Qualla: Herzogin Cecilie

Herzogin Cecilie: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. She had just made one of the fastest grain runs ever sailed - Port Lincoln, South Australia to Falmouth in 86 days, around Cape Horn under full canvas. On the morning of 25 April 1936, the four-masted barque Herzogin Cecilie was making for Ipswich in dense fog when she struck the Ham Stone rock and drifted ashore against the cliffs of Bolt Head, on the south Devon coast. She was still afloat after the cargo was partly unloaded. Six weeks later they towed her around the headland to Starehole Bay at the mouth of the Kingsbridge Estuary, beached her there, and walked away. The Herzogin Cecilie, one of the last great working windjammers on the planet, finished her days as a tourist curiosity in a Devon cove.

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Image: Public domain

Herzogin Cecilie: A Ship from Another Age

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. She had been built in 1902 at Rickmers Schiffbau in Bremerhaven - 334 feet of steel-hulled iron-rigged sailing ship, four masts, square-rigged on the first three. The Germans named her Herzogin Cecilie - Duchess Cecilie - for the Crown Princess of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. She sailed...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Herzogin Cecilie: Falmouth for Orders

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Love, Mary, Public domain. The grain race was a real race, though no one had organised it. Every November the windjammers loaded sacks of wheat at South Australian ports and shoved off, the first home to a European port winning bragging rights and sometimes a small premium on price. The ships sailed under ...

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Image: Love, Mary | Public domain

Herzogin Cecilie: Fog at Bolt Head

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MichaelMaggs, CC BY-SA 3.0. Sven Erikson was her captain that voyage, Elis Karlsson his first mate. They left Port Lincoln on 21 January 1935 - the date in some sources is given as 1936, the discrepancy due to how the grain season is dated; the ship reached the Channel in April of 1936 - and made Falmouth o...

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Image: MichaelMaggs | CC BY-SA 3.0

Herzogin Cecilie: Pieces of a Duchess

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bahnfrend, CC BY-SA 4.0. Almost everything portable was carried off her before the sea took her. The chart room was lifted bodily off the deck, brought ashore, and reassembled inside the Cottage Hotel at Hope Cove on the same coast - timber walls and brass portholes intact, hung today with photographs an...

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Image: Bahnfrend | CC BY-SA 4.0

Herzogin Cecilie: Last of the Windships

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Photographed by Adrian Pingstone (on a chilly Monday before the school holidays, hence so few people) and placed in the public domain., Public domain. Alan Villiers titled one of his later books Last of the Windships - and the Herzogin Cecilie was one of the last of those. The grain race kept going for a few more years after she beached at Starehole, but by 1949 the trade was over. Of the great commercial four-masters that had ...

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Image: Photographed by Adrian Pingstone (on a chilly Monday before the school holidays, hence so few people) and placed in the public domain. | Public domain