Volume Eight - Pre-Victorian to the present day - more aspects - Pamir and Passat - the end of an era . . .

In fact the Pamir's launch merited less than half a column in a Hamburg evening newspaper which was headed: 'Another Workhorse from Blohm and Voss.' It was hard to argue with that: the barque was a B&V standard design - 114.5 metres overall, 14 metre beam and 7.25 metre draft. Her 51.2 metre masts carried 3,800 square metres of sail. Her maximum crew was 35 and she had no engine until 1951.

Three months later, Pamir joined the rest of the Laiesz fleet on the South American nitrate run, the start of a deep-sea career which would last 52 years. Over the next nine years she made nearly 20 passages to and from the major Chilean nitrate ports of Valparaiso and Iquique, averaging between 65 and 70 days. Only the giant Preussen achieved higher average speeds.

Pamir spent the First World War holed up in the Canary Islands before being handed over to Italy as war reparation. An obsolete sailing ship was the last thing the Italians wanted and Pamir spent the next five years laid up in the Gulf of Naples before the Laiesz company, once more back in the nitrate trade, bought her back for £7,000.

But by now trading under sail was barely viable and Laiesz began getting rid of their oldest barques and replacing them with faster steamships which could also be used in the profitable fruit trade, particularly bananas.

Expecting to get little more than scrap prices, Laiesz were delighted to meet a middle-aged Finnish sea captain who was snapping up square riggers in the obstinate belief that even in the depth of world recession there was still a commercial future for merchant sail.

Captain Gustav Erikson, of Mariehamn in Finland's Aland Islands, had soon achieved a strangely perverse ambition to become the last of the great sailing-ship owners.

He eventually amassed a fleet of 17 three and four-masted barques, many from the Laiesz fleet, legendary names like Passat, Pommern and Parma - ships that Erikson knew well had been well maintained regardless of cost.

Finally, in the summer of 1931, he sent his senior captain, Reuben de Cloux, to buy Pamir. 'Don't spend more than £2,000,' Erikson told him, and he was delighted when Cloux brought £100 back.