HAMBURG: Maritime Museum

Leave it to a sea-faring city to do a Maritime Museum right! Lisbon, a fabled sea power, boasts a magical museum with life-size ships from centuries past. Hamburg’s museum bills itself as the world’s largest private maritime collection, and it is big. This post necessarily may be the most impressionistic from Hamburg.

The Maritime Museum covers 3,000 years of sailing and shipping over seven floors of an old warehouse.

The museum covers the (relatively) modern: 21,000 hp Doxford J-Type “engine of improved design,” 1967.

And the old: Jigger, or gaff sail. Hope that’s right; my sailor brother may be reading.

The museum models everything — even the modelers! A couple of the famous yellow true-to-scale hulls from HSVA (Hamburg Ship Model Basin), service provider and consultant to shipyards and shipping lines worldwide.