Sail Training Ship Danmark
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Theme Sail Training Ship Danmark
Period World War II
Artist George Eisenberg, Marblehead, Massachusetts
Size (framed) 4’-2” wide x 3’-2” high
Champion Bill Avery, Class of 1962
Sponsor Class of 1962
Story The training ship Danmark was constructed at Nakskov Shipyard in 1933, for the purpose of training officers for the Danish Merchant Navy. It is built of steel and has three full-rigged masts that can carry a total of 26 sails. If the wind should fail, the ship also has a main engine that enables it to do 9 knots.
Praising her graceful lines, Harold Underhill wrote: “She has a perfectly normal profile with poop, forecastle and deckhouse, and, if one substituted hatches for the cadets’ companion, she would be an ordinary trader which is as it should be.”
Her uneventful career prior to World War II culminated in a voyage to the New York World's Fair in 1939. She was slated to return to Europe in the fall, but her sailing was put off following the start of the war in September and she sailed for the Caribbean. When Germany invaded Denmark in April 1940, she returned to Jacksonville, Florida, where she remained until the United States entered the war, when Captain Knud Hansen offered her to the U.S. government. The Coast Guard welcomed the offer of a training ship and Danmark was homeported at the Coast Guard Academy, serving as a training ship in the relatively protected waters of Long Island Sound for the duration of hostilities.
This experience so convinced the Coast Guard of the value of sail training that, following Danmark's return to Europe after the war, it lobbied for the government to acquire the German training ship Horst Wessel—renamed Eagle—as war reparations. Danmark resumed her regular sail-training program, and she remained in that work more than half a century later.