Barque Sirimahannop

Sirimahannop

As I was on a long tail boat river tour on the Chao Phraya in Bangkok I suddenly saw a tall ship alongside the bank and quickly snapped a few pictures. 

After I got back to the hotel I did some ad hoc searching on the inter webs and quickly learned that she was a replica of the Royal barque "Thoon Kramom" from the turn of the century some 125 years ago. 

Sirimahannop

Now she was permanently berthed alongside and served as a restaurant. I could have easily gone and booked a table but I chose not to go due to various lukewarm reviews of her on Tripadvisor. It would have anyway been an expensive exercise and with their allegedly "not so good" food (after all, it is just opinions, could be great for all I know). I would have been disappointed so I rather not experience it. I also did not fancy seeing a copy of a tall ship that probably was not made to sail. But her history did peak my interest.

Sirimahannop

As per Wikipedia, Thoon Kramom was a wooden-hulled barque owned by the Siamese (Thai) royal government of King Chulalongkorn. It was built in 1866 in Bangkok, and was used as a trading vessel, counting among its captains Hans Niels Andersen, who sailed her to England in 1883 with a cargo of teak. The ship was later converted for use by the Royal Siamese Navy as a training ship, and saw action in the 1893 Paknam Incident. The last sailing ship in the navy, it went out of service and was wrecked by the 1900s.

That statement alone has so many exciting stories in it so I looked a bit further. 

Barque Thoon Kramom was built in Bangkok in 1866, under the orders, according to some Thai sources, of Prince Vongsadhiraj Sanid. The ship, registered in Bangkok, was a wooden-hulled barque with a net register tonnage of 475, and measured 151 feet in length, 28' in breadth, and 15' in depth (46m x 8.5m x 4.6 m). Sources from its later naval career record a displacement of 800 tons.

By the 1870s, the Thoon Kramom was owned by the royal government of King Chulalongkorn, and was among some fifty vessels that comprised Siam's merchant fleet at the time. The management of the ship was handled by the Hanseatic trading company Pickenpack, Thies & Co., and it mostly made journeys to Singapore and Bombay. 

H. N. Andersen, captain of the Thoon Kramom in 1883

The ship itself was supposed to have been rotting on the banks of Chao Phraya off the Mahisra palace by 1908 so the fate was not very grandiose, I'm guessing the worms had their way in the end and the steam engine also came about.

From 1876, the ship was captained by P. W. Vorrath, who later passed the role to his Danish first mate Hans Niels Andersen. Captain Andersen, initially a ships carpenter, would later become Denmark's most successful shipping magnate of the early 20th century probably surpassing that of today's Maersk.

The Pickenpack's German merchant company was a grand actor on international scale, Mr Paul himself was at one time the Siamese consul general and represented several countries and had contacts all over SE Asia.

The Dane's were also well represented in the Navy with Andreas du Plessis de Richelieu as head of the Siamese Navy.

The Paknam incident was a skirmish between Siamese officials and a French Captain that resulted in an exchange of fire and also in the diplomatic and political aftermath that shaped Siam close of today's Thailand.

It goes to show that the Siamese rulers were quite smart (lot to read there too about their royals) and managed to avoid diplomatic and political pitfalls on the International arena. With some maneuvering and concessions they avoided being conquered and exploited as a colonial state to European masters unlike all their neighbors that succumbed under British and French rule.