Retro – Professional Mariner

Permanente Silverbow

The Permanente Steamship Corp. was organized in 1940 by businessman Henry Kaiser to provide the millions of barrels of cement needed by his company to build scores of U.S. military facilities in the Pacific. After the war, the company acquired Silverbow Victory, a VC-2 Victory-type freighter built in 1944, and converted it into a self-unloading bulk carrier at the Kaiser…

African Lightning

The American South African Line, was founded in 1925 to operate cargo and passenger services from New York to West and South Africa. Ten years later, a service was inaugurated to East African ports and Mauritius and in 1948 the company was restyled as Farrell Lines. One of the fleet of ships operated by the company in the years following…

Santa Rosa/Santa Paula

Originally a British company, Grace & Co. originally specialized in operating ships in the traffic to the west coast of South America; then expanded into the Caribbean. Grace eventually put its fleet of passenger and cargo ships under the U.S.-flag. At its peak, the Grace Line was a major force in American merchant shipping. Following World War II, the company…

Seatrain Texas

In the late 1920s, New York naval architect Graham Brush came up with the idea of developing a ship specifically built to carry railroad freight cars. As a result, Brush founded Seatrain Lines Inc. in 1928 to carry railroad cars from New York to New Orleans and Cuba. He designed the first ship, the Seatrain New Orleans, which was…

Marine Rice Queen

For many decades, shipments of California rice grown and processed in the state’s Central Valley have found their way to markets around the globe. In years past, rice shipments were bagged and loaded aboard scow schooners and river steamers that transited the San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers to San Francisco for domestic consumption and shipment overseas. As time went on,…

Lurline

The combination container/ro-ro ship Lurline (seen above on its maiden arrival at Honolulu) was the fifth ship to bear the name for the Matson Navigation Company. Built in 1973 at the Sun Shipbuilding Co. yard in Chester, Pa., the ship was built at a cost of $31 million, jointly owned by a pair of banks, and chartered to Matson under…

Pacific Far East Lines’ Pacific Bear

After World War II, PFEL purchased a number of the low-cost surplus ships, all of which were given names ending with the word “Bear.” The line operated a regular scheduled service in the transpacific trades linking San Francisco and Los Angeles with ports in the Far East including Yokohama, Kobe, Osaka, Busan, Hong Kong, Kaohsiung, and Manila. During the Vietnam…

American Leader

A few years before the U.S. entry into World War II, the U.S. Maritime Commission selected a design for a new freighter that had the size, capacity, and speed readily adaptable to the most varied types of cargo “from refrigerated freight and banjos to gasoline and steel sheets,” according to one Commission document. Known as the C-2 class, the type…

The sternwheel tug Portland

Presently resting comfortably at the Willamette River seawall in downtown Portland, Or., the sternwheeler Portland’s quiet retirement as home of the Oregon Maritime Museum belies its past as one of the most unique historic vessels afloat. Ordered by the Port of Portland, Portland was built in 1947 at the Northwest Iron Works shipyard to replace her predecessor of the same name, built in…

Calmar Steamship Company’s Calmar

The Calmar Steamship Co. was a subsidiary of the Bethlehem Steel Co. which had operated since the 1920s on an intercoastal route linking the U.S Atlantic and Pacific Coasts via the Panama Canal. After the end of World War II, the Calmar company operated ten Liberty-type ships and, in the early 1960s, the decision was made to replace six of…