Object Details
- Description
- By the mid-1870s, the Pacific guano trade had mined all the available bird guano from the South American and remote Pacific Ocean islands. Fortunately for international agricultural interests, nitrate and phosphate mines had recently been discovered inland in Peru and Chile to fill the gap, and big sailing ships from Europe and the United States exchanged the avian excrement for chemicals that could be mined and blended for synthetic fertilizers and other products.
- The German four-masted steel barque Pitlochry was built in Scotland in 1894 for the Flying P Line of nitrate clippers and was one of the fastest in the fleet. It measured 319 ft. 5 in. in length and 3,111 tons (gross) and set a speed record in 1902 on a nitrate voyage to Valparaiso. In 1905 it was partly dismasted on a trip around Cape Horn.
- This track chart measured daily progress for Pitlochry from Hamburg, Germany to "The West Coast" (South America) on a 1908 nitrate voyage that took only 72 days. In 1913 Pitlochry sank in the English Channel after a collision with a British steamship.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
- date made
- 1908
- Credit Line
- Gift of Capt. J. Ferrell Colton
- Physical Description
- paper (overall material)
- Measurements
- overall: 11 3/8 in x 14 3/8 in; 28.8925 cm x 36.5125 cm
- Object Name
- chart
