Imperator (ship, 1913)
Emperor with a bow ornament .
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The Imperator was a passenger ship that was built in 1913 for the HAPAG line and later sailed as the RMS Berengaria for the Cunard Line . It was considered the largest ship in the world until 1914 .
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history
Before the First World War
The Imperator (HAPAG used the male article at the request of Kaiser Wilhelm II ) was the first of HAPAG's gigantic passenger steamers for the North Atlantic. The other two were called Vaterland and Bismarck . Of this trio, known as the Imperator class , only the Imperator and the Fatherland made trips under the HAPAG flag.
The Emperor was at AG Vulcan built in Hamburg, where he on 23 May 1912 by the stack was running and was completed by April of the following year. The front ornament - a mighty eagle on a globe - was modeled by the Berlin sculptor Bruno Kruse . On the way from Hamburg to the North Sea , where the test drives were carried out, the new ship came aground for a short time, which was not surprising, because never before had such a large ship sailed down the Elbe . During the tests in the North Sea, however, a momentous discovery was made shortly afterwards: It was found that the ship was top-heavy . The slightest rudder angle caused the ship to heel a long way and it took a long time for it to straighten up again. The maiden voyage was to take place only a short time later, but the streak of bad luck persisted: five people were killed in a fire caused by welding work. The repairs caused a delay.
On June 11, 1913 was emperor from Steubenhöft in Cuxhaven on her maiden voyage to New York from. The Berlin graphic artists Wilhelm Deffke and Carl Ernst Hinkefuß designed the printing material for this. In Southampton , Cherbourg and at the port of destination, the Imperator was warmly welcomed as the world's largest ship. It outperformed the largest passenger liner Titanic and its sister ship Olympic by around 6,000 GRT. In addition, the Imperator was the first ship in the world to exceed 50,000 GRT.
Another fire broke out in the port of Hoboken , which could be extinguished quickly, but the water that was pumped in caused a threatening lateral position again. The departure was delayed by two days. During a stay in the shipyard after the end of the voyage, the fire damage was repaired and measures were taken to counteract the top pliability: Heavy wooden cladding was removed and replaced with lighter ones, heavy chairs in the common rooms were replaced with wicker furniture and a lot of built-in marble was dismantled. In addition, the ship received more ballast. The chimneys were shortened by almost three meters. All of this helped lower the ship's center of gravity. The measures were successful.
Wartime
His last journey under the HAPAG flag undertook the Emperor on July 8, 1914. It was after returning to Hamburg because of the outbreak of war launched .
After the war
After the armistice in 1918 and the Versailles peace treaty , the emperor went to the US Navy as a troop transport as part of the German reparations after the First World War . It then came under the management of the British Cunard Line and in February 1920 went on its first voyage under the flag of the new owners from Liverpool to New York . In February 1921, Cunard also officially became the owner of the ship and it was renamed Berengaria . Its sister ship Bismarck , meanwhile completed by Blohm & Voss in Hamburg and transferred to the property of the White Star Line, was named Majestic .
At the service of the new owners
As Berengaria , the ship left Southampton for the first time on April 16, 1921. In the same year, urgent repair and overhaul work was done at the Armstrong Whitworth shipyard , which took six months. The living and common rooms were refurbished and the boilers were converted from coal to oil burners.
The modernized ship was put back into service in May 1922 and joined the Cunard steamers Mauretania and Aquitania in the express service from Southampton to New York. It stayed there for the next 16 years and made a name for itself because of its reliability. The machinery worked to full satisfaction and the ship was a valuable addition to the fleet for Cunard. For Captain Arthur Henry Rostron , the Berengaria was the last ship he was allowed to command in his long career at sea. The famous captain of the Carpathia , which salvaged the castaways of the sunken Titanic in April 1912 , mentioned them in his memoirs only in a subordinate sentence as "the most comfortable ship on which he would have ever served". On the other hand, he devoted a whole chapter to the faster, smaller, older, but thoroughly “English” Mauretania , which he commanded from 1919 to 1928.
The last few years
After the union of Cunard and White Star in 1935, only the Aquitania and the Berengaria remained for their North Atlantic service . In May 1936 the Queen Mary was put into operation and Cunard actually wanted to keep the Berengaria going until the Queen Elizabeth was commissioned . In view of the constant risk of fire - several smaller fires broke out on board - the Berengaria had fallen out of favor with the US authorities and one day had to start the journey home to Europe without passengers. An extensive renovation to reduce the risk of fire did not seem worthwhile to the owners, especially since the ship would only be in service for a few years before the Queen Elizabeth could be put into service.
On November 7, 1938, the former Imperator was sold for scrapping and moved to Jarrow ( South Tyneside ). The Second World War , however, interrupted the complete demolition of the ship and the still buoyant part of the hull was towed to Rosyth (Scotland) in 1946 and scrapped there.
Passenger capacity
1913
- First class: 592
- Second class: 972
- Third class: 942
- Between deck: 1772
1922
- First class: 972
- Second class: 630
- Third class: 606
- Tourist class: 515
Sister ships
- Bismarck (later Majestic )
- Fatherland (later Leviathan )
Others
There is a large model ship of the "Imperator" in the entrance hall of the headquarters of Hapag-Lloyd AG ( Ballindamm on the Inner Alster ).
literature
- Robert D. Ballard , Ken Marschall : Lost Liners - From the Titanic to Andrea Doria - the glory and decline of the great luxury liners. Translated from the English by Helmut Gerstberger. Heyne, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-453-12905-9 .
- Max Geitel: Creations of modern engineering. (= From nature and the spiritual world, Volume 28). Teubner, Leipzig / Berlin 1914, p. 84.
- Clas Broder Hansen: The German Passenger Ships, 1816 to 1990. Urbes, Hamburg 1990, ISBN 3-924896-19-4 .
- Arnold Kludas : The German express steamers. The imperator class - the climax of an era. In: Deutsches Schiffahrtsarchiv, Volume 8. Kabel, Hamburg 1985, ISSN 0343-3668 , pp. 147-164 ( PDF ).
- Arnold Kludas: The History of German Passenger Shipping. Volume 4: Destruction and rebirth 1914 to 1930 (= writings of the German Maritime Museum, Volume 21). Ernst Kabel Verlag, Hamburg 1989, ISBN 3-8225-0047-X .
- Literary Bureau of the Hamburg-America Line (ed.): Imperator at sea. Commemorative sheets for the first voyage of the steamship Imperator on June 11, 1913. Graphics by Wilhelm Deffke . Hapag, Hamburg 1913.
- Eberhard Mertens (ed.): The Hapag giants of the Imperator class. The history of the luxury ships Imperator, Vaterland, Bismarck in pictures and contemporary documents. Olms, Hildesheim 1974, ISBN 3-487-08083-4 .
- Hans Jürgen Witthöft: Ballin's thick steamers - Imperator, Fatherland, Bismarck. Koehler, Herford 1974, ISBN 3-7822-0100-0 .
- Peter Zerbe: The big German passenger ships "Imperator", "Vaterland", "Bismarck". Nautik Historie Verlag, Hamburg 1999, ISBN 3-929231-11-5 .
Web links
- Imperator / RMS Berengaria . In: AtlanticLiners.com (English)
- Imperator / RMS Berengaria . In: NavSource Online
- Susanne Wiborg: Germany's "Titanic" . In: Zeit Online ( Die Zeit , No. 15/1999), April 8, 1999
- Marc-Oliver Rehrmann: When the "Imperator" conquered the Atlantic . In: NDR.de , May 21, 2012
Individual evidence
- ↑ The Ballin House. (PDF; 2 MB) Hapag Lloyd, archived from the original on March 5, 2016 ; accessed on November 28, 2018 .