks, then Naples until April 28, 1926
May 2-3, 1926 Messina
May 15-25, 1926 Alexandria
May 28-30, 1926 Port Said
June 19-22 , 1926 Aden
July 12-21, 1926 Colombo
July 29 to August 2, 1926 Sabang , Sumatra
August 6-16 , 1926 Belawan
August 23-30, 1926 Singapore
September 6 to 18, 1926 Tanjung Priok
September 21-27 , 1926 Semarang
October 1st to 17th, 1926 Surabaya , repairs
October 18-23, 1926 Boeleleng in Bali
October 27 to November 4, 1926 Makassar
November 21-28, 1926 Manila
December 18, 1926 to January 6, 1927 Kobe
January 19 to 31, 1927 Shanghai
March 25 to April 9, 1927 Honolulu
May 8 to June 1, 1927 San Francisco , met Count von Luckner there on May 11, 1927 and the following days
June 7-20, 1927 San Pedro (Los Angeles)
July 3 to 18, 1927 Manzanillo , July 13, 1927 in Mexico City
July 21-23, 1927 Acapulco
August 7-10 , 1927 Puntarenas , Costa Rica
August 13-15 , 1927 Balboa (Panama)
August 17-18, 1927 Colón (City, Panama)
August 31 to September 10, 1927 Havana
September 12-19, 1927, Miami
Philadelphia October 1st through October 19, 1927
October 22 to November 16, 1927 New York
December 25-29, 1927 Cuxhaven
Return on December 29, 1927 after around 34,000 nm

After the circumnavigation

Kircheiß used his fame and undertook further lecture tours through Germany, in which he increasingly campaigned for his own German whaling . In 1930 he drove as a passenger with the Norwegian whaler Leiesten to the Antarctic and the southern Arctic Ocean in order to gain knowledge about the conduct of whaling. After the fishing season, he drove via Argentina to the west coast of South America in the spring of 1931. He spent the months around the turn of the year in Panama and then traveled north in the northern hemisphere in time for summer to study whale and salmon fishing in Alaska and the Bering Strait . Kircheiß came back to Hamburg at the end of 1932.

Viking whaling ship (model)

On March 25, 1935, the Erste Deutsche Walfang-Gesellschaft mbH was founded in Bremerhaven , where Kircheiß worked as technical and nautical director. From 1935 onwards, industrial partnerships - mainly Henkel & Cie. and the German margarine industry - a fishing fleet in several companies (.. and Others also Walter Rau whaling AG and the German whaling company Hamburg) be established that already in 1936 about 35,000 t Tran , scoring 1,000 t Walmehl. In the spring of 1939 Kircheiß took over command of the whale catcher Wikinger with 13 fishing boats for 90 days .

At the beginning of the Second World War in 1939, he was initially given command of the Kaiser sea ​​bathing ship, which had been converted into a mine-laying ship , and then a submarine trap . When it was torpedoed , he suffered serious injuries. After his partial recovery he was an instructor in the Navy in Hamburg, later he headed a military district command in Westphalia. The ships of the whaling shipping companies had been transferred to the service of the navy at the beginning of the war and were partly destroyed in the war. The ships that were not destroyed went to the victorious powers of the war as reparations .

After the war, Kircheiß wanted to buy his own ship again and worked towards it. In 1949 he acquired an eleven-meter-long magnetic boat from the Navy, rigged it to become a deep-sea sailor, and named it Wal hooo . In autumn 1951 he sailed one-handed 3060 nm to the Azores in 62 days , got caught in a hurricane, and had to break off his planned Atlantic crossing there. The experiences were published as Exciting Stories , Issue No. 17, by C. Bertelsmann Verlag.

Grave: Carl Kircheiss

Carl Kircheiß died in a traffic accident: he was hit by a car while crossing the Hamburg Elbchaussee . His grave is in the Nienstedten cemetery . He left behind his wife, Ellen Angela, a son and a daughter.

Awards

Name foundations

  • The Carl Kircheiß Foundation , established posthumously by the Nautical Comradeship Hansea von 1896, Hamburg, has been caring for seafarers in need since 1958.
  • In 1969, HADAG Seetouristik und Fährdienst AG , operator of the Hamburg Elbe ferries, christened a 30 m long new ship in the ferry service to Kircheiß, which carried this name until 1979. Furthermore, a pilot transfer boat of the Elbe Pilots Brotherhood, which was stationed in Brunsbüttel until the end of 2017, bore his name.
  • From 1933 to 1948, the Kanalplatz in Hamburg-Harburg was named Kapitän-Kircheiß-Platz .

Fonts

  • My circumnavigation with the fishing cutter Hamburg , Kribe, Berlin 1928
  • Arctic Circle South - Arctic Circle North: As whale and soul catcher around the two Americas , KF Koehler GmbH, Leipzig 1933
  • Storm primer for sailors , Hamburg 1935
  • Whale hooo! Traveling around the world with harpoons, fishing hooks and nets , Wilkens, Rendsburg 1950
  • Alone across the Atlantic , Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1952
  • Water, wind and the wide world: Around the world as a cabin boy , Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1953

literature

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Carl Kircheiss: Water, Wind and Wide World: As a cabin boy around the earth , Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1953
  2. ↑ My circumnavigation of the world with the fishing cutter Hamburg , Kribe, Berlin 1928, pp. 34–44
  3. ↑ The seaquake probably only raged in Luckner's imagination , in: Informationsdienst Wissenschaft from September 1, 1999, accessed on January 15, 2010
  4. ↑ Yacht No. 16, pp. 15ff, 1935
  5. ↑ Whale hooo! Traveling around the world with harpoons, fishing hooks and nets, Wilkens, Rendsburg 1950
  6. ^ Johan Nicolay Tønnessen, Arne Odd Johnsen: The history of modern whaling, C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, 1982, pp. 423f., ISBN 978-0-905838-23-6
  7. ↑ Hildebrand / Röhr / Steinmetz: The German Warships , Vol. 9, p. 33.
  8. ↑ Kurt Ruthe: Captain Carl Kircheiß † , obituary in: Polarforschung (published by the Archive for Polar Research, Kiel), Volume III / 1953, Issues 1 and 2, 23rd year, published December 31, 1954, p. 209
  9. ↑ Carl Kircheiß (1969)  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed January 15, 2010@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.inselfaehren.de  
  10. ↑ Investigation report on the collision between Arctic Ocean and Maritime Lady as well as the Sunny Blossom touching the wreck of the Maritime Lady and the resulting stranding of the Sunny Blossom on the Elbe on December 5, 2005  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: Der Link was automatically marked as broken. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Federal Bureau of Maritime Casualty Investigation (BSU) and others, Hamburg 2007, accessed on February 4, 2010@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.vht-online.de  
  11. ↑ Carl Kircheiss: Water, wind and wide world: As a cabin boy around the earth , Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1953, p26f.
  12. ↑ Hamburg State Archives, 430-62 Findbuch Katasteramt Harburg, No. III a 13 (PDF; 89 kB), p. 17
personal data
SURNAME Kircheiß, Carl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Churchiss, Carl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German captain and circumnavigator
DATE OF BIRTH July 17, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Harburg (Elbe)
DATE OF DEATH December 6, 1953
Place of death Hamburg-Othmarschen