| Summary |
The purpose of this thesis is the examination of the history of the four-masted German barque Peking in the context of maritime, German, and world history during the time of her active career-1911 to 1932-and to consider the efforts made to present her as a museum ship since 1975, in order to assess her historical significance and her interpretation. My intention is to present a more contextualized historical account than is frequently found in ship biographies, and this intention accords with the research approach recommended by the National Park Service in its guidelines for the nomination of historic vessels to the National Register of Historic Places. I visited the ship twice, had a lengthy tour from the historian who has been charged with researching the ship for over twenty years, and interviewed the president of South Street Seaport Museum-the ship's owner. I have mined the secondary literature in German and English, and used documentary sources from the files of the South Street Seaport Museum Library. The Irving Johnson film Around Cape Horn, made in 1929, is such a valuable source that it deserved not only special mention, but purchase and multiple viewing by this author The National Park Service published valuable references for the chapter on Peking as a museum ship. My research supports the hypothesis that the Peking represents the zenith of the ocean-going square-rigged cargo vessel. It seems clear that interpreting her as such, which her current owners do, is entirely appropriate. She is a valuable historical resource, both as a surviving example of the last of commercial square-rigged sailing ships and, more generally, as a key to understanding the character of maritime commerce in the early twentieth century. |
