She was built on the Isle of Man in 1863, her hull shaped from iron rather than wood — still a bold industrial wager at the time, a bet that the future of commercial sail was metal and permanence. They named her Euterpe, after the Greek muse of music, and her early voyages were the opposite of lyrical.
Her maiden voyage brought a collision off the coast of Wales before she had even cleared British waters — when the crew refused to continue, 17 of them ended up in Beaumaris Gaol. Her second voyage reached the Bay of Bengal, where a severe gale forced the crew to cut away her masts off Madras; the captain died at sea on the return voyage. Two voyages, two disasters of different kinds, the sort of record that would have condemned most ships to the breaker's yard. Instead she circled the globe 21 times.
For years she carried general cargo between England and India. Then she became an emigrant ship, crossing from England to New Zealand with holds full of families going to start over on the far side of the planet — thousands of people, the sum of their possessions reduced to what fit below deck. Late in the 19th century she crossed the Pacific entirely, joining the Alaska salmon trade. In 1901 the Alaska Packers' Association of San Francisco acquired her, re-rigged her as a barque, and in 1906 renamed her Star of India to match the rest of their fleet. She spent 22 Alaska seasons carrying cannery workers north each spring and salmon south each fall. After her last Alaska voyage in 1923, she was laid up; in 1926 she was sold to the Zoological Society of San Diego, which moored her at the Embarcadero and left her to quietly dissolve.
She sat there for decades. Salt worked at her iron hull. Sun bleached her paint. San Diego walked past her every day on its way to work and did not particularly notice. It took Australian mariner and author Alan Villiers — passing through on a lecture tour in the late 1950s and visibly appalled at what he found — to make the public case that a city in possession of the world's oldest iron-hulled sailing ship was watching it rot and calling that normal.
San Diego reconsidered. Citizens formed the Star of India Auxiliary in 1959 and began one of the most ambitious maritime restorations on the West Coast. The work stretched across years. Nearly all of her original iron hull survived — the standing rigging was rebuilt to period specification during restoration —, which meant that what was being saved was genuinely irreplaceable, and every decision in that restoration was permanent. The people who took it on understood what they were holding.
On the morning of July 4, 1976 — 113 years after her launch and on the bicentennial of American independence — the Star of India raised full sail for the first time in fifty years and moved across San Diego Bay while tens of thousands watched from the waterfront. Everyone who was there describes the same thing: they kept waiting for the moment to feel ordinary, and it never did.
She still sails at least once a year. This means she remains, by definition, the oldest active sailing ship on earth. On those mornings she is not a museum piece. She is a ship going somewhere — which is what she has always been.
Today the Star of India rests at the Maritime Museum of San Diego alongside a remarkable gathering of her peers and descendants: HMS Surprise, the square-rigged frigate built in 1970 as HMS Rose and later modified to portray the Surprise in the 2003 film Master and Commander; the 1898 steam ferry Berkeley, which rescued survivors after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; and a full-scale working replica of the San Salvador, the galleon Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo commanded when he sailed into this bay in 1542. The waterfront on North Harbor Drive has become a living timeline — centuries of seafaring, standing in sequence at the edge of a modern city, available to anyone who walks past.
JADA is herself a vessel that knows what it means to be restored: a 1938 wooden yacht built in Stockton, California, brought back to life, and now sailing these waters with the same conviction that kept the Star of India in the world. Sail out with us, pass her in the harbor, and feel what a ship in her 163rd year on the Pacific actually looks like from the water.
Hear this story where it happened. JADA sails past this very spot. Join the San Diego Bay History Sail →
Wear the story. She survived a mutiny, a gale, and a century of neglect. This shirt has a better chance. The 1863 — Still Sailing shirt →