København (ship)
.jpg) |
||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
The Danish steel five-masted København was the fourth largest and last ship of rigging in the world merchant fleet. Until her unexplained disappearance she served as a sailing training ship .
history
The København was launched on March 24, 1921 at the Messrs. Ramage & Ferguson shipyard, Leith , Scotland . The first of this ship certain hull was already in 1915 been launched, but was in the First World War in 1918 by the British Admiralty confiscated and as a coal Black Dragon in Gibraltar used. After commissioning on October 26, 1921, the ship with its home port of Copenhagen was used as a sailing training ship to train exclusively Danish officers in freight traffic, mostly in wheat transport, by the Danish shipping company Det Østasiatiske Kompagni between Europe , South America's east coast, East Asia and Australia . The maiden voyage of the København took her from October 26, 1921 to November 7, 1922 to San Francisco and back, making a total of ten voyages, including some circumnavigations. The first skipper was the frigate captain and technical director of the company (Danish: Kommandørkaptajn og Teknisk Direktør) Baron Niels Juel-Brockdorff, followed by L. Mortensen, HF Christiansen and Hans Ferdinand Andersen, who had already served as the first officer on the ship on the previous voyages and was 35 years old at the time of the sinking.
The service on the ship was considered a special honor, only the best students who had previously served on the sailing training ship Georg Stage were accepted.
loss
On the last voyage she was on the way from Denmark to Buenos Aires with a load , but had no load there and therefore only drove with ballast to South Australia, where she was supposed to pick up grain in the Spencer Gulf . The ship left Buenos Aires on December 14, 1928. A crew of 60 were on board, including 45 cadets, who were 17.5 years old on average. The crew was also otherwise young, the oldest and only over 40 was the machine assistant at 43 years of age. A cadet had to leave the ship in Buenos Aires for personal reasons and later confirmed that the ballast (in addition to water and 700 tons of sand) was stowed correctly and safely. As usual, the København took the west wind route in the area of the Roaring Forties between the 42nd and 43rd degrees of southern latitude. The journey from Buenos Aires to Australia on this route should take an average of 42 to 50 days, a maximum of 55 days. From Australia one wanted to return to Europe around Cape Horn. The last known contacts were recorded on December 17 with the steamer Arizona 400 nautical miles east of Montevideo and on December 21 or 22, 1928 with the City of Auckland on the Hall line Liverpool and the William Blumer of the shipping company C. H. Sørensen, Arendal . After no further information about their whereabouts was known, a large-scale search was started in the South Atlantic as far as the Antarctic , but it did not produce any result. Even the most remote sub-Antarctic islands were searched with specially chartered ships such as the Deucalion , Beltana and Mexico , an effort that was unprecedented in the search for a sailing ship. The chartered Lars Riisdahl searched the coasts of South Africa and from Australia the Junee , the British steamer Halesius followed rumors of a stranding at Tristan da Cunha . But then and later nothing was found. A report that residents of the island of Tristan da Cunha had still seen the ship turned out to be confusion with the four-masted barque Ponape sailing under the Finnish flag . The suspicions of the cause of the accident range from a night collision in January 1929 with an iceberg within a huge ice field in the South Atlantic during the southern summer of 1928/1929 to the sudden capsizing as a result of a hard gust of wind from an unfavorable angle of attack, supported by the higher center of gravity as a result of the ballast trip. The last five-masted barque in the world was finally declared lost by Lloyd's in London in January 1930.
The Maritime Administration hearing on October 15, 1929 in Copenhagen brought no new information. The only criticism was that only nine fully qualified seamans were on board (all former cadets), but this was not regarded as serious - according to the Maritime Administration, the ship was well manned.
technical description
_-_SLV_H91.250-506.jpg)
The barque's hull, made of Siemens-Martin steel , was green, the bulwark was black, and beneath it, a light-colored stripe ran around the ship at the level of the main deck line. The underwater ship was red. Her figurehead was a knight in chain mail , helmet and robe divided into red and white. It was the founder of Copenhagen, Absalon von Lund . With his left hand he held a shield decorated with the Dannebrog in front of his chest, the right hand was stretched downwards, armed with a morning star . Similar to the Potosi , which served as a model for its planning , it had two continuous steel decks, the upper one of which was planked with teak , and a partial deck made of steel and wood as a bridge deck. There was also an intermediate deck below the lower continuous deck. Its division as a three-island ship was particularly noticeable due to a 15 meter short forecastle compared to an extremely long poop of 25 meters. The up to 45 cadets of the crew of up to 60 men were accommodated in the midship deck. With a total length of 131.85 meters, width of 14.94 m, a side height of 8.70 meters and a draft of 8.14 meters, the ship was measured at 3,901 gross tons. By Lloyd's Register of Shipping or the Bureau Véritas the ship was on + 100A classified Service.
