Shipping Lines - Dutch cargo ships are named after Amsterdam canals

As is the case for some years now an increasing percentage of European-owned merchant tonnage has come from shipyards in the Far East, mainly China. Fagelgracht is no exception. Built in 2011 by Jiangsu Changba shipyard, Jingjiang is 12,500-ton deadweight with three deck cranes each with a lifting capacity of 80 tons.

Spliethoff is a well-known Dutch shipping and sea transport company with its head office in Amsterdam, controlling a group of well-established companies specialising in various aspects of the international shipping business.

The company was founded in 1921 by John Frederik Spliethoff to transport timber from the Baltic to ports in western Europe. In 1946 he was joined by his son Herman, who commissioned their first new ship Keizersgracht, named after the canal beside which their main office stood. The Company have been naming their ships after Dutch canals ever since.

Ships of the group have been calling at Montrose on a regular basis while carrying baled wood pulp for the Scotland-based papermaking industry, mainly from sources in North America. Their dark red hulls and “gracht” suffix were always noticeable on the waterfront,

Two vessels in particular come to mind – the pair with Inuit names, painted on the hulls in the alphabet of the Canadian ‘First Nation’ as they traded between the port of Valleyfield at the foot of the Great Lakes and Milne Inlet on Baffin Island in an annual ‘lifeline service’, carrying tugs and barges to assist in seasonal cargo handling on the exposed anchorage. The full story of the two cargo ships previously appeared in Shipping Lines in the pages of the ‘Review’.

It wasn’t always only wood pulp Spliethoff vessels carried. In early 2018 an unusual form of transport was noted that of an Erickson S-64 F Aircrane shipped in from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to assist with a power generation project north of Montrose. Such equipment is used in the oil and gas, logging, containerisation and power generation industries.

The Spliethoff F- Type cargo freighter, the Floragracht, was used on that voyage. She was one of the same F-Type as the recent arrival. In recent years there have been several ‘tramping’ class cargo ships of the Spliethoff group including Big-Lift. This is not a derogatory description, but rather describes a class of ship which picks up cargo where and when offered. They do a worthwhile task transporting a miscellany of freight between out of the way ports not covered by regular liner shipping companies. Such cargoes seen at Montrose have included catamaran ferries bound for China, expensive motor cruisers, and, more unusually, the replica of explorer Henry Hudson’s wooden ship ‘Halve Maen’ which was being transported from the United States to a maritime museum in The Netherlands.