Moshulu

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The Moshulu at Penn's Landing Pier, Philadelphia

The Moshulu ( [mɔʃɔəlʊː] , and [mɔʃʊːlʊː] ) is a 1904 under the name Kurt for the Hamburg shipping company G. JH Siemers & Co. -built steel barque . In 1917 it was renamed Dreadnought for a few months , after which it was given its current name, which it only changed again for Oplag for a short time in 1948 . The Moshulu is now a private restaurant ship in the port of Philadelphia in the USA .

description

The big steel windjammer , named after the then junior boss of the shipping company, Dr. Kurt Siemers (1873-1944), was designed as a three-island ship and had a modern standard rig with double Mars and Bramrahen , Royalrahen , the mizzen mast as a pole mast with two gaffs . The barque measured 3,109 GRT and could carry up to 5,300 ts (1 ts = 1.01605 t) of freight. So that it is slightly larger than the Beijing of F. Laeisz . The hull was initially painted dark gray to black and, similar to the Antoine-Dominique Bordes ships, provided with a porte band . Later the four-masted barque could be seen without a ribbon of gates. She was a very beautiful and fast ship, and well known in the world ports. As a restaurant ship, she again has a black-painted hull with a porte strap. The missing bow net was “famous” .

history

Freighter

The four-masted barque ran as Kurt on April 20 in 1904 for the shipping company GJH Siemers & Co. (founded in 1811 by Georg Johannes Heinrich Siemers) on the ship's throw William Hamilton & Co. in Scotland Port Glasgow from the stack . The barque had a very eventful history and many different owners. By 1914 that made Kurt among the captains Christian bulk and Amrumer Wilhelm Heinrich Gerhard Tönissen (1881-1929), who took over the Bark in 1908 at age 27, nine round trips in the nitrate trade to Chile to coal from England and Wales to South America, Coke to transport to Mexico . A few trips took the ship to Newcastle , Australia , to bring coal to Chile and saltpeter to Germany on its way home. The tenth voyage under Captain Tönissen led in 1914 via Santa Rosalía , Mexico, where the coal cargo was unloaded, in ballast to Portland , Oregon , to take over a wheat cargo.

When the First World War broke out, the ship was just outside Astoria , Oregon , where the shipping company ordered it to anchor and remain in place to protect it from British warships. Captain Wilhelm HG Tönissen was interned in various places in the States for three years until he was allowed to travel home to Amrum in 1917. The ship was confiscated by the US government on April 6, 1917 (the USA entered the war) and briefly renamed Dreadnaught ( fear of nothing ), but probably never went under this name (according to other sources, there was a sailing time in the Pacific to Australia and the Philippines ), until it was later discovered that there was already a ship of the same name registered in the States. As a result, it was renamed again on September 18, 1917, this time at the instigation of the President's wife Edith Bolling Galt Wilson in Moshulu , which in the Seneca or Onodowohgah language also means nothing to fear - in appreciation of the native Indian population.

The Moshulu served for the next three years as a cargo ( chrome , wool) sailing training ship for the United States Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation. In 1920 it came to the shipping company Moshulu Navigation Co. (Charles Nelson & Co.), San Francisco , to transport timber along the west coast and as far as Australia and South Africa , the main owner of which, Charles Nelson, moved the ship to James Tyson, San Francisco in 1922 after a brief change of ownership , for a sum of 40,000 US dollars bought back. In 1928, after his last lumber voyage for Nelson to Melbourne and Geelong (Australia), it was launched in Los Angeles , as increasingly faster steamers drove in the lumber trade. In the following years it was relocated several times in ballast in the greater Seattle area: to the Union Sea (in Seattle), to Windslow, Washington on Puget Sound , 20 kilometers northwest of Seattle, and to Esquimalt (reservation center of the Indian tribe of the same name) in British Columbia, Canada (100 nautical miles northwest of Seattle).

