Kruzenshtern

Built at the J. C. Tecklenborg yard at Geestemünde in 1926 as the last four-masted cargo barque, launched on 24 June 1926 as Padua, the last of the famous Flying P-Liner fleet of the Hamburg shipping company F. Laeisz.

Between August 1926 and February 1932 she made eight voyages round the Horn to Chile, usually loading nitrate. She was then laid up until the end of 1933; put back into service with a government subsidy, she sailed in October 1933 for Wallaroo in South Australia to load grain consigned to Avonmouth in England. After another voyage to South Australia she made four more voyages to Chile; her last voyage as a cargo ship left Bremerhaven in October 1938 for Chile and Australia and ended at Glasgow in July 1939.

She spent the war laid up at Flensburg and in January 1946 was towed from Hamburg to Świnoujście to be handed over to the Soviet Union as a war prize, renamed Kruzenshtern.

She remained in harbour until 1959; a refit in 1959–61 gave her her first auxiliary engines. From 1961 to 1965 she conducted hydrographic and oceanographic surveys in the Atlantic, the West Indies and the Mediterranean while training naval cadets. In 1965 she was transferred to the USSR Ministry of Fisheries and homeported at Riga, training seamen and officers for the fishing fleet. Between 1968 and 1972 she was given new engines and her poop was extended to merge with the midship Liverpool house.

In 1974 Kruzenshtern and Tovarishch were the first Soviet ships to enter an international Tall Ships Race; she sailed the American bicentennial transatlantic race in 1976 and has since been a regular in western races and tall ship events, including the 1992 Columbus Regatta and Tall Ships 2000.

In 1980 her port of registry changed to Tallinn and in 1991 to Kaliningrad; since 1992 the Kaliningrad Marine College of the Russian Ministry of Fisheries has operated her.

In 1995–96 she sailed around the world in the steps of Johann Adam von Krusenstern, whose name she bears. The voyage under Captain Oleg Sedov covered 34,242 nautical miles and took 238 days, rounding Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope by way of Kaliningrad – Santa Cruz de Tenerife – Rio de Janeiro – Cape Horn – Tahiti – Moorea – Hawaii – Tokyo – Vladivostok – Singapore – the Cape of Good Hope – Cape Town – Santa Cruz de Tenerife – Kaliningrad.

Johann Adam von Krusenstern (1770–1846), a Russian-Baltic seaman and traveller, captained the first Russian sailing expedition around the world.