Grace Line

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The US shipping company Grace Line existed from 1882 to 1969. It operated various freight and passenger lines departing from US ports. In their prime, the Grace Line comprised 23 ships with a volume of around 188,000 tons plus 14 ships in bareboat charter . This made it one of the larger members of US merchant shipping. The New York-Caribbean Service and the freight and passenger line from San Francisco via Honolulu to Auckland and Sydney became particularly well known.

history

The company went back to the mid-19th century in Callao , Peru founded shipping company of the two Irish-born brothers William Russell Grace and Michael Grace. Initially, they took part in the Guano trip to the USA with sailing ships. William Russel Grace left Peru in 1865 and founded the shipping company WR Grace and Company in New York , which from 1882 also offered steam connections along the American west coast under the name Grace Line. The names of the Grace Line ships in those years all began with "C" and, notably, carried the British flag. Over the years, the Grace Line expanded its route network and began passenger and mail services from New York via the Panama Canal to Seattle in the 1930s. Later in the same decade, there was a strong focus on services between New York and Haiti.

In the post-war years, the fleet was expanded several times and renewed with contemporary ships, such as the Santa Rosa class . In addition, the shipping company operated the first American container ships to call at a foreign port with the Santa Eliana and Santa Leonor units of MARAD Design C3-S-45a . In the course of the rapidly growing passenger air traffic in the 1960s, the parent company WR Grace decided to sell the shipping company and to reorient it towards the chemical industry and other business areas. In 1969 the Grace Line was sold to Prudential Lines by Spyros Skouras , the former president of 20th Century Fox . The shipping company then called itself Prudential Grace Lines for a few years. A number of Grace Line ships remained in service until the mid-1980s.

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