On March 14, 1935, Gustaf Erikson from Mariehamn on the Finnish Åland Islands bought the Moshulu for $ 12,000 (or $ 20,000) as the penultimate tall ship for his fleet in order to use her like his other sailing ships in the Austral wheat voyage. Gustaf Erikson bought what was then the world's largest fleet of 25 commercial sailing ships. The ship was taken over in Windslow (after H.-J. Furrer in Esquimalt) on the day of purchase by Captain Gunnar Boman of Mariehamn and sailed to Port Victoria, Victoria , Australia. In July 1936 the barque returned to Europe for the first time in 22 years with a load of wheat. The Moshulu circled Cape Horn 28 times (54 times in total) under Captain Mikael Sjögren, who became the second Erikson captain since October 14, 1938 (to August 15, 1939, from October 7, 1939 to June 1940) Four masters was. In 1939 she won the wheat regatta with 91 days on the journey from Port Victoria around Cape Horn to Queenstown ( Ireland ). On July 27, 1939, she cast off in Belfast and reached Gothenburg on August 11, 1939, from where she drove on October 7 for her fifth wheat voyage to the Río de la Plata in Buenos Aires to take over a grain load. She arrived there on December 7, 1939 and left Buenos Aires on January 26, 1940 with 4,809 tons of grain (4,303 tons of rye and 506 tons of oats) and reached the crossing on April 10 after 72 days at the time of the German occupation of Norway by the Wehrmacht around the northern tip of Scotland the seaport of Farsund around 85 kilometers west of Kristiansand , where it was until May 22nd. The ship was confiscated by the Wehrmacht. On May 25, the grain load was unloaded after being moved to the port of Kristiansand. Captain Mikael Sjogren returned to Mariehamn in June 1940; the ship, now in the hands of the occupying power, remained de iure the property of Gustaf Erikson.

Depot and residential ship

In the following years, the Moshulu found various missions and was towed to several ports in Norway, where she ran aground several times, but could be towed free. She served as a residential ship for German marines (May – July 1940), then moved to Horten on the Oslofjord in November and was partially dismantled (most of the yards). 1940 to 1942 the Wehrmacht used the Moshulu as a depot ship near Tenvik in the southwest of the island of Nøtterøy near Tønsberg in the Oslofjord. In the further course (1942–1944) she was towed with military equipment (barracks, ammunition) to Kirkenes in Northern Norway. At the beginning of 1945 she was towed to the bow bay , an equipment and repair base for the navy near Narvik , and was anchored there. Other parts of the rigging had already been removed during the lay times in previous years. The rigging now consisted only of the four masts and a few stays . In August 1945, the shipowner Erikson sent Captain Gustaf Holm to inspect his ship, who described the ship in acceptable condition, even though he had to discover the absence of all yards, the mizzen tree and the mizzen rig, as well as damage to the capstan .

post war period

On September 17, 1947, the barque broke loose from her anchorage in the arched bay in a westerly storm and ran aground near Østervik (Austervik). In the still heavy sea, the Moshulu capsized the following day and remained with the masts in the surf. Two businessmen, Gisken Jakobsen and JP Skotnes from Narvik, bought the heavily damaged ship in February 1948 for about 20,000 dollars to convert it into a motor ship, which was not implemented. Erikson's ownership of the Moshulu officially ended here , as salvaged ships become the property of the salvor. In the spring of 1948, the hull was erected, for which the masts had to be partially completely detached, recovered in May and provisionally repaired in Narvik, and then brought in to Bergen on June 13, 1948 .

Further changes of ownership of the hull of the Moshulu followed : in 1948 it went to Trygve Sommerfeldt from Oslo , and in 1948 to Sweden; on November 4, 1948, it was introduced into Stockholm , renamed Oplag and used as a floating granary . In 1952 the shipping company Hans Schliewen from Hamburg was supposed to take over the ship for its fleet of freight sailing school ships ( Pamir , Passat and the no longer in service Carl Vinnen ), but the ship was never delivered due to the bankruptcy of Schliewen. However, other sources cite August 30, 1952, when the towed Moshulu is said to have reached the Port of Hamburg again after many years, but was not rigged again due to financial difficulties. From November 16, 1953, the Moshulu served the Svenska Lantmännens Riksförbund ("Swedish Farmers' Association"), a Swedish association of agricultural enterprises and cooperatives, as a floating granary in Stockholm. In 1961 it went to the Finnish government as a grain hulk (until 1968) in Naantali for 3,200 t of Soviet rye.

Restaurant ship

In 1970, Captain Raymond E. Wallace discovered the hull in Nådendal Bay, and the Walt Disney Company, USA, bought the hull. After negotiations with David Tallichet, the ship was sold to the Specialty Restaurants Corp., which he owned, due to the lack of implementation options . sold on for use as a restaurant-museum. In May 1972 the Moshulu was towed to Scheveningen in the Netherlands for conversion, where her mast and square mock-ups were installed. Other sources name Amsterdam as a berth for the renovation work. Then the transfer took place in tow across the Atlantic with the help of Raymond Wallace to New York, where she was moored unused as Moshulu at the famous South Street Seaport Museum - the mooring of the Peking .

In 1974 she was moved to Philadelphia at Penn's Landing Pier and converted into a restaurant and museum ship. In 1975 the first Moshulu restaurant opened on the restored ship. A fire of unknown cause in the electrical switch room (or in the galley ) caused the ship's restaurant to close in 1989. The partly burned out ship was looted, individual parts of the Schauriggs came from above. In 1994 the ship was hauled into dry dock at the Broadway Terminal on the New York Ship Company Pier in Camden , New Jersey . The mast mock-ups were removed because the ship should possibly be scrapped.

In 1995, Moshulu was bought by HMS Ventures Inc. An elaborate restoration (custom-made parts, as there are no right angles in the hull) in the millions, including a new Schaurigg, was applied. A real rig that can carry sails in storm conditions, which makes sense for a true-to-original museum tall ship like the Pomeranian , was deemed unnecessary for a floating restaurant. The ship was now at Pier 34. Apart from the hull nothing has survived from the original ship. July 24, 1996 was the day of her new baptism as Moshulu .

On May 18, 2000, Pier 34 collapsed right next to the Moshulu . There were three dead and more than 40 injured. The accident had legal consequences because the pier, built in 1909, was considered dilapidated. In May 2002 the ship returned to its old berth, Penn's Landing Pier, 401 South Columbus Boulevard.

Two years later, on May 1, 2004, the Moshulu ship restaurant was reopened. 150 employees looked after up to 1,000 guests. It should be open all year round and every day. It contains a large dining room as well as a dining café with a bar below deck, and another dining café on deck, which also hosts entertainment shows.

One of the last four masters

The Moshulu is next to the four earlier Laeisz four-masted barques Kruzenshtern (ex Padua ), Passat , Beijing and Pomerania as well as the Sedov (ex Commodore Johnson , ex Magdalene Vinnen II) and the Viking in Gothenburg one of the few remaining freight-traveling four-masted barques. In addition, even the four Japanese training ships exist Nippon Maru and Kaiwo Maru of 1930, as museum ships lie and their respective successors in 1984, plus the luxury cruise ship Sea Cloud that 1930 as a private ocean-going yacht Hussar was built with Viermastbarktakelage. Another four-masted ship is the Falls of Clyde , the only four-masted full-ship in the world that is moored in Honolulu .

Ship data

Trivia

The Moshulu can be seen at the beginning of Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather - Part II when the young Vito Andolini enters the USA. In the movie Rocky , at the end of his training, Rocky sprints with the ship in the background.

literature

  • J. Ferrell Colton: Britons, Bring the Moshulu Home! . Sea Breezes Vol. 68, 1994, pp. 296-298.
  • J. Ferrell Colton: Last of the Square-rigged Ships . GP Putnam's & Sons, New York 1937
  • Hans-Jörg Furrer: The four- and five-masted square sailors in the world . Koehlers Verlagsgesellschaft, Herford, 1984, p. 137 (Kurt); ISBN 3-7822-0341-0
  • Walter Kozian: A coal gas explosion on the first trip. The résumés of the Hamburg four-masted barques Hans and Kurt . German Shipping Archive 16, 1993; (Pp. 93-124); ISBN 3-934613-64-0
  • Dr. Georg Lauritzen: The last voyage of the Hamburg four-masted barque "Kurt" under the German flag (1914) . In: Der Albatros , Heft 1 (pp. 1–8), Heft 2 (pp. 42–51), 2001; ISSN  0516-5016
  • Dr. Jürgen Meyer: Hamburg's sailing ships 1795 - 1945 . Egon Heinemann Verlag, Norderstedt 1971, p. 164
  • CH Milsom: New life for the "Moshulu"? In: Sea Breezes Vol. 64, No. 537 September 1990, pp. 596-597
  • Eric Newby: The last grain race . Penguin Books, New York 1986; ISBN 0-14-009571-3
  • Otmar Schäuffelen: Chapman Great Sailing Ships of the World . Hearst Books, New York 2005, p. 373; ISBN 1-58816-384-9

Web links

Commons : Moshulu  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ the Moshulu without yards in August 1945 ( memento of the original from February 19, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / sailing-ships.oktett.net
  2. ↑ In the appendix to the German version of Eric Newby's The Last Grain Race ( The last wheat race . Delius, Klasing & Co, Bielefeld 1968, p. 235) you will find the following “information from Lloyd's shipping directory”: “As a grain hulk in Stockholm until 1952. Bought by Heinz Schliewen, Hamburg, for the purpose of converting it into a sailing training and cargo ship. Arrived in tow in Hamburg on August 30, 1952. "

Coordinates: 39 ° 56 ′ 32.5 "  N , 75 ° 8 ′ 28"  W.