Tinto (ship, 1852)
The Tinto was a Chilean barque that was used in Chile by interned members of the Imperial Navy and the German merchant navy as an escape ship to Norway during the First World War in 1916 and broke through the British naval blockade in the northern North Sea in 1917 .
Technical specifications
- Year of construction: 1852
- Type of ship: three-masted barque
- Builder: J. Steel jr., Liverpool
- Size: 477 GRT
- Length: 42.0 m
- Width: 8.12 m
- Draft: Unknown
- Propulsion: sails
- Masts: 3
- Speed: 9 to 10 kn
- Crew: 28 men (as an escape ship)
history
After the outbreak of World War I, several German merchant ships were interned in Chile, including the steamer Göttingen and the sailing training ship Herzogin Cecilie . The crew of the small cruiser SMS Dresden was added in March 1915 .
After the Battle of the Skagerrak on May 31 / May 1 In June 1916, eight crew members of the Dresden under the leadership of Leutnant zur See der Reserve C (K) arl Richarz decided to break out of internment by sea and return to Germany. Through contacts with interned merchant ship crews, crew members of the Göttingen and cadets of the Duchess Cäcilie joined the company. The escape was prepared undercover to distract the Chilean authorities and British agents operating in Chile .
The Tinto , which was built in 1852 and has been used in coastal shipping in Chile since 1902, was acquired through financial donations from Chile-Germans . Details are not known. Despite British intervention by the Chilean authorities, the Tinto was able to leave Chilean waters from the Chiloe Island on November 28, 1916 . The barque was officially declared for an inner-Chilean coastal trip. The Chilean crew switched to the schooner Chola beforehand .
Although the hull of the Tinto was made of teak and very robust, the rigging and sails were "inferior", so that according to Carl Richarz the ship gave the impression of a seller of soul rather than a windjammer . However, since its takeover by Chile in 1902, the barque had never been intended for ocean shipping. A radio telegraph system had been installed on board, which made it possible to listen to radio traffic within a radius of around 1000 nautical miles and thus to avoid Allied or neutral warships . As a seafaring captain ( captain ) of the ship acted Richarz, the function of the first officer exercised Carl Reumer, navigation officer was Friedrich-Wilhelm Fleischer . It is unclear under which flag the ship officially sailed; In purely formal terms, the Tinto is likely to have remained a Chilean ship.
At the height of the Falkland Islands , Richarz held a memorial service in memory of those who fell in the Falkland Battle on December 8, 1914, in which Dresden was involved. The Chilean flag was used up to the equator , then apparently the Norwegian flag under the legend Eva , an actually existing Norwegian barque.
Despite several severe storms that hit the Tinto extremely hard and in one case almost capsized it , the trip was ultimately uncomplicated, as it evidently avoided the usual steamship tracks and with a Scandinavian flag did not attract attention among the sailing ships it encountered. The barque was stopped only once shortly before Norwegian waters by the British armored cruiser HMS Minotaur and an unknown auxiliary cruiser of the Northern Patrol and asked about its origin and destination by waving signals , but not searched. On March 31, 1917, she entered Drontheim with considerable navigational difficulties .
In 125 days the barque had covered over 12,000 nautical miles. The Dresden -Offiziere the crew traveled immediately after arriving in Norway to Warnemünde and on to the Naval Staff in Berlin to report on the trip; the rest of the Tinto crew followed a few days later. The "Tinto" was auctioned and broken up in Norway for the benefit of the Red Cross.
literature
- Carl Richarz: The Viking journey of the "Tinto" twelve thousand miles across the ocean , Berlin (Scherl) 1917.
- FW Fleischer : Storming of the "Tinto" , Oldenburg i. O. (Gerhard Stalling) 1933.
- Erich Gröner , Dieter Jung, Martin Maass: The German warships 1815-1945 , Volume 8/1: River vehicles, Ujäger, outpost boats, auxiliary minesweepers, coastal protection associations (Part 1), Bonn 1993, Volume 2, p. 541. ISBN 3-7637- 4807-5 .
- Maria Teresa Parker de Bassi: Cruiser DRESDEN. Odyssey without return , Herford (Koehlers Verlagsgesellschaft mbH) 1993. ISBN 3-7822-0591X .
- Jack Strauss: 20,000 Leagues Across the Sea. The biography of the small cruiser "Dresden" (I) of the Imperial German Navy and the fate of its war crew (1906 to 1920) , Berlin (Pro Business) 2017. ISBN 978-3-86460-779-0 . ISBN 3-86460-779-5 .
- Fritz Brustat-Naval: "Windjammer on a long journey", Göttingen (W. Fischer Verlag) 1973. ISBN 3 439 00955 6