Windjammer

A windjammer is a large, steel-hulled sailing ship built primarily in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to carry bulk cargo over long ocean routes, typically rigged as a barque or full-rigged ship with multiple masts and a large sail area needed to remain commercially competitive as steamships began to dominate shorter and more time-sensitive trades. Built mostly in Britain, Germany and France, windjammers specialized in routes where speed mattered less than cargo capacity and where coal for a steamship's boilers was expensive or unavailable, such as carