Robert Hilgendorf

Robert Hilgendorf

Robert Hilgendorf (born July 31, 1852 in Schievelhorst near Stepenitz , Pomerania Province , † February 4, 1937 in Hamburg ) was a German captain. He became world famous on the sailing ships of the Hamburg shipping company F. Laeisz .

Life

Hilgendorf's father was the captain of small ships on the Stettiner Haff and carried cargo, including peat . So it happened that Hilgendorf was already on board as a child in the summer and learned seamanship as a matter of course. At the age of 12, Robert Hilgendorf was allowed to operate his father's cutter independently. In 1867 Hilgendorf left home and hired a freighter that sailed the North Sea as well as the Baltic Sea . Just two years later, Hilgendorf became a fully qualified seaman .

This was followed by a three-year service with the Imperial Navy from 1873–1876. Hilgendorf drove on the SMS Arcona , a covered corvette with an additional screw drive . He rose from the ranks of the crew and retired after two years as boatswain's mate . Then he attended the navigation school (Hamburg) , where he passed the helmsman's examination with distinction. After he had sailed on the Blankeneser Barkentine Nautik , he passed the test to become a captain on a long voyage with distinction on August 29, 1879 . He applied to the Hamburg shipping company F. Laeisz and was accepted. He initially drove as a helmsman before receiving his first command on the Parnassus in 1881 .

P-liner

The Flying-P- Liners managed by Robert Hilgendorf during his time at F. Laeisz were:

• Parnassus (1881-1884), wooden barque
• Parsifal (1884-1886), Bark
• Professor (1887), Bark
• Pirate (1888), Bark
• Pergamon (1888), Bark
• Palmyra (1890–1891), full ship
• Placilla (1892-1894), four-masted barque
• Pitlochry (1894), four-masted barque - the beginning of an extraordinary career. Hilgendorf
• Potosi (1895–1901), five-masted barque

A considerable part of Hilgendorf's travels consisted of the saltpeter trip to Chile. In more than 20 years of service on board Laeisz ships, Hilgendorf circled Cape Horn 66 times and achieved surprisingly high and above all steady speeds on these voyages, which earned him the name "Teufel von Hamburg" ("Düwel von Hamborg"). To do this, he made scientific calculations and considerations, similar to the American Lieutenant Captain Matthew Fontaine Maury , whose works he knew inside out. During his time as captain of the Potosi he developed a night vision sextant together with the Hamburg optics company C. Plath .

In the course of his career as a captain he lost a ship, the Parsifal . She was loading coal from South Shields for Valparaíso when a hurricane broke out in the Hoorn region and the load slipped. Although Hilgendorf tried to trim the cargo and had the masts cut, he could no longer save the ship. The British barque Saraca picked up the castaways and brought them to Ireland. In Hamburg he was soon given a new command. Hilgendorf already had a legendary reputation around the world by 1880. He was a master of weather navigation when the term was not even known.

“He used the wind. He used all the winds. "

- Alan Villiers

On land

In November 1901, at the age of 49, he went ashore forever. The offer to take over the Prussians , the largest Laeisz ship (five - mast full ship ) as captain, he declined. In Hamburg, Hilgendorf was appointed captain of the “Deputation for Trade, Shipping and Commerce” (President of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry for Maritime Affairs) and worked for 27 years until he retired in 1928. He had six sons and two daughters, of whom he survived a wife and daughters. Two of his sons went to sea. For his 80th birthday in 1932, the former Kaiser Wilhelm II sent a picture from his exile of the encounter on the Potosi . Hilgendorf had been a member of the Hamburg Freemason Lodge Boanerges since 1892 for brotherly love .

Namesake

A five-masted gaff schooner was named after Hilgendorf in 1939 and the Kapitän Hilgendorf , a pilot station ship in the Elbe estuary, in 1961 . There is a Hilgendorfweg in Hamburg-Blankenese.

literature

• Jochen Brennecke : Windjammer. The great report on the development, travels and fate of the "Queens of the Seven Seas" . Koehler, Herford, 3rd edition 1984; Cape. XIV - Captains, pp. 202-212; ISBN 3-7822-0009-8
• Russell Drumm: The Barque of Saviors: Eagle's Passage from the Nazi Navy to the US Coast Guard . Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston 2001; P. 94 ff; ISBN 0-3959-8367-3
• Hans Georg Prager : F. Laeisz - from cargo sailors to refrigerated ships, container ships and bulk carriers . Koehler, Herford 1994, p. 57; ISBN 3-7822-0096-9
• Uwe Janßen: The Devil of Hamburg , yacht, December 18, 2003
• Heino Brockhage: Captain Robert Hilgendorf. His life and work on cargo-carrying sailing ships , ed. by the Shipping History Society Bremerhaven eV, Oceanum Verlag , Wiefelstede 2015; ISBN 978-3-8692-7403-4 .

Web links

• Newspaper article about Robert Hilgendorf in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .