Leopoldus Primus

*Leopoldus Primus*
History
Hamburg
Namesake:	Leopold I
Ordered:	1663
Launched:	1668
Decommissioned:	1705
Fate:	scrapped 1705
General characteristics
Length:	40 metres (130 ft)
Armament:	54 cannon:; 26 × 18 pdr (8.2 kg); 18 × 8 pdr (3.6 kg); 4 × 6 pdr (2.7 kg); 6 × 4 pdr (1.8 kg);

Last updated April 17, 2019

The Leopoldus Primus, also called Leopold I, was the first convoy ship commissioned to protect the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg. She was designed for use against piracy on the trade routes to Spain, Portugal, and West Africa and to accompany whalers to Greenland. Named in honor of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, she was put into service in 1668 and scrapped in 1705 after 34 major missions. She was probably identical with the Wapen von Hamburg, which went into service shortly after her.

Hamburg is the second-largest city in Germany with a population of over 1.8 million.

Whaling is the hunting of whales for their usable products such as meat and blubber, which can be turned into a type of oil which became increasingly important in the Industrial Revolution. It was practiced as an organized industry as early as 875 AD. By the 16th century, it had risen to be the principle industry in the coastal regions of Spain and France. The industry spread throughout the world, and became increasingly profitable in terms of trade and resources. Some regions of the world's oceans, along the animals' migration routes, had a particularly dense whale population, and became the targets for large concentrations of whaling ships, and the industry continued to grow well into the 20th century. The depletion of some whale species to near extinction led to the banning of whaling in many countries by 1969, and to a worldwide cessation of whaling as an industry in the late 1980s. The earliest forms of whaling date to at least circa 3000 BC. Coastal communities around the world have long histories of subsistence use of cetaceans, by dolphin drive hunting and by harvesting drift whales. Industrial whaling emerged with organized fleets of whaleships in the 17th century; competitive national whaling industries in the 18th and 19th centuries; and the introduction of factory ships along with the concept of whale harvesting in the first half of the 20th century. By the late 1930s more than 50,000 whales were killed annually. In 1986, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) banned commercial whaling because of the extreme depletion of most of the whale stocks.

Greenland is an autonomous constituent country of the Kingdom of Denmark between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Though physiographically a part of the continent of North America, Greenland has been politically and culturally associated with Europe for more than a millennium. The majority of its residents are Inuit, whose ancestors began migrating from the Canadian mainland in the 13th century, gradually settling across the island.

Background

In the 17th century, Hamburg was an important coastal town, well fortified but an attractive target to pirates. Particularly troubled by the corsairs of the Barbary Coast, and following the loss in June 1622 of eight fully laden cargo ships, the city determined that it needed to create a fleet of armed convoy ships to protect its interests, escorting merchant and other vessels.

The term Barbary Coast was used by Europeans from the 16th century to the early 19th to refer to the coastal regions of North Africa inhabited by Berber people. Today this land is part of the modern nations of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya.

The plans for the construction of Leopoldus Primus and the probably largely identical Wapen von Hamburg started in 1663. The first mention of these plans can be found in the Minutes of the Admiralty of 4 June 1663.^[1] While previously they had relied for protection on converted merchant ships, Hamburg now looked to full-fledged warships. On 23 September, the council proposed to build two frigates, and the citizenry voted to enact the plan.

A warship or combatant ship is a naval ship that is built and primarily intended for naval warfare. Usually they belong to the armed forces of a state. As well as being armed, warships are designed to withstand damage and are usually faster and more manoeuvrable than merchant ships. Unlike a merchant ship, which carries cargo, a warship typically carries only weapons, ammunition and supplies for its crew. Warships usually belong to a navy, though they have also been operated by individuals, cooperatives and corporations.

A frigate is a type of warship, having various sizes and roles over the last few centuries.

Not much is known about the construction of the Leopoldus Primus. Construction was delayed for unknown reasons, and for several years there were debates about who should take charge of funding the ships, but construction finally began, led by an unknown Dutch ship-master, in 1667. Builders of the period were secretive, so plans were not recorded or shared. The Hamburg sculptor Christian Precht, also known for his work in churches, was hired to create a representation of Leopold I for the stern. This figure is now on display at the Museum of Hamburg History.

The naming of such an important vessel after a strict Catholic Emperor in distant Vienna for a city like Hamburg, Lutheran and uninterested in imperial affairs, was quite unusual. A handwritten contemporary poem suggests that the ship was named for the association of Leopold with military success, perhaps against the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Saint Gotthard.

The Ottoman Empire, historically known in Western Europe as the Turkish Empire or simply Turkey, was a state that controlled much of Southeast Europe, Western Asia and North Africa between the 14th and early 20th centuries. It was founded at the end of the 13th century in northwestern Anatolia in the town of Söğüt by the Oghuz Turkish tribal leader Osman I. After 1354, the Ottomans crossed into Europe, and with the conquest of the Balkans, the Ottoman beylik was transformed into a transcontinental empire. The Ottomans ended the Byzantine Empire with the 1453 conquest of Constantinople by Mehmed the Conqueror.

The Battle of Saint Gotthard was fought on August 1, 1664 as part of the Austro-Turkish War (1663–1664), between the Imperial Army led by Generalleutnant Raimondo Montecuccoli, Jean de Coligny-Saligny, Wolfgang Julius, Count of Hohenlohe-Neuenstein, together with the Army of the Holy Roman Empire led by Reichsgeneralfeldmarschall Prince Leopold of Baden and Reichsgeneralfeldmarschalleutnant Georg Friedrich of Waldeck and the army of the Ottoman Empire under the command of Köprülü Fazıl Ahmed Paşa.

The ship was operational in 1668, at some point between April and September. Her first captain was Leopoldus M. Dreyer.

Construction, equipment and crew

There are few records describing the size and appearance of Leopoldus Primus or her sister ship, Wapen von Hamburg. Dimensions are unknown. What is known is that the ship was built on the model of leading Dutch design. Wolfgang Quinger, in Wappen von Hamburg I (1980), suggests that the pair may have been more or less replicas of the Dutch ship Aemilia . If this is so, Leopoldus Primus would have had a length of about 40 metres (130 feet) and a width of almost 11 metres (36 feet). To get over the shoals in the river Elbe, the hull was probably built after the "Rotterdam form". The ship was elaborately decorated with Baroque carvings and sculptures.

The Leopoldus had 54 guns. The heaviest caliber were on the lower gun deck with the lighter on the upper aft decks. When the ship was docked for a length time in Hamburg, the guns could be unloaded and moved to the ramparts of the city to protect it, as was done during a Danish attack on Hamburg in 1686.

Leopoldus Primus had a crew, depending on length and purpose of travel, from around 150 to 250 men, of which about 15 to 20 were officers, including the captain and his lieutenant as well as ministers and the commander of the soldiers. The crew was not stable, but employed for the duration of the trip. Voluntary recruits rather than being pressed into service, they were expected to equip themselves, and more died from diseases caused by unclean conditions on the ship than from battle, at as high a rate as four to one. The 40 to 60 soldiers aboard were better trained and disciplined, taken from the ranks of the city's soldiery or reassigned from other convoy ships.

Operations and decommissioning

The success of Leopoldus Primus is supported by many reports. Captain Berend Jacobsen Karpfanger took her through a number of successful battles against pirates. One highlight is Karpfanger's defense against five French ships in the Elbe estuary on 11 September 1678. Fifty whaling ships were returning to Hamburg from Greenland when the frigates attacked. After a 12-hour battle, two of the French frigates were sunk and the rest put to flight. None of the Hamburg ships were lost, although Leopoldus Primus sustained slight damages. Only two of the crew of Leopoldus were killed, with one man injured. In other activities, the ship was used in 1686 to protect Hamburg from Denmark.

In 1702, Leopoldus Primus was the oldest of the three then existing Hamburg convoy ships when it was badly damaged in a storm. Her captain, Captain Schroeder, had to take port in Falmouth, and it was determined that she was not worth the expense of repair. Schroeder reported this to Hamburg, who rejected a proposal to sell the ship and instead brought her home. There, they determined that if repaired she might continue to sail for another decade. They repaired her at a cost of 3500 marks (1166 pounds) and she was back on the seas, voyaging to Greenland, in 1703.

Before her next trip, concerns that she was not seaworthy were raised, and although some felt she could still manage the voyage to England a few more times, others felt the cost of further repairs was a poor risk. Thirty-six years after embarking on her career as the first convoy ship, Leopoldus Primus was taken out of commission. In 1705, she seems to have been scrapped, probably in Hamburg.

Overall, Leopoldus Primus undertook 22 trips to the Iberian Peninsula, three trips to England and nine trips to protect whalers to Greenland. Among the convoy ships of Hamburg, she had more missions than any other with the Admiralität von Hamburg , which had 32, as her closest rival.

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References

↑ Baasch, S. 134

Sources

Ernst Baasch: Hamburgs Convoyschiffahrt und Convoywesen: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Schifffahrt und Schifffahrtseinrichtungen im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, Hamburg 1896 – Trotz ihres Alters die bis heute einzige Darstellung der Hamburger Konvoischifffahrt, die auf intensiver Quellenarbeit beruht.
Peter Hessel: Hertzfliessende Betrachtungen / Von dem Elbe Strom, Altona 1675, ohne ISBN.
Wolfgang Quinger: Wappen von Hamburg I, Rostock 1980.
Carsten Prange: Hamburg und die Barbaresken – Herausforderungen der Hamburger Kauffahrer durch die Korsaren in Gottes Freund – Aller Welt Feind. Von Seeraub und Konvoifahrt, herausgegeben vom Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte, Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-9805772-5-2.

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[1] Baasch, S. 134