The Albert Leo Schlageter,
since 1961 the school ship Sagres (III) of the
Portuguese Navy, is a three-masted tall ship launched on 30 October
1937 at Blohm & Voss in Hamburg for the German navy (Kriegsmarine)
as a training vessel for cadets. It thus is a sistership of the
Gorch Fock, the Horst Wessel, and the Romanian training
vessel Mircea. Another sister, Herbert Norkus, was not
completed, while Gorch Fock II was built in 1958 by the
Germans to replace the ships lost after the war. The ship was named
after Albert Leo Schlageter, who was executed in 1923 by French
forces occupying the Ruhr area.
The ship is a steel-built three masted barque, with square sails on
the fore and main masts and gaff rigging on the mizzen mast. Her
main mast rises 42 m above the deck. She carries 22 sails totalling
about 2,000 m² (21,000 ft²) and can reach a top speed of 17 knots
(31 km/h) under sail. She has a sparred length of 89 m (295 ft), a
width of 12 m (40 ft), a draught of 5.2 m (17 ft), and a
displacement at full load of 1,755 tons.Following a number of
international training voyages, the ship was used as a stationary
office ship after the outbreak of World War II and was only put into
ocean-going service again in 1944 in the Baltic Sea. On 14 November
1944 she hit a Soviet mine off Sassnitz and had to be towed to port
in Swinemünde. Eventually transferred to Flensburg, she was taken
over there by the Allies when the war ended and finally confiscated
by the United States.
In 1948, the US sold her to Brazil, where she sailed as a school
ship for the Brazilian Navy under the name Guanabara. In
1961, the Portuguese Navy bought her to replace the old school ship
Sagres (II) (which was transferred to Hamburg, where she is a
museum ship under her original name Rickmer Rickmers). The
Portuguese Navy renamed her Sagres (the third ship of that
name), and she is still in service. |
