Post #360961 by bigbrotiki on Wed, Feb 13, 2008 1:20 PM

Since Nautical/Shipwreck/Beachcomber style is part and parcel of the language of Tiki style, as evidenced in this picture from Trader Vic's warehouse...

...I decided to share a little bit of Kirsten family history with the TC Ohana:

Now while I was hanging out at the Cape of Good Hope not too long ago...

...my sister Jessica went to its equivalent on the other side of the globe, Cape Horn. Though she still lives in my home town of Hamburg, Germany, she has been working for a Norwegian Arctic Cruise line in Buenos Aires on and off. She is also, inspired by my dad, an avid family history buff. This led her to find out about the fate of this ship, which once belonged to the now defunct Kirsten Shipping Line:

This shipwreck is sitting near Ushuiaia, in the Tierra Del Fuego on the Southern-most tip of Argentina:

My sister loves to travel, so she joined a team of documentary video makers, and the photographic results of her expedition were so spectacular that they inspired me to post about them here. Here is a link on an Argentinian website with shots clearly done by a professional photographer:

http://www.tierradelfuego.org.ar/v4/_esp/index.php?especial=desdemona2008

(scroll all the way to the bottom and click on each image for enlarging it)

This ship was called Desdemona, after a female character from Shakespeare's "Othello", in keeping with the family tradition of christening all the Kirsten ships with female Shakespeare character names. Just like many of Shakespeare's characters', the fortunes of the Kirsten Line faltered, when in the 1960s the container business was swallowing up all the small shipping lines. I myself barely remember setting foot on a family ship once, I must have been like 4, here I am with my older brother Oliver:

By the time my dad inherited my grandfather's shares of the business in the 1960s, they were worthless pieces of paper. The ships were sold of to developing countries, and this is what happened to one of them:

http://www.akirsten-reederei.de/desdemona/fotos/dd-anbord/index.htm

The above pics are from my sister's website

Now a post from me always should have some THEN and NOW photos, and some memorabilia:
Here is a photo of the launching of the Desdemona in 1950 in Hamburg:

...THEN, and NOW:

Apparently, the ship's new owner was steering its captain to run it aground so he could collect the insurance, tiz tiz..
Here is the full story:

The poor ship had no idea of this fate when it was happily flying its flags in 1950:

I myself have only a handful of items displaying the characteristic red and white striped Kirsten flag, like this 1950s office calender:

a midcentury modern ashtray:

and a tiny desk ship model:

I blame a lot on my family history, like my nostalgic feelings for small family businesses that are made obsolete by the tides of time, my fondness for sailor's bars, and the fact that I ended up living in America:

Here are my mom and dad on the way to the New World in the summer of 1952:

What, you don't see them? They are standing on the bridge, let's zoom in:

My mom is on the left in overalls and white sailor's cap, my dad is on the right with the captain's cap

My dad working overseas for the shipping line in the 50s is the reason why my brother was born in Montreal, Canada...here is a photo of him in my dad's old Packard in Chicago in 1953:

...and the reason why my biography states that I was conceived on a family freighter on the way back from Chicago to Hamburg. :D

[ Edited by: bigbrotiki 2008-02-13 16:29 ]