A tall ship is a large, traditionally-rigged sailing vessel. Popular modern tall ship rigs include topsail schooners, brigantines, brigs and barques. "Tall ship" can also be defined more specifically by an organization, such as for a race or festival.
A barquentine or schooner barque is a sailing vessel with three or more masts; with a square rigged foremast and fore-and-aft rigged main, mizzen and any other masts.
A ship is scuttled when its crew deliberately sinks it, typically by deliberately opening holes in its hull.
HMS Royal George was a ship of the line of the Royal Navy. A first-rate with 100 guns on three decks, she was the largest warship in the world at the time of her launch on 18 February 1756. Construction at Woolwich Dockyard had taken ten years.
Asgard is a 51-foot (16 m) gaff-rigged yacht. She was owned by the English-born writer and Irish nationalist Erskine Childers and his wife Molly Childers. She is most noted for her use in the Howth gun-running of 1914.
Jeanie Johnston is a replica of a three masted barque that was originally built in Quebec, Canada, in 1847 by the Scottish-born shipbuilder John Munn. The replica Jeanie Johnston performs a number of functions: an ocean-going sail training vessel at sea and in port converts into a living history museum on 19th century emigration and, in the evenings, is used as a corporate event venue.
USS Windlass, a Gypsy-class salvage lifting vessel of the United States Navy, was originally conceived as LSM-552 and laid down on 27 August 1945 at Houston, Texas, by Brown Shipbuilding Corporation. Launched on 7 December 1945; and commissioned on 9 April 1946 in Houston at the Tennessee Coal and Iron Docks.
HMS Reclaim was a deep diving and submarine rescue vessel of the British Royal Navy. She was originally intended to be the King Salvor-class ocean salvage vesselSalverdant and was fitted with specialised equipment including underwater television cameras and sonar and echosounding apparatus. She was also equipped for submarine rescue work.
SS Laurentic was a British transatlantic ocean liner that was built in Belfast, Ireland, and launched in 1908. She is an early example of a ship whose propulsion combined reciprocating steam engines with a low-pressure steam turbine. Laurentic was one of a pair of sister ships that were ordered in 1907 by the Dominion Line but completed for the White Star Line. Her regular route was between Liverpool and Quebec City.
The third USS Falcon, (AM-28/ASR-2) was a Lapwing-class minesweeper in the United States Navy. She later became a submarine rescue ship.
HMS Fittleton, originally named HMS Curzon, was a wooden-hulled Ton-class minesweeper of the Royal Navy which spent most of her career in the Royal Naval Reserve. She was sunk in a collision with HMS Mermaid on 20 September 1976 whilst en route to Hamburg for an official visit. Twelve naval service personnel lost their lives, making this the worst peacetime accident involving the Royal Naval Reserve.
USS League Island (AG-149/AKS-30) – also known as USS LST-1097 - was an LST-511-class tank landing ship launched by the U.S. Navy during the final months of World War II. League Island served as a supply and stores-issue ship for the U.S. 7th Fleet, and was decommissioned after the war.
Defence was an American Revolutionary War privateer that was part of the 1779 Penobscot Expedition, during the American Revolutionary War. A brigantine, she was built that year in Beverly, Massachusetts, and was scuttled near Stockton Springs, Maine in the later stages of the expedition. The wreck site was excavated in the 1970s, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.
Cymric was a British and Irish schooner, built in 1893. She joined the South American trade in the fleet of Arklow, Ireland, in 1906. She served as a British Q-ship during the First World War; she failed to sink any German U-boats, but did sink a British submarine in error.
The Mary B Mitchell was a British and later an Irish schooner, affectionately known as Mary B.. She was a pleasure craft, a war hero, a working schooner, a film star and a transporter of essential cargoes in dangerous waters.
SS Egypt was a P&O ocean liner. She sank after a collision with Seine on 20 May 1922 in the Celtic Sea. 252 people were rescued from the 338 passengers and crew aboard at the time. A subsequent salvage operation recovered most of the cargo of gold and silver.
SS Oceana was a P&O passenger liner and cargo vessel, launched in 1887 by Harland and Wolff of Belfast and completed in 1888. Originally assigned to carry passengers and mail between London and Australia, she was later assigned to routes between London and British India. On 16 March 1912 the ship collided in the Strait of Dover with the Pisagua, a 2,850 GRT German-registered four-masted steel-hulled barque. As a result Oceana sank off Beachy Head on the East Sussex coast, with the loss of 17 lives.
Kommuna is a submarine salvage ship in service with the Russian Navy's Black Sea Fleet and the world's oldest active duty naval vessel. A double-hulled catamaran, she was laid down at the Putilov Factory in St. Petersburg in November 1912 as Volkhov. The ship was launched the following year, and commissioned on 14 July 1915. She was renamed Kommuna on 31 December 1922. Kommuna has served in the Russian Imperial, Soviet, and Russian Federation navies through the Russian Revolution and two World Wars.
STV Astrid was a 41.90-metre long tall ship that was built in 1918 in the Netherlands as a lugger and originally named W.U.T.A., short for Wacht Uw Tijd Af meaning "Bide Your Time". She was later transferred to Swedish ownership, renamed Astrid and sailed on the Baltic Sea until 1975. She then sailed under a Lebanese flag and was allegedly used for drug smuggling. After being found burnt out on the coast of England in the early 1980s, she was overhauled and used as a sailing training vessel. She was based in Weymouth, Dorset, United Kingdom and was informally known as "Weymouth's vessel".
The Arklow Maritime Museum opened in 1976 in the old technical school on Saint Marys Road in Arklow, County Wicklow. Its original purpose was to celebrate the town's rich seafaring heritage, described by the late maritime historian John de Courcy Ireland in a letter to the museum as "Ireland's Most Maritime Town". In 2009, the museum moved to its current location at the Bridgewater Shopping Centre.
Ireland 
