Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Royal Clipper, the world's largest fully-rigged sailing ship, anchors off the island of Mayreau. T he sinews of a thousand ropes sing as sails wake from their slumber. Billowing into a canvas canopy, they pierce the horizon with a silhouette from another age.
On the bridge, Captain Bruno Borowka calls the shots as a mahogany wheel spins. Hard to starboard. Hard to port.
Finally, full sails. In the Caribbean, wandering yachtsmen on sloops and catamarans know these masts well. They’re the unmistakable callsigns of the Royal Clipper , a 442-foot, 42-sail phantom that dances between the Windward Islands and the Mediterranean ever year.
Royal Clipper is the last gasp of a bygone era, the world’s only, fully-rigged, five-masted cruise ship. And for a week or two at a time, she gives travelers the chance to experience sea travel as it used to be. Though forests of masts like hers were still fairly common on the world’s oceans even a century ago, by the end of World War II less than a dozen ships like Royal Clipper remained.
The sight of her towering sails conjures names plucked from the pages of history books—Magellan, Morgan, Drake, Vespucci and Teach. Royal Clipper makes port in some of the same harbors the Caribbean’s most famous pirates and infamous explorers once did. In places, she shares historic harbor with ships like Queen Anne’s Revenge and Santa Maria.
She glides by the same verdant, volcanic peaks they once.
