Qualla: Atlantis (Barquentine)

Atlantis (Barquentine): Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JorgenQ, CC BY 4.0. For most of her life, this ship was anchored. Built in 1905 as the lightship Buergermeister Bartels, she spent decades fixed in place off the mouth of the Elbe, her rotating beacon at sixteen meters carving slow circles through North Sea fog while every other vessel in sight had somewhere to go. She was a landmark, not a traveler. Today, she travels for a living - the three-masted barquentine Atlantis, chartered out to passengers who pay to feel the deck heel beneath them off the Cote d'Azur. The same hull. A completely different life.

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Image: JorgenQ | CC BY 4.0

Atlantis (Barquentine): Anchored by Design

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JorgenQ, CC BY 4.0. The shipyard J.H.N. Wichhorst launched her in Hamburg in 1905 with a strange brief: build a ship that does not go anywhere. Lightships were the lighthouses of places no lighthouse could stand - mid-channel sandbanks, river mouths, the soft drowned edges of coast where rock could ...

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Image: JorgenQ | CC BY 4.0

Atlantis (Barquentine): Wartime Drift

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JorgenQ, CC BY 4.0. When the Second World War came, even the stationary ships were pressed into motion. The German navy pulled the Buergermeister Bartels off Elbe 2 in 1939 and sent her to the Baltic as a barrier guard ship and outpost security vessel. She survived - many of her contemporaries did n...

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Image: JorgenQ | CC BY 4.0

Atlantis (Barquentine): Second Life Under Canvas

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JorgenQ, CC BY 4.0. In 1979 a Hamburg firm bought her for firefighter training - the kind of practical end that most superannuated vessels meet. But around 1984, someone with a different imagination took her on. The squat lightship hull was stripped down, raised, rerigged. Three masts went up. Squar...

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Image: JorgenQ | CC BY 4.0

Atlantis (Barquentine): Memory in the Lines

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wolfgang Fricke, CC BY 3.0. Look at her now in Kiel or Malmoe and you can still read the lightship beneath the schooner. The hull shape is wrong for a sailing vessel - too short, too beamy, too full at the bow. She was built for stability in storm, not speed in trade. Her masts work, but they sit on a platf...

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Image: Wolfgang Fricke | CC BY 3.0