The hold was divided by steel watertight transverse bulkheads, a measure that was planned after the Danish sailing training ship Georg Stage was rammed in the fog and sank with many casualties - later it was lifted again and put back into service.
The five masts of København were made of steel in the area of the lower masts and Mars stern. She ran a standard rig with double topsails and bram sails as well as royal sails , measured at the highest point from the lower edge of the keel to the flag button, reaching 57.3 meters. The mizzen mast had a bar and initially led an upper and lower mizzen with two gaffs . In 1927 the double Besangaffel was exchanged for a single one. The maximum speed under sail was 16 knots .
The two 3-ton stick anchors were stored on crane beams on the forecastle, the ship had double hawsers on the bow for the anchor chain and the associated safety rope. The auxiliary diesel engine of the Burmeister & Wain brand, 4.125 l diesel engine with 508 hp, was installed in front of the mizzen mast below the construction waterline . With this she could reach a top speed of 6 knots. Part of the holds in front of the central masts served as tanks. These fixtures led to the effective loading capacity being reduced to 5,283 t. The ship was already equipped with a long-range radio system, the callsign of which was NGHB.
She was not only the largest sailing ship in the world at times, but also very fast. According to her former captain, she could easily make 15 knots on ballast voyages. In one day she could cover up to 300 nautical miles, corresponding to an average of 12.5 knots. It was not unusual for them to overtake steamers on the same course.
See also
literature
- Hans-Jörg Furrer: The four- and five-masted square sailors in the world . Koehler, Herford 1984, p. 112; ISBN 3-7822-0341-0
- Jens Kusk Jensen: Handbook of practical seamanship on traditional sailing ships . Heel Verlag, Königswinter 1998, pp. 118–119; ISBN 3-89365-722-3 (German reprint; Danish Håndbog i Praktisk sømandskab , Foreningen til Søfartens Fremme (Association for the Promotion of the Sea), København, 1924)
- Palle Bruus Jensen, Erik Jensen: Skoleskibet København: historie, forlis, tragedie , Copenhagen 2005, ISBN 87-12-04178-5
- Alan Villiers: Verschollen auf See , Delius Klasing 1976, pp. 177–192
- Erik Jensen: Skoleskibet KØBENHAVN - med vægt på skibets tilknytning til Buenos Aires - article series from DKkommunikation , Svendborg 2001
- Hanne Poulsen: Femmastet bark m / s København , in: Hans Jeppesen (ed.), Handels- og Søfartsmuseet på Kronborg - Årbog 1988, Helsingør 1988 (Kronborg Trade and Maritime Museum, yearbook 1988)
- Thomas Minto, Eric Stevens: The Search for the 'Kobenhaven' and other true sea stories of the Depression years , New South Wales 1984
- Jens Ervø: Fem-masteren “København” - fra Buenos Aires til…?, Copenhagen 1932
- Hother Scharling: Med femmastet Bark “København” Jorden rundt, Copenhagen 1923
Web links
- Skoleskibet København main page (Danish)
- Skoleskibet Danmark (Danish)
- København on bruzelius.info (English)
- Ships of the East Asiatic Line 1920–1929 with photos of the København (English)
- More photos of København on pictureaustralia.org
Individual evidence
- ^ Villiers, Disappearance at Sea, p. 185
- ^ Alan Villiers, Lost at Sea, p. 183
- ^ Benjamin Asmussen, Som en Maage paa Vandet: nyt materiale om skoleskibet KØBENHAVN, Kronborg Trade and Maritime Museum, yearbook 2009 (German translation of the title: Like a seagull on the water). Photos of the ship by cadets and excerpts from their diaries are presented.