Qualla: Passat (ship)

Passat (ship): Introduction

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Aconcagua, CC BY-SA 3.0. On the homeward run from Buenos Aires in early November 1957, Passat's cargo of loose barley shifted and she lay over fifty to fifty-five degrees to port. Her crew had every reason to believe they were about to die, because they knew exactly what a shifting grain cargo did to a four-masted barque. Seven weeks earlier Pamir - same rig, same owners, same trade - had rolled over in Hurricane Carrie west of the Azores and gone down with around eighty of the eighty-six people aboard. Six survived. Passat did not sink. She limped into Lisbon on 8 November, transferred her cargo, and went home to Hamburg. She never carried freight again.

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Image: Aconcagua | CC BY-SA 3.0

Passat (ship): One of the Flying P-Liners

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marhelle, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Hamburg shipping house F. Laeisz named every vessel it owned with a P, and its ships were fast enough that the fleet became known as the Flying P-Liners. Passat - German for the trade wind - came off the ways at Blohm & Voss on 20 September 1911, yard number 206, at a cost of...

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Image: Marhelle | CC BY-SA 3.0

Passat (ship): Nitrate, and Thirty-Nine Roundings

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rolf Krahl (Rotkraut), CC BY 4.0. Her working life was the Chilean nitrate run: general cargo south, saltpetre north, and Cape Horn twice each voyage. The First World War caught her in Chile and she sat interned at Iquique for the duration, sailing in 1921 to Marseille to be handed over to France as reparations. ...

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Image: Rolf Krahl (Rotkraut) | CC BY 4.0

Passat (ship): The Last Grain Race

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jürgen Howaldt, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1932 Laeisz sold her to Gustaf Erikson of Mariehamn, the Åland Islands owner who kept commercial square-riggers working when almost nobody else would. Erikson put her into the Australian grain trade, loading wheat at Spencer Gulf in South Australia for Europe - the annual run ...

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Image: Jürgen Howaldt | CC BY-SA 3.0

Passat (ship): Why the Windjammers Stopped Paying

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lothar Schaack, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. What finished commercial sail was not weather but arithmetic. Gustaf Erikson died in 1947, and his son Edgar found he could no longer run either ship at a profit - chiefly because changing regulations and union agreements had replaced the traditional two-watch system with the thr...

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Image: Lothar Schaack | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Passat (ship): Tied Up at Priwall

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrzej Otrębski, CC BY-SA 4.0. Lübeck bought her in December 1959 for 315,000 Deutsche Marks. On 1 August 1960 she was made fast at the Priwall shore in Travemünde, near the mouth of the Trave and directly across the water from the ferry berths, and she has not moved since. Heritage protection came in 1978. In...

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Image: Andrzej Otrębski | CC BY-SA 4.0