Carl Schurz (ship, 1912)
 The former Carl Schurz as Changuinola
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The Carl Schurz (until 1913 Karl Schurz ) of the Hamburg-American Packetfahrt-Actien-Gesellschaft (Hapag) was the first reefer new build for a German shipping company when it was completed in October 1912. It was also the first refrigerated ship to transport bananas on the American market . These far-sighted decisions were made by Albert Ballin , who combined passengers, bananas and mail with them. However, other German ships also had cooling systems for part of their holds (in particular the Hapag and the DADG ).
The early sale of the ship in March 1914 was due to the termination of the transport contract with the Atlantic Fruit Company .
It was named after Carl Schurz (born March 2, 1829 in Liblar , † May 14, 1906 in New York), who was a radical democratic German revolutionary at the end of the 1840s, emigrated to the United States and was Interior Minister of the United States from 1877 to 1881 .
Technical specifications
With a length of 130 m and a width of 15.6 m, the Carl Schurz was measured at 6,000 GRT and had a load capacity of 6,665 tdw. The cargo space, specified in cubic feet and usable for refrigerated cargo, was 187,000 cft. Two triple expansion steam engines served as propulsion, giving the ship a speed of 16 knots with an output of 5,500 hp . The ship had postal facilities and comfortable passenger facilities for 80 1st class passengers, which were very popular with American business people and tourists for trips to Central America . In many elements, especially the luxurious passenger facilities, it was the forerunner of the luxurious ships from the "5000 Ton Class" of the later Great White Fleet .
history
The Carl Schurz was still launched as Columbia at Swan, Hunter & Wigham Richardson in (Newcastle), but when it was commissioned in October 1912, it was named Karl Schurz after the former American interior minister of German origin Carl Schurz , who was the representative of the from 1888 to 1892 Hapag was in New York. In 1913 the spelling in Carl Schurz was corrected. She was brought into service in January 1913 with her sister ship Emil L. Boas (whose keel was laid as Normannia and which was then renamed in New York after the Hapag director who died in 1912) and in association with ships of the Atlantic Fruit Company (AFC) in the service New York - Port Limon and Santa Martha and was in competition with the powerful United Fruit Company (UFC). She was z. B. 1913 used on Line A of the Atlas Line with 14-daily departures from New York and served ten ports in the Caribbean and Central America.
The Carl Schurz and her sister ship were sold in March 1914 to Elders & Fyffes, a company founded in Ireland in 1870, which had been under the control of the UFC since 1913, when the AFC had terminated the contract with Hapag and there was insufficient cargo for the refrigerated ships gave in both directions. In order not to give up its market share in passenger traffic, from the spring of 1914 Hapag sold the almost 10,000 GRT King Wilhelm II . in the Atlas service from New York.
The Carl Schurz was renamed Changuinola by Elders & Fyffes . In the same year, after the outbreak of war, she was hired as an auxiliary cruiser by the Royal Navy , armed with six 6-inch cannons and two light cannons and, from mid-January 1915, with a crew of over 200 in the 10th Cruiser Squadron in the Northern Patrol between the Shetlands and Norway deployed. From the end of 1917, the ship was used to secure convoy on the North Atlantic, where Halifax initially served as a base. In mid-January 1920, the Royal Navy returned the ship to its owners. It returned to Elders & Fyffes' banana service as a refrigerated ship and was scrapped in Glasgow in 1933.
The Emil L. Boas
The résumé of Emil L. Boas , who was completed shortly after Carl Schurz , was almost identical. She was renamed Motagua at Elders & Fyffes , also served as an auxiliary cruiser, but went first to Sierra Leone in 1917 and was returned to the owners in 1919. It was demolished in Rotterdam in 1933.
background
As part of the Atlas Line, Hapag was briefly involved in refrigerated shipping, surprisingly in the most difficult branch, banana shipping. As early as 1903, it was mainly active in the American branch of banana shipping and is considered to be the pacemaker in the fruit refrigerated shipping industry. This significantly reduced the proportion of prematurely ripening fruit during transport. At that time, the world market for banana shipping was concentrated in Central and North America, Europe was not yet a role at that time. The companies that dominated the market until the First World War transported the bananas in ventilated, not refrigerated, cargo holds. These companies also gradually replaced their fruit ships with fruit refrigerated ships.
literature
- Arnold Kludas : The History of German Passenger Shipping. Vol. III Erratic growth 1900 to 1914. (Writings of the German Maritime Museum, Volume 20). Kabel, Hamburg 1988, ISBN 3-8225-0039-9 .
- Arnold Kludas, Ralf Witthohn: The German reefer ships . Koehler, Herford 1981, ISBN 3-7822-0248-1 .
- Karl-Heinz Hochhaus, Holger Glandien, Ingo Schenk, Michael Schweer: Cool. Reefer technology with a future. Refrigerated Ships - Market, Transport and Perspective. Seehafen-Verlag, Hamburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-87743-818-3 .
- Karl-Heinz Hochhaus: German refrigerated shipping (1902–1995). Shipping companies, refrigerated ships, refrigerated goods. House sign, Bremen 1996, ISBN 3-931785-11-4 .
Web links
- List of British ships in World War I.
- Elders & Fyffes
- Funeral of Emil Boas . In: New York Times. May 7, 1912. Online at nytimes.com (PDF, 33 kB)