Royal Clipper is a steel-hull

Hull (watercraft)

A hull is the watertight body of a ship or boat. Above the hull is the superstructure and/or deckhouse, where present. The line where the hull meets the water surface is called the waterline.The structure of the hull varies depending on the vessel type...

ed five mast

Mast (sailing)

The mast of a sailing vessel is a tall, vertical, or near vertical, spar, or arrangement of spars, which supports the sails. Large ships have several masts, with the size and configuration depending on the style of ship...

ed fully rigged

Full rigged ship

A full rigged ship or fully rigged ship is a sailing vessel with three or more masts, all of them square rigged. A full rigged ship is said to have a ship rig....

 tall ship

Tall ship

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....

 used as a cruise ship

Cruise ship

A cruise ship or cruise liner is a passenger ship used for pleasure voyages, where the voyage itself and the ship's amenities are part of the experience, as well as the different destinations along the way...

. She was designed by Zygmunt Choreń

Zygmunt Choren

Zygmunt Choreń is a Polish naval architect and the proprietor of the naval architectural firm Choreń Design and Consulting. He is a graduate of the Gdańsk University of Technology and the Leningrad Ship-Building Institute....

, and built using an existing steel hull that was modified by the Gdańsk Shipyard

Gdansk Shipyard

Gdańsk Shipyard is a large Polish shipyard, located in the city of Gdańsk. The yard gained international fame when Solidarity was founded there in September 1980...

, and the Merwede

Merwede

The Merwede is the name of several interconnected stretches of river in The Netherlands, all part of the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt delta. The Meuse river joins the Waal at Woudrichem to form the Boven Merwede...

 shipyard completed the ship's interior in July 2000. The renovations included frescography

Frescography

Frescography is a method for producing murals digitally on paper, canvas, glass or tiles, invented 1998 by German muralist Rainer Maria Latzke...

 murals by Rainer Maria Latzke

Rainer Maria Latzke

Rainer Maria Latzke is a German artist working in the field of trompe l'oeil and mural painting. He teaches at the Utah State University and is Founder of the Institute of Frescography in Logan, Utah. He also is Honorary Professor of the Shanghai Institute of Visual Art of Fudan University and...

 completing the ships' Mediterranean interior. Her design was based on Preussen, a famous German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 five-mast Flying P-Liner

Flying P-Liner

The Flying P-Liners were the sailing ships of the German shipping company F. Laeisz of Hamburg.The company was founded in 1824 by Ferdinand Laeisz as a hat manufacturing company. He was quite successful and distributed his hats even in South America...

 windjammer

Windjammer

A windjammer is the ultimate type of large sailing ship with an iron or for the most part steel hull, built to carry cargo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century...

 built in 1902.

Star Clippers claims that she is the largest "true sailing ship" built since Preussen. She is listed in the Guinness World Records

Guinness World Records

Guinness World Records, known until 2000 as The Guinness Book of Records , is a reference book published annually, containing a collection of world records, both human achievements and the extremes of the natural world...

book as the largest square-rigged ship in service, with 5202 square metres of sail. Her sails can be handled with a crew as small as twenty using powered controls.

Royal Clipper cruises the Mediterranean during the summer. During the winter she offers Caribbean

Caribbean

The Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north...

 trips through the southern parts of the Lesser Antilles

Lesser Antilles

The Lesser Antilles are a long, partly volcanic island arc in the Western Hemisphere. Most of its islands form the eastern boundary of the Caribbean Sea with the Atlantic Ocean, with the remainder located in the southern Caribbean just north of South America...

 area. Because of her size, she can visit smaller ports that larger cruise ships can't reach. Transatlantic crossings are available between seasons.

External links

• Star Clippers website about Royal Clipper
• "Royal Clipper: melding the thrills of sailing with the comforts of cruising aboard Star Clippers' mega-yacht" by Charles Doherty, Cruise Travel (magazine/journal), September 2005, as found online at LookSmart Find Articles