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3/4 port stern view of the four-masted barque HERZOGIN CECILIE at Cardiff Docks, c.1936.

The last European shipowner to operate deep-sea sailing vessels was Gustav Erikson of the Åland Islands in the Baltic. One of numerous such vessels that he bought in the 1920s was the 3,111 gross ton barque Herzogin Cecilie, built originally as a sail-training vessel in 1902. Erikson employed these vessels in the grain trade from Australia, and this view was taken when the vessel discharged grain from Port Lincoln at Cardiff in April 1928.

Source: Shipping at Cardiff: Photographs from the Hansen Collection 1920-1975 by David Jenkins, 1993.

(3242gt) : 4-masted steel barque built 1902 by Rickmers, Bremerhaven, as a training ship for the North German Lloyd Line. She was laid up in Chile from 1914 – 1918. 1918 – Allocated to the French government as War Reparations, and subsequently bought by Capt. Gustaf Erickson of Mariehamn. She became famous for winning a succession of “Australian Grain Races”. It was at the culmination of one of these races that she she struck the Hamstone Rock off Salcome, Devonshire in thick fog on the 25th April 1936. Holed in the forepeak, she was beached at Starhole Bay but rough seas quickly turned her into a wreck