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The Eagle has docked
By adamg on Fri, 09/29/2023 - 5:00pm
Adam Castiglioni visited the Coast Guard's cutter Eagle today after it docked at the Charlestown Navy Yard, next to Old Ironsides. It's open to the public until 7 p.m. tonight and between 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. tomorrow.
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Comments
It's a beautiful ship
with an interesting history. It used to belong to the navy of some country being run by a lunatic named Adolf and it was originally named for a martyr to his cause.
The last former Kriegsmarine ship still afloat
...if I'm not mistaken. Originally the sail training ship Horst Wessel, it was taken by the United States after the war. Other prizes of war, such as the Japanese battleship Nagato, the German cruiser Prinz Eugen, and numerous U-boats, were subsequently sunk as targets or in atomic bomb tests, but this one sails on for the U.S. Coast Guard.
More on the history of the Eagle -
Yes, it was built as a training ship for a certain madman's armed forces. The yard that constructed it was Blohm & Voss, which remains one of the world's premier shipyards, particularly for billionaires desirous of hundreds-of-feet-long yachts.
What's sorta fun is that the Eagle was just one of several near-identical ships built as training ships, most of which are still operational as training ships for navies or merchant navies. There's the Gorch Fock, which was a Soviet and then Ukrainian training ship before returning to German hands in the early 21st century, the Sagres (ex. Albert Leo Schlageter), which the US also confiscated after WWII and sold to Brazil, which later sold it to Portugal, the Mircea, which is owned by the Romanian navy, and a second Gorch Fork for the then-West German Bundesmarine.
Later on a shipyard in Bilbao, Spain, built several more training ships for Latin American nations based closely on the Eagle-class ships: the Gloria (Columbia), the Guayas (Ecuador), the Cuauhtemoc (Mexico), and the Simon Bolivar (Venezuela).
Often a few of these sister / near-sister ships will participate in tall ship gatherings, including those around New England. I know that I've seen the Mexican and Colombian ships, and I think the Portuguese ship, when Boston or New London or whoever hosts.