In 1863 a shipyard at Ramsey, on the northeast coast of the Isle of Man, launched an iron-hulled full-rigged ship and named her Euterpe, after the Greek muse of music and lyric poetry. More than a century and a half later the same hull floats on San Diego Bay, moored on the Embarcadero. About once a year she still casts off and sails. No other ship that old does that, and so she holds the title of the oldest active sailing ship in the world.
She has been the Star of India since 1906. Her two names cover two working lives. A third life, the one she lives now, nearly never happened.
Euterpe was built when iron shipbuilding was still young. A full-rigged ship carries square sails on all three masts, and she was built to carry cargo and passengers across the open ocean on long deep-water passages.
Her first voyages went badly. She was in collisions, and her crew mutinied. A ship with that record could easily have been sold off or broken up early. Euterpe kept working.
She found her steady trade carrying emigrants from Britain to New Zealand. The route made each round trip a full circle of the globe: out by way of the Cape of Good Hope and the Southern Ocean, home by way of Cape Horn. Euterpe made that circuit 21 times.
Her passengers were people leaving Britain for a colony on the other side of the earth. They lived aboard for months, with only what they had brought, and they stepped off in a country most of them had never seen. Many New Zealand families trace their arrival to ships like her. Over those decades, crossing the oceans was her ordinary work.
In 1901 she crossed to a new owner and a new ocean. The Alaska Packers' Association bought her for the salmon trade, and in 1906 the company renamed her Star of India. The company also changed her rig. She became a barque, with square sails on her fore and main masts and fore-and-aft sails on the mizzen, a rig that needs fewer hands to work.
Her job now followed the salmon. Each season she carried cannery workers north to Alaska and brought them south again when the season ended. She did this every year until 1923. By then steamers did the work faster, and the old sailing ships of the fleet were being laid up one after another. The Star of India was among them.
In 1927 she was bought for San Diego and towed south, with plans for her to become a museum ship. The plans stalled. For decades she sat on the waterfront, rusting and largely neglected. A ship that had survived collisions, a mutiny and 21 passages around the world came close to dying in harbor from plain lack of attention.
Restoration finally came, slowly, and much of the work was done by volunteers. They replaced decking, rebuilt rigging and worked through problems a 19th-century iron hull presents. In 1976 the Star of India went to sea under sail again. It was her first time sailing since the 1923 season, a gap of 53 years.
Plenty of old ships survive as museums. Most of them stay at the pier. The Star of India stands apart because she still leaves it. When she sails, a full working crew handles lines, sets canvas and takes her out of the bay much as sailors did in the 1860s. The rest of the year she is the flagship of the Maritime Museum of San Diego, and visitors walk her decks, look down into the hold and stand at a wheel that has steered her across every ocean she crossed.
Her age is easy to say and hard to picture. When Euterpe was launched, the American Civil War was still being fought. San Diego was a small town. The harbor she rides in now had no Navy base, no bridge to Coronado and no Shelter Island or Harbor Island. Those islands were built later from dredge spoil, in the 1950s and 1960s, while she sat waiting at the waterfront.
A sailor heading up the bay from the harbor mouth passes Point Loma, Ballast Point, North Island and Harbor Island before the downtown skyline opens up. There on the Embarcadero, near the USS Midway, the Star of India's three masts rise above the museum's other ships. Seen from a deck at sea level, her height and the length of her yards are easier to judge than they are from the pier. JADA, a 65-foot wooden yacht launched in 1938, is young beside her: the Star of India was already 75 years old when JADA first touched the water. If you want to see her the way her crews did, from the water, our San Diego Bay history sail passes her berth on the way up the bay.
Sources: Maritime Museum of San Diego; Wikipedia articles "Star of India (ship)", "Alaska Packers' Association" and "Ramsey, Isle of Man".
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