Belem

Designed and built in 1896 at the Dubigeon yard in Nantes for the South Atlantic route between France and Latin America. For her first owners, Denis Crouan Fils & de Lagotellerie, she carried coal from Cardiff to the River Plate and cacao from Belém in Brazil to France.

In 1907 the Demanges brothers bought her and used her to deliver food and supplies to the penal colony in French Guiana made famous by Papillon; she made ten such voyages. Sold again but still trading across the Atlantic, she was finally retired in 1914 after thirty-two transatlantic passages.

The Duke of Westminster bought her for conversion into a private yacht. She spent the war years at Camper & Nicholsons in Gosport, where she was given her first twin auxiliary engines, and cruised the Mediterranean from 1919 to 1921. In 1921 Lord A. E. Guinness bought her, renamed her Fantome II, sailed her around the world and made many cruises to the Mediterranean and the Arctic. After Guinness died in 1939 she was laid up at Cowes and remained there through the Second World War.

In 1951 the Italian Count Vittorio Cini bought her and presented her to the Cini Foundation in Venice, a school for seamen's orphans. Re-rigged as a barquentine and renamed Giorgio Cini after the count's son, she made short cruises in the Adriatic until 1965, when costs laid her up. The Italian state police bought her as a cadet ship and for public relations work and sent her to a Venice yard for a major refit in 1972, but unpaid bills led the yard to put her up for sale in 1974.

In 1979 the French savings bank Caisses d'Épargne bought her, renamed her Belem and set out to recommission her as a civil training ship. She escaped becoming a static museum: exhibited in Paris from 1982 to 1985, her restoration continued and she went on sea trials in 1985. In 1984 she was classified as a Monument Historique.

From March to October she usually runs short public training cruises of three to ten days along the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of France. She took part in Operation Sail in New York in 1986, the Brest 2000 festival and Sail Bremerhaven 2000, and from February to July 2002 crossed the Atlantic calling at Vigo, Madeira, the Canaries, Dakar, Belém, Caribbean ports including Saint-Pierre on Martinique, Bermuda and the Azores. She joined the 400th anniversary of the founding of Québec in 2008, the Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant of 670 ships in June 2012, a visit to Venice in 2014, her own 120th anniversary at Nantes and the Fêtes maritimes de Brest in 2016, the 500th anniversary of Le Havre in 2017 and the Armada de Rouen in 2019.