Eagle

Commissioned in Hamburg in 1936 as a training ship for the German Navy under the name Horst Wessel. Sagres II, ex-Albert Leo Schlageter (1937), and Gorch Fock II (1958) were built to the same lines; nearly identical but smaller are Mircea (1938) and Tovarishch, ex-Gorch Fock (1933).

During the war she was converted to carry men and supplies around the Baltic. In 1946 she was handed to the US Coast Guard as reparations and taken to New London, where she was renamed Eagle; the Coast Guard, founded in 1790, uses her for military maritime training.

Each year she makes a main voyage through European or Central American waters, along with shorter cruises in the western Atlantic. She joined the parade of sail at the American bicentennial in 1976 and the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America.

She was modernised and fitted with additional watertight bulkheads in 1981–82. In 1996 she visited the Blohm & Voss yard in Hamburg where she had been launched sixty years earlier. That same year she sailed the Cutty Sark Tall Ships Race from Rostock to St Petersburg, and in 2000 was flagship of the New York Sail.