The Hamburg shipping house F. Laeisz named every vessel it owned with a P, and its ships were fast enough that the fleet became known as the Flying P-Liners. Passat - German for the trade wind - came off the ways at Blohm & Voss on 20 September 1911, yard number 206, at a cost of 680,000 gold marks. She measured 115 metres overall and 97 on deck, 14.4 metres in the beam, with her mainmast standing 54 metres from the waterline to the truck and some 4,600 square metres of canvas to set, later cut back to 4,000. All of that was handled by a crew of between twenty-six and thirty-five. She sailed on her maiden voyage on Christmas Eve 1911, bound for Valparaíso, and reached it on 14 March 1912.

Her working life was the Chilean nitrate run: general cargo south, saltpetre north, and Cape Horn twice each voyage. The First World War caught her in Chile and she sat interned at Iquique for the duration, sailing in 1921 to Marseille to be handed over to France as reparations. The French put her up for sale, and Laeisz bought their own ship back for £13,000. All told, Passat went round the Horn thirty-nine times, which earned her people the old title of Kap Hoornier - Cape Hornier - and stands as the tally by which she is still measured.

In 1932 Laeisz sold her to Gustaf Erikson of Mariehamn, the Åland Islands owner who kept commercial square-riggers working when almost nobody else would. Erikson put her into the Australian grain trade, loading wheat at Spencer Gulf in South Australia for Europe - the annual run that windjammer crews turned into an informal race home. The Second World War found her at Mariehamn; in 1944 she was towed to Stockholm to serve as a storage hulk. Erikson's line returned to grain in 1948, and in 1949 Passat and Pamir sailed from Port Victoria round the Horn to Europe in what turned out to be the last Great Grain Race under sail. Among Passat's crew that voyage was Niels Jannasch, who would later direct Canada's Maritime Museum of the Atlantic.

What finished commercial sail was not weather but arithmetic. Gustaf Erikson died in 1947, and his son Edgar found he could no longer run either ship at a profit - chiefly because changing regulations and union agreements had replaced the traditional two-watch system with the three-watch system used aboard motor ships, which meant carrying substantially more crew for the same cargo. In March 1951 Belgian shipbreakers paid £40,000 for Passat and Pamir together. The owner then ran into financial trouble, and a newly assembled consortium of forty German shipowners bought both vessels out of the breakers' hands. For five years they traded between Europe and the east coast of South America, mostly Argentina, no longer rounding the Horn. Then came September 1957, and Pamir, and the barley.

Lübeck bought her in December 1959 for 315,000 Deutsche Marks. On 1 August 1960 she was made fast at the Priwall shore in Travemünde, near the mouth of the Trave and directly across the water from the ferry berths, and she has not moved since. Heritage protection came in 1978. In 1997-98 the Flender yard spent 7.2 million marks putting her back in condition, rewelding around 5,000 of her 24,000 rivets and patching roughly a thousand holes in the hull plating. She now works as a museum ship, an event venue and a youth hostel with 106 berths in 35 cabins, used mostly by school groups in summer; couples get married aboard, sometimes by a captain. Her true sister ship is the Peking. Pamir is often called one, but the two were only stablemates under that 1950s consortium - and of Laeisz's last eight four-masted barques, the ones commonly grouped as the Eight Sisters, Pangani, Petschili, Pamir and Padua had no true sister at all. Padua is still sailing, under the Russian flag, as the training ship Kruzenshtern.