Carl Woermann (ship, 1910)
Carl Woermann as Brazilian Atalaia
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The second Carl Woermann of the Woermann Line (WL) was the largest cargo ship of the shipping company when it was completed in 1910. The shipyard Bremer Vulkan built five similar cargo ships of the Emir class for the German East Africa Line (DOAL) from 1911 to 1915 .
In 1914, Carl Woermann sought refuge in Rio de Janeiro , where it was confiscated by the Brazilian government in June 1917 and renamed Atalaia . From 1923 she was used by the Lloyd Brasileiro , which she owned in 1927.
In 1941 the ship was lost without a trace on a voyage from Cape Town to Buenos Aires .
History of the ship
From 1907 until the outbreak of war, the Woermann line received seven new-build cargo ships for West African service. Only Aline Woermann and Lulu Bohlen (1910/11, 4500 GRT) from the Reiherstieg shipyard came from one of the shipping company's main suppliers so far, the other five ships were supplied by the Bremer Vulkan in Vegesack . After Arnold Amsinck and Max Brock (1907, 4500 GRT) as the first new cargo ships, the Carl Woermann with 5715 GRT was delivered in 1910 , followed by Renata Amsinck and Elisabeth Brock (1912, 3700 GRT).
The second Carl Woermann was 128.0 m long, had a quadruple expansion engine of 3000 hp, which enabled the ship to reach a speed of 11.5 knots (kn) . The accommodation of 12 passengers was possible. The ship with the construction no. 535 was launched on June 8, 1910 and was delivered to the Woermann Line on August 16, 1910
Carl Woermann (1813–1880) was the name of the company founder of the Woermann trading house. The second steamer in the Woermann line previously bore his name. This 1946 BRT ship, completed in 1881 at the Reiherstieg shipyard, was in service from 1882 to Liberia and Cameroon after several trips to the West Indies and was scrapped in 1908.
Until the war, the Bremer Vulcan built three sister ships of Carl Woermann for the German East-Africa Line with Emir , Muansa and Rufidji ( Emir class), which is closely connected with Woermann , which came into service in 1911. Werft in Bremen-Vegesack completed two more ships of this type in 1917, which were never used under the German flag.
Operation under the German flag
In the fall of 1910, Carl Woermann began its service in West Africa. She remained the largest cargo ship of the shipping company until the outbreak of World War I and was only surpassed by the two imperial mail steamers on the main line and the two new passenger ships for the West Africa voyage.
In August 1914, Carl Woermann headed for Rio de Janeiro as a neutral port. A total of 44 German ships sought refuge in Brazil in 1914. At least nine German ships were moored in Rio, including the Reichspostdampfer Gertrud Woermann and the cargo ship Arnold Amsinck, two other WL ships. In Recife , the Henny Woermann had found shelter as the fourth Woermann ship in Brazil coming from Monrovia . Under pressure from the Entente , Brazil occupied the German ships in its ports on June 2, 1917. However, the country was not able to get this fleet up and running straight away, especially since maintenance was not sufficiently possible during the years of lay-up. In addition, the German crews had made some of the machines unusable in anticipation of confiscation.
Under the Brazilian flag
The Brazilian government gave the German ships new names, so that the Carl Woermann became the Brazilian Atalaia . In December 1917, the Brazilian parliament approved the chartering out of 30 of the seized ships to France . The Atalaia came into French service, but probably only after the end of the war. In May 1920 there was a dispute between Brazil and France, which refused to return 28 formerly German ships after the charter contract expired. In 1923 the ship was back in Brazil and was managed by the almost state-owned Lloyd Brasileiro. It was one of the ships that the shipping company subsequently acquired, so that it came into the ownership of the privatizing shipping company in 1927.
The main area of operation of the ship under the Brazilian flag was traffic with South Africa and Mozambique . On February 13, 1941, the ship left Brazil on its 13th and final voyage. Starting in Rio Grande , the ship called at various Brazilian ports and then went to Cape Town, Durban and Lourenco Marques. On the way back we called at Cape Town again, which the Atalaia left on May 10th with 66 people on board. On May 21, two radio messages from the ship were intercepted near Tristan da Cunha , which indicate that the ship , which had got into a cyclone , had lost its rudder. No trace of the ship or its occupants was ever found.
Sister ships at DOAL
| Surname | Construction no. | GRT | Launched in service |
further fate |
| emir | No. 542 | 5532 | 01/28/1911 04/03/1911 |
Applied in 1914 by the sloop HMS Cormorant near Gibraltar , used as pole loaders on the Entente side, renamed Sunheath in 1921 , purchased by the NDL in 1927 , as Ilmar also in Africa service, 1935 to Woermann-Linie, 1939/40 conversion to the first German Fully frozen factory ship Hamburg , sunk on March 3, 1941 by British destroyers in an attack on the German fish supply in Vågsfjord . |
| Muansa | No. 549 | 5408 | 30.06.1911 08.10.1911 |
1914 sought refuge in Buenos Aires , towed from South America to Hamburg for repairs in August 1920, bought back by DOAL after formal delivery, from March 1940 troop transport, sunk on January 1, 1943 off Hammerfest by the Soviet submarine L 20 . |
| Rufidji | No. 553 | 5442 | 29.09.1911 09.11.1911 |
Captured by a British torpedo boat between Cape Town and Simonstown in 1914 , used as Huntscliff on the Entente side, leaked and sunk in a storm on October 16, 1918 in the North Atlantic on the way from Canada to France. |
Web links
- Page on the history of the shipping companies Deutsche Afrika-Linien, John T. Essberger, u. a. as well as the trading house C. Woermann under construction
- List of ships seized by Brazil in World War I.
literature
- Arnold Kludas : The ships of the German Africa Lines 1880 to 1945. Verlag Gerhard Stalling, 1975, ISBN 3-7979-1867-4 .
- Arnold Kludas: The History of German Passenger Shipping. Volume IV: Destruction and rebirth 1914 to 1930. (= Writings of the German Maritime Museum. Volume 21.)
- Arnold Kludas: The History of German Passenger Shipping. Volume V: An era comes to an end from 1930 to 1990. (= Writings of the German Maritime Museum. Volume 22.)
- Claus Rothe: German ocean passenger ships 1919 to 1985. Steiger Verlag, Moers 1987, ISBN 3-921564-97-2 .
- Hans Georg Prager: Blohm & Voss. Koehler Verlagsgesellschaft, Herford 1977, ISBN 3-7822-0127-2 .
- Jürgen Rohwer , Gerhard Hümmelchen : Chronicle of the naval war 1939-1945. Manfred Pawlak VerlagsGmbH, Herrsching 1968, ISBN 3-88199-009-7 .
- Reinhart Schmelzkopf: The German Merchant Shipping 1919–1939. Verlag Gerhard Stalling, Oldenburg, ISBN 3-7979-1847-X .