NRP Sagres III

The Portuguese Navy school ship Sagres

The Sagres at OpSail 2000

Sagres at dock in Mar del Plata, Argentina, February 2010

The NRP Sagres is a tall ship and school ship of the Portuguese Navy since 1961. It is the third ship with this name in the Portuguese Navy, so she is also known as Sagres III.

The three-masted ship was launched under the name Albert Leo Schlageter on 30 October 1937 at Blohm & Voss in Hamburg for the German navy (Kriegsmarine). 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 for a symbolic price of $5000 USD.^[1] She was towed to Rio de Janeiro, and for Brazil 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.

Sisterships

• Gorch Fock (1) (ex Tovarishch)
• USCGC Eagle (ex Horst Wessel)
• Herbert Norkus, never completed
• Mircea, Romanian sail training ship
• Gorch Fock (2)

See also

• The school ship Sagres III in the Portuguese Navy Website
• List of naval ships of Germany
• List of Kriegsmarine ships
• List of ship launches in 1937

References

1. ^ NRP Sagres