Flying
P-Liner - (en)
The Flying P-Liners were the sailing ships of the German F. Laeisz
shipping company from Hamburg.
The company was founded in 1824 by Ferdinand Laeisz as a hat manufacture.
He had quite some success and distributed his hats even in South America.
In 1839, he had the three-masted wooden brig Carl (named after his son)
built and entered the shipping business, but lack of success made him sell
the ship already five years later.
Ferdinand's son Carl Laeisz entered the business in 1852. It was he who
turned the F. Laeisz company into a shipping business. In 1857, they
ordered a barque which they named Pudel (which was the nickname of Carl's
wife Sophie), and from the mid 1880s on, all their ships had names
starting with "P" and they became known as "the
P-line". The last ship without a "P-name" was the wooden
barque Henriette Behn which stranded on the Mexican coast in 1885.
The Laeisz company specialized in the South American nitrate trade. Their
ships were built for speed, and they soon acquired an excellent reputation
for timeliness and reliability, which gave rise to the nickname "the
Flying P-Line". The five-masted barque Potosi made the voyage from
Chile to England around Cape Horn in 1904 in just 57 days, which was a
record at the time.
The Laeisz company had some of the largest sailing ships ever built. They
experimented with steel-hulled five-masters, first the barque Potosi
(1895) and in 1902 the huge full rigger Preussen with a length of 147 m,
5.081 GRT, and over 7.800 tons dead weight. She could sail faster than 18
knots and her best 24-hour distance was 392 sm in 1908 on her voyage to
Yokohama. However, these ships turned out to be too big: their crews
didn't like them, and it became increasingly difficult to achieve a
satisfactory utilization on the outbound leg from Europe to Chile. The
later ships, such as the Peking or the Passat, were smaller four-masted
barques again.
During World War I, many of Laeisz' ships were blocked in Chilean ports
and had to be handed over as war reparations. However, the Laeisz company
could re-acquire many ships after the war and put them into service again.
Towards the end of the 1920s, the company began pulling out of the nitrate
trade and increasingly started transporting other goods, e.g. bananas.
They also sold some of their older ships, for instance the Pamir to Gustav
Erikson in Finland. The last sailing ship ordered by the Laeisz company
was the Padua (1926). Subsequently, the Laeisz company only ordered steam
ships. The Laeisz shipping company still exists today.
Four of the Flying P-Liners still exist today:
the Pommern is a museum ship in Mariehamn, Finland.
the Peking is a museum ship in New York City (South Street Seaport).
the Passat is a museum ship in Lübeck's sea resort Travemünde, Germany.
the Padua is the only ship still active: she is today a school ship and
sails as the Kruzenshtern under Russian flag.
Other famous Flying P-Liners were the five-masters Potosi and Preussen,
and of course the four-masted barque Pamir, Ponape and Priwall.
