The Herzogin Cecilie

the long version

This is a copiously illustrated definitive record of one of the last and finest of the four-masted, steel-hulled commercial sailing ships written by two distinguished experts, Greenhill in maritime history and Hackman in Finnish ethnography. The ship was built in Germany and made her first voyage in 1902. She was bought in 1921 by the legendary Finnish shipowner Gustaf Erikson and joined his fleet of similar commercial sailing ships based at Marriehamn in Finland. Under her last captain, Sven Erikson, she ran aground on rocks near Start Point in Devon and, after several months of desperate salvage work, was abandoned in Starehole Cove. The reason for the accident was never completely understood or explained at the time, even by Pamela Bourne Erikson, the captain's wife who was on board the ship and wrote a book about it (The Duchess, by Secker and Warburg, 1958) and the authors therefore conducted many interviews with relevant people and consulted extensive records for the first time to compile a definitive account. This suggests that after many years of hard-driving achievement, the captain had become exhausted, possibly unbalanced, unduly influenced by his wife, and probably falling out of favour with the owner. The course that the ship had taken was clearly wrong.