Blog

When I Began to Understand a Ship: Finally Entering the World of PEKING

The Ship Had Not Changed

On 30 August 2026, I returned to PEKING in Hamburg. I had already written about her twice, but this was the first time I actually stepped aboard.

The ship had not changed because I had begun studying navigation. The masts were still there. The ropes still crossed the sky. The wooden deck still stretched beneath them. What had changed was my way of looking.

By then, a few unfamiliar words had entered my vocabulary: Schott, Ballast, Ruder and Takelage. I still did not truly understand them. There were pieces of equipment aboard PEKING that I could not even name. But I had begun to notice relationships.

A rope was no longer simply a rope. A wall inside the hull was no longer simply a wall. A steering wheel was not the same thing as a rudder. A cargo hold was not simply an empty space waiting to be filled. For the first time, I began to see a ship as a body whose parts had to work together.

A Ship Has a Body

From the shore, PEKING is easy to see as a whole. Her long black hull, four tall masts and dense rigging form the familiar silhouette of a historic sailing ship. Once aboard, that single image breaks apart.

There is a bow and a stern. There are raised deck areas and spaces below. There are masts, yards, rigging, bulkheads, decks and cargo holds. Walking through them, I slowly began to understand that a ship is not simply a large shell containing people and cargo. Its spaces have different tasks.

Above me stood the masts and rigging. Below were steel structures, compartments and the cargo hold. One system helped the ship receive forces from outside. Another helped the ship withstand them.

Then I encountered ballast. On land, we often associate lightness with freedom and weight with burden. A ship complicates that intuition. Cargo changes weight. Where that weight is placed matters. A vessel must remain in a condition in which it can continue to float and remain stable.

Some weight, I realised, does not exist to hold you back. It exists to keep you from overturning.

How Do You Catch Something You Cannot See?

Looking upward from PEKING’s deck, I saw what had once seemed to me like an impossible quantity of ropes. Now I had a word for the larger system: Takelage, the rigging and sail arrangement.

I still could not identify every line, but I finally knew that they were not hanging there at random. The masts, yards, sails and ropes formed a system through which the crew could respond to wind.

Wind itself cannot be held. Humans do not create it. They cannot order it to arrive, and they cannot command it to remain. What they can do is build structures that receive its force, adjust sails and rigging, and continually change the relationship between ship and wind.

That changed the way I thought about sailing. Perhaps sailing has never really been about making nature obey. It is about learning how to act within forces that remain larger than us.

The Wheel Is Not a “Go to Chile” Button

Near the stern, I came to PEKING’s large wooden steering wheels. My earlier understanding would have been simple: turn the wheel and the ship turns. After studying a little navigation, the picture had become more complicated.

The Steuerrad is the steering wheel. The Ruder is the rudder. The Kompass helps with direction. The Kurs describes the course the vessel is following. But none of them makes the sea stop changing.

Wind changes. Current changes. Weather and visibility change. The ship’s position changes. A vessel travelling from Hamburg toward Chile did not simply follow a straight line drawn across a map.

Navigation required observation, judgement and correction, then observation again. This became one of the most important things I had learned from navigation: the skill of sailing is not the elimination of deviation. It is the ability to notice deviation.

You determine where you are. You judge again. You correct. And then you continue.

Perhaps this is what direction really means. It does not guarantee that we will never move away from our intended course. It allows us to know what to do when we do.

Why Does a Ship Leave at All?

Eventually, I went down into the cargo hold. That changed the question again. Until then, I had been asking how a ship was built and how it moved. The empty hold asked something else: Why did this ship have to sail?

For PEKING, one answer was saltpeter. The exhibition traces it back to the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. Caliche was extracted and processed, and the resulting saltpeter was packed into sacks.

Those sacks then began a journey of their own. From the mining region they travelled by railway toward the Chilean coast. From the port they were transferred to sailing ships and entered cargo holds like PEKING’s. After the ocean voyage and the passage around Cape Horn, the cargo reached Europe, where it continued through ports and warehouses into industrial networks.

I had thought a ship connected two ports. The cargo hold showed me something larger. A ship connected mines, railways, ports, workers, capital, cargo and industries on opposite sides of the world.

The exhibition also prevents this story from becoming only a romantic tale of Cape Horn and magnificent sailing ships. The saltpeter economy also contained harsh labour conditions and social conflict. The exhibition points to the violence at Iquique in 1907.

Standing aboard the beautifully restored PEKING today, it is easy to look upward at the four masts, at the rigging, and at the image of a great sailing ship crossing a dangerous ocean. The cargo hold made me look downward.

Behind every route were other lives. Behind every cargo were other forms of labour. Behind every celebrated voyage was a much larger system.

A Cargo Ship Also Carries a Society

PEKING did not carry cargo alone. People lived inside her. There were spaces for the captain and officers, an officers’ mess, a pantry and quarters for the crew. The arrangement of those spaces revealed another structure.

A ship was a workplace. It was a home. It was also a social order. People navigated, handled sails and rigging, prepared food, maintained the vessel, worked shifts and slept between them.

Then another part of the exhibition brought me back to wind. Meteorological observations made aboard PEKING recorded conditions such as wind, air pressure, temperature and weather. The people aboard did not merely use nature to travel. They observed it. They recorded it. Through repeated observation, experience could become knowledge.

When Wind Returns

More than a century after PEKING was built, wind has returned to the conversation about cargo shipping. At the exhibition, I encountered projects such as RASANT and technologies such as the Flettner rotor.

They do not simply put PEKING’s old sails onto a modern cargo vessel. The technological system has changed. Automation, simulation and new propulsion concepts now approach an old question in new ways: How can we use wind?

PEKING once crossed oceans with wind as her essential source of propulsion. Today, shipping is again examining wind in the context of energy use, emissions and the future of maritime transport.

Technology moves forward. Sometimes, moving forward also means returning to an old force and asking a better question.

PEKING no longer carries saltpeter from Chile to Hamburg. Yet perhaps she has not entirely stopped carrying things. Today, she carries memory. She carries knowledge. She carries the remains of a working world that has disappeared. And she carries our attention from the past toward possible maritime futures.

I Still Do Not Understand Ships

When I first began writing about historic ships, I remembered their names. Then I remembered shipyards, construction dates, routes and the events that shaped their lives. Eventually, I began calling them my “ship children.”

Later, I started studying navigation and a little ship structure. The more I learned, the less willing I became to say that I understood ships. Too much remained unknown.

Before, a rope was a rope. A wall was a wall. A steering wheel was a steering wheel. A cargo hold was a cargo hold.

Now there was force behind the ropes. There was structure behind the bulkheads. There was stability behind ballast. There was direction behind the steering wheel. And behind the cargo hold was a world.

Not understanding something and seeing nothing are not the same thing.

I left PEKING without believing that I had learned how to understand a ship. But I could no longer look at one in the same way.

The ship had not changed. My eyes had. I was finally beginning to learn how to look at her.

Across Civilizations

King Kaolie looked up at PEKING’s four masts. “If the wind cannot be commanded, why build so many sails?”
Lord Chunshen Huang Xie replied: “Precisely because it cannot be commanded. Humans must learn how to respond.”
The king looked at the steering wheel. “And navigation? Why learn it if a ship can still go off course?”
I said: “Because navigation is not about never going off course. It is about noticing, correcting, and continuing.”

The king was quiet for a moment. “So humans never conquered the sea?”
Huang Xie shook his head. “No. They learned how to keep moving through a world much larger than themselves.”

The king looked at me. “So, can you sail PEKING now?”
“No.”
“Then what have you understood?”
I looked up at the rigging. “I still cannot name every rope. But now I know that each one is there for a reason.”

The wind continued through PEKING’s four masts.
The ship had not changed. I was only beginning to learn how to see her.