Graptolite - Ships, Settlers and Swords
Graptolite's Sailing Log
Martyn Pickup & Heike Richter
Mon 22 Mar 2010 16:27
16th March. The skipper is in Dortmund.
More German history recently; maritime, emigration and universities.
We went up to Hamburg last weekend and stayed at the very nice 'Hotel Vier
Jahreszeiten' overlooking the Binnenalster lake in the centre of Hamburg
then on for some fish at the 'Rive' overlooking Hamburg harbour on the river
Elbe. Further down the river is the cute Willkomm-Hoeft, a pier where
unsuspecting ships sailing into Hamburg are shouted at by loudspeakers with
"Willkommen in Hamburg, wir freuen uns, Sie im Hamburger Hafen begruessen zu
koennen" and played the ship's national anthem. Flags then go racing up and
down a flagpole to force the harassed ship's Captain into some kind of
return salute. Naturally there is a ships-in-bottles museum as well.
Then on to Bremerhaven which is on another river flowing into the North Sea,
this time the Weser which also flows through Hamelyn many miles upstream.
The main museum there is the very entertaining 'Deutches Auswandererhaus'
which covers the more than seven million emigrations from the port to the
New World. There are reconstructions of the trans-Atlantic ship's berths
from the days of sail through to steamships. They give you a 'boarding pass'
which you use to electronically track the life of a particular emigrant
assigned to you based on your nationality. They can't have had any English
passing through Bremerhaven though as my man was a German Jew going to
Argentina in 1939. Lunch was Lobscouse in the old sailing ship the "Seute
Deern". The ships name means 'lovely girl' although the figurehead suggests
the name should really be 'grumpy housewife'.
We needed to be in Hamburg on the Monday then Dortmund on Tuesday so to make
it a more useful trip we stopped off in Heidelberg and stayed in 'Die
Hirschgasse', a historic place which used to be a sort of fraternity house
for Heidelberg University students while they were busy beer drinking and
carving each other up in fencing duels. Otto von Bismarck also found time to
carve his name in one of the tables. The view of the red sandstone ruins of
Heidelberg Castle across the river Necker has inspired paintings by our very
own J.M.W.Turner amongst others.
M