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Museum Pieces: Sailing Ship "Star of India" [1]
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Date: 2025-03-25
The Star of India is an iron-hulled merchant sailing ship built in England in 1863. On display at the Maritime Museum of San Diego, she is billed as “the world’s oldest active sailing ship”.
"Museum Pieces" is a diary series that explores the history behind some of the most interesting museum exhibits and historical places.
In 1863, the Gibson, McDonald & Arnold shipbuilding company, on the Isle of Man, began work on a three-masted sailing barque for the Wakefield Nash Company, a Liverpool firm that traded in jute from India. Named Euterpe for the Greek muse of music, she was unusual at the time for being constructed with an iron hull rather than wood.
Euterpe was launched in November 1863. On her maiden voyage from Liverpool to Calcutta in January 1864, she collided in the dark with a Spanish ship off the English coast, and when the crew refused to continue the voyage with the damaged ship and mutinied, Euterpe returned to port for repairs. Her next voyage, in 1865, did not go much better: this time she made it to India but ran into a tropical gale and had to undergo repairs at Calcutta. Upon her return trip to England, her Captain died aboard ship and was buried at sea.
In 1871, Euterpe was purchased by the Shaw Savill shipping line in London. By this time, London had become an overcrowded city packed with poor and unemployed, and Shaw Savill was doing a profitable business carrying London emigrants to New Zealand. With her tough iron hull, Euterpe proved to be especially suited for this long voyage, and she made a total of twenty-one round trips between London and New Zealand, sometimes with stops in Australia and occasionally crossing the Pacific to Chile and California. Some of these voyages lasted over a year.
The Pacific Colonial Ship Company then purchased Euterpe in 1899 and used her to haul lumber from the Pacific Northwest to Hawaii. Two years later, the ship was sold to the Alaska Packers Association, which was one of the major players in the salmon-canning industry.
The United States had purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867. Most people at the time viewed the area as a vast wasteland of useless snow and rock, and the press mocked it as “Seward’s Folly”. But the cold nutrient-rich waters off Alaska had immense fish resources, particularly in salmon which came to the area’s streams to spawn every year. The first commercial salmon cannery was opened on Klawock Creek in 1878. By 1900, the United States had become the largest producer of canned fish in the world. In San Francisco, where labor was cheaper and railroad lines could carry the finished canned goods to the rest of the country, fish canneries began to appear in Monterey harbor, which soon became dubbed Cannery Row.
Much of the labor force in the canning industry came from China, but when the United States passed several immigration acts which excluded Chinese laborers, the canneries turned to importing workers from Japan, then from the Philippines. To meet this demand, shipping companies began carrying immigrants across the Pacific, and one of these was the Alaska Packers Association, which owned its own salmon canneries and warehouses as well.
The Packers Association changed Euterpe’s name to Star of India, and modified her to carry passengers by reducing the number of sails (thus requiring a smaller crew) and extending her deck to accommodate 45 more passenger cabins. Each July the Star would sail from San Francisco loaded with immigrant workers and fishermen, who would harvest the annual salmon run for three or four weeks, then spend the rest of the season packing and canning the catch. The Star would sail back to San Francisco with a cargo of salmon, which would be canned and loaded onto freight trains for distribution. By the time she was retired in 1923, the Star of India was one of the oldest sailing ships still in service, and was obsolete in an age of steam-powered vessels.
In 1926 the San Diego Zoological Society, the nonprofit association which ran the San Diego Zoo, purchased the Star and made plans to put her on exhibit at a maritime museum, but the Great Depression and the Second World War delayed that idea until 1957, when the process of restoration was finally begun. By 1976 the Star was once again fully seaworthy.
Today the Star of India is on exhibit at the San Diego Maritime Museum. Guided tours of the ship are available. The Star still sails regularly, manned by a specially-trained crew, and often participates in the annual Labor Day Tall Ships regatta.
Some photos from a visit.
Star of India
On deck
Ship’s wheel
Foredeck and bowsprit
9-pounder cannon
Mast, sails and crows nest
Windlass
Rigging blocks
One of the anchors
Ship’s galley
Bunk beds
Cargo hold
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