Stock Press Photo | S/V Linden

The autonomous Åland Islands have always had shipping as one of their principal industries. The Ålanders are very proud of their traditions, and have made great efforts to preserve more than just the memory of the epoch of sailing ships for future generations.
Mariehamn is the homeport of the four-masted barque Pommern, one of the ‘Flying P-liners’ of the German shipyard F. Laeisz, and the only big ocean-going sailor from the beginning of the last century still preserved in her original state. She represents the last heydays of the merchant sailingships, when Åland shipowners, headed by the legendary Gustaf Erikson, operated the great windjammers on their last voyages in the grain trade between England and Australia – the world famous Grain Races.
One smaller, very common type of sailingship formerly used in Åland for trading in the Baltic Sea was the ‘galeas’, which had only gaff-rigged masts. None of that type remains in their original state, but in 1988, an exact copy of a galeas from the turn of the century was built in Mariehamn, receiving the same name as her prototype, Albanus.

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