If you look closely at yesterday’s post about the South Street Seaport and Schermerhorn Row, you can see four masts of a sailing ship in the background. That ship is the Peking, a four masted barque that was moored at the South Street Seaport as a part of the South Street Seaport Museum from 1975 to 2016. Joseph Papin’s drawing of the Peking ran in the Daily News as a center fold piece. This is the negative for making the printing plate for the drawing:
A barque is a “sailing ship of three or more masts with the aftmost mast fore-and-aft rigged and the others square-rigged.” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/barque). (The aftmost mast is the one closest to the rear of the ship.)
The German website, https://peking-freunde.de/index.php/en/ provides a good overview of the ship:
The Peking “is a cargo sailing vessel without engine built in 1911 by the shipyard Blohm & Voss in Hamburg for the ship owner F. Laeisz. It is 115 metres long [126 yards] and 14.40 metres [15.75 yards] wide.”
[For comparison, a US football field is 120 yards (109.73 meters) in length and 53.3 yards (48.74 meters) in width; a FIFA international soccer field is 110-110 meters (110–120 yards) in length by 64-75 meters (70–80 yards) in width. The Peking is a huge ship – longer than a US football field and about one third as wide.]
“From 1932 she was a training ship in England, from 1975 to 2016 a museum ship in New York and returned to Germany onboard dock ship in 2017.
“She was restored at Peters Yard in Wewelsfleth and returned September 2020 to her home port of Hamburg to be a stationary museum ship.”
There is an extraordinary documentary of the Peking sailing around Cape Horn in 1929 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tuTKhqWZso
The Wikipedia article on the Peking goes into additional detail about the Peking; the following excerpts from that article follow:
“Peking is a steel-hulled four-masted barque [and] was one of the last generation of cargo-carrying iron-hulled sailing ships used in the nitrate trade and wheat trade around Cape Horn. … [The ship] remained in the nitrate trade until traffic through the Panama Canal proved quicker and more economical.”
“Renamed Arethusa II in 1932 … she served as a children’s home and training school [in England]. During World War II she served in the Royal Navy as HMS Pekin.”
“Arethusa II was retired in 1974 and sold [as the] Peking for the South Street Seaport Museum in New York City, where she remained for the next four decades. … A 2012 offer to return the ship to Hamburg, where she was originally built, as a gift from the city of New York, was contingent upon raising an endowment in Germany to ensure the preservation of the vessel.”
“In November 2015 the Maritim Foundation purchased the ship [to] become part of the German Port Museum (Deutsches Hafenmuseum) at Schuppen 52 in Hamburg. [The Peking spent the winter of 2016-2017 in dry dock on Staten Island] and on 14 July 2017 she was loaded on the deck of the semi-submersible heavy-lift ship Combi Dock III for transport across the Atlantic.”
The ship was refurbished and restored from 2017-2020 including “review of rigging, double floor steel plates, dismounting and remount of all masts, docking in dry dock, renewal of the steel structure, removal of the cement that filled the lower three and a half metres (11 ft) of the hull, painting, woodwork and overall refurbishment. … [The Peking] was refloated on 7 September 2018 [and] was transferred on 7 September 2020 to the German Port Museum.”
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