Albert Leo Schlageter (sailing ship)

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The Portuguese Navy school ship Sagres

The Sagres at OpSail 2000

Sagres has a great deal of polished brass and hoists lights in her rigging when in port.

The Albert Leo Schlageter, since 1961 the school ship Sagres (III) of the Portuguese Navy, is a three-masted tall ship launched on 30 October 1937 at Blohm & Voss in Hamburg for the German navy (Kriegsmarine) as a training vessel for cadets. It thus is a sistership of the Gorch Fock, the Horst Wessel, and the Romanian training vessel Mircea. Another sister, Herbert Norkus, was not completed, while Gorch Fock II was built in 1958 by the Germans to replace the ships lost after the war. The ship was named after Albert Leo Schlageter, who was executed in 1923 by French forces occupying the Ruhr area.

The ship is a steel-built three masted barque, with square sails on the fore and main masts and gaff rigging on the mizzen mast. Her main mast rises 42 m above the deck. She carries 22 sails totalling about 2,000 m² (21,000 ft²) and can reach a top speed of 17 knots (31 km/h) under sail. She has a sparred length of 89 m (295 ft), a width of 12 m (40 ft), a draught of 5.2 m (17 ft), and a displacement at full load of 1,755 tons.

Following a number of international training voyages, the ship was used as a stationary office ship after the outbreak of World War II and was only put into ocean-going service again in 1944 in the Baltic Sea. On 14 November 1944 she hit a Soviet mine off Sassnitz and had to be towed to port in Swinemünde. Eventually transferred to Flensburg, she was taken over there by the Allies when the war ended and finally confiscated by the United States.

In 1948, the US sold her to Brazil for a symbolic price of $5000 USD.^[1] She was towed to Rio de Janeiro, and for Brazil she sailed as a school ship for the Brazilian Navy under the name Guanabara. In 1961, the Portuguese Navy bought her to replace the old school ship Sagres (II) (which was transferred to Hamburg, where she is a museum ship under her original name Rickmer Rickmers). The Portuguese Navy renamed her Sagres (the third ship of that name), and she is still in service.