Qualla: Potosi (barque)

Potosi (barque): Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. She carried a tower of canvas, forty-three sails spread across five steel masts, and in a fair wind she could outrun a steamship. The Potosi was a windjammer at the very peak of the breed, a 122-metre giant built in 1895 for the German shipping house F. Laeisz, and for nearly two decades she thundered around Cape Horn at speeds that beggared belief for a vessel driven by nothing but wind. Her end, when it came, was strange and slow: not a storm, but fire, and a final volley from a warship's guns off the Patagonian coast.

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Potosi (barque): The Flying P-Liners

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit George Schutze, Public domain. The Potosi belonged to a fleet of legends. F. Laeisz gave every ship a name beginning with P, and the firm's fast, immaculately run sailing vessels became famous worldwide as the Flying P-Liners, described by one chronicler as without doubt the most successful fleet of sail ever ...

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Image: George Schutze | Public domain

Potosi (barque): A Cathedral of Steel and Canvas

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit George Schutze, Public domain. Almost everything about the Potosi was steel: her black hull with its white waterline, her masts, her yards, even much of her rigging drawn into cable. Four of her five masts were square-rigged, each carrying six sails in towering tiers, while the aftermost mast bore fore-and-aft...

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Image: George Schutze | Public domain

Potosi (barque): Faster Than the Wind Had Any Right to Be

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wilhelm Hester, Public domain. The ship was the brainchild of Robert Hilgendorf, the most celebrated of the Laeisz captains, who shaped her design and then sailed her as her first master. Under his hand she set records on the saltpetre run. In good conditions the Potosi could touch nineteen knots, and on her b...

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Image: Wilhelm Hester | Public domain

Potosi (barque): Fire Off Patagonia

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit see below, Public domain. The war ended her German career. Caught at Valparaíso when the First World War broke out in 1914, she was interned, and afterward handed to France as reparation; sold on, she passed eventually to a Chilean firm in Valparaíso and was renamed Flora. Her end came in 1925. On 15 Sept...

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Image: see below | Public domain