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Parmir
Bark (4m). L/B/D:
316 × 46 × 23.4 (96.3m × 14m × 7.1m). Tons: 3,020 grt. Hull:
steel. Comp.: 30; 52 cadets. Built: Blohm & Voss, Hamburg;
1905.
Built in Germany in 1905,
PAMIR represented the peak achievement of sailing ship design and construction.
She was constructed at the Hamburg yards of Blohm and Voss and launched on the
River Elbe on July 29th to a career which would span almost exactly 52 years.
Ordered by Reederei F. Laeisz for its Flying P Line of nitrate clippers and
named for the Central Asian mountain range,
Pamir was built to sail in
the hard-driving nitrate trade between Europe and Chile via Cape Horn. During her long career PAMIR was to sail under the flags of Germany, Finland,
New Zealand and, briefly, Italy.
Bought by Gustaf Erikson of Mariehamn, Åland
Islands, in Finland, she entered the grain trade from Australia, occasionally
carrying timber and other bulk cargoes from Europe.
In 1941, Finland was in a
state of war with Great Britain, and Pamir was seized at Wellington.
She made ten voyages under the New Zealand flag from New Zealand and Australia
to the United States.
The era of the
commercially viable sailing ship had passed and PAMIR was laid-up until March
1951 when she, along with her sister and sometime rival PASSAT, were sold to a
shipbreaker in Antwerp. She was reprieved at the last minute and bought to be
used by Germany as a cargo carrying training ship. It was in this capacity that,
on September 21st 1957, she sank in the teeth of a North Atlantic hurricane with
the loss of 80 lives. For 52 years PAMIR had sailed the seas of the world,
through two world wars and innumerable storms. It was the sea she loved and it
was the sea which finally took her.
Links with More information
Sailing
Ships: "Pamir" (1905)
PAMIR
– The New Zealand Episode
Ships
of the World: An Historical Encyclopedia - - Pamir
Pamir
memorial
Alan
Villiers' centenary - 23 September 2003 : National Maritime ...
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The Last Time Around Cape Horn: The Historic 1949
Voyage of the Windjammer Pamir
In 1949, a young Dartmouth
student named William Stark left his study-abroad program in Zurich for
a berth as an Ordinary Seaman on a Finnish windjammer that would carry
60,000 sacks of barley 12,000 miles in 128 days from Australia to
Europe, around Cape Horn. This is Stark’s engrossing memoir of the end
of a long tradition of young men going to sea in the Great Age of Sail,
and the final rounding by a commercial sailing ship of fearsome Cape
Horn—the veritable Mount Everest of sailing. Stark vividly chronicles
the Pamir’s journey through the world’s stormiest seas as he worked
brutal four-hour watches on decks awash with the huge swells of the
Southern Ocean, and scrambled up ice-coated rigging to manhandle sails
on masts that were up to twenty stories high. Stark experienced the
shipboard life of the seventeenth century in 1949 on a vessel longer
than a football field. Stark wrote a thrilling narrative that
brings closure to the era of Cape Horn merchant sailors that began more
than three centuries before. Pages of memorable photographs are included |
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Tall Ships Down : The Last Voyages of the Pamir,
Albatross, Marques, Pride of Baltimore, and Maria Asumpta
Captain
Daniel Parrott, captain of the 170-foot topsail schooner Pride of
Baltimore II, is a professional mariner of 18 years' experience in tall
ships. While earning a master's degree in Marine Affairs from the
University of Rhode Island in 1998, Parrott undertook an in-depth,
critical reexamination of the official inquiries and other records
pertaining to the losses of the 316-foot bark Pamir in 1957; the
117-foot brigantine Albatross in 1961; the 117-foot bark Marques in
1984; the 137-foot schooner Pride of Baltimore in 1986; and the 125-foot
brig Maria Asumpta in 1995. Each of these casualties is ingrained in the
consciousness of serious sailors. Each of them involved loss of life -
112 lost crew in total. Each is a frequent topic of sailors' talk and
speculations. |
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The Last of the Wind Ships
A tribute to
the last days of the great merchant sailboats and their crews from a
unique photographic talent. The photographic work of Alan Villiers is
arguably the most important photo-historical record of
early-twentieth-century maritime history in the world. In capturing on
film life aboard the last of the great merchant sail ships, he has
provided us with a singular record of the end of an era. Passionate
about the sea from an early age, Villiers worked on several commercial
sailing vessels before taking on a job as a journalist on a whaling
expedition to Antarctica in 1923, which ultimately resulted in the
writing of his first book. Other acclaimed books would follow (as well
as one film). These powerful images, published for the first time in
this volume, date from the late 1920s through the 1930s and were taken
aboard the three ships Villiers worked on during this period: the Herzogin
Cecilie, the Grace Harwar, and the Panama. 140
duotones.
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The Last Grain Race
In 1938 an eighteen-year-old boy signed on for the round trip from
Europe to Australia in the last commercial sailing fleet to make that
formidable journey. The four-masted barque Moshulu ended up as a
dockside restaurant in Philadelphia; the young apprentice went on to
become one of the greatest travel writers of this century. The Last
Grain Race is Eric Newby's spellbinding account of his time spent on
the Moshulu's last voyage in the Australian grain trade.
As always, Eric Newby's sharp eye for detail captures
the hardships, danger, squabbles, companionship and sheer joy of
shipboard life - bedbugs, ferocious storms, eccentric Finnish crew and
all. By pure chance, Eric witnessed the passing of the era of sail, and
his tale is all the more significant for being the last of its kind.
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Learning the Ropes : An Apprentice on the Last of the
Windjammers
In 1938, Eric Newby signed on as
an apprentice on the Finnish four-masted barque Moshulu for a
'round-the-world' voyage transiting between Europe and Australia. It was
the toughest imaginable introduction to the sailor's life. Few of the
crew spoke English, and he was ordered atop the rigging -- 200 feet
above deck -- before he could get out of his best jacket and shoes. More
extraordinary still, between his shifts he managed to photograph
day-to-day life aboard the antique vessel, and on others like her in
various ports of call. Though he did not realize it then, these pictures
soon became historic, for with a world war brewing, there would never
again be a cavalcade of square riggers such as made the circuit that
year. Remarkably, the Moshulu is still afloat and is now a
restaurant ship, moored in Philadelphia. |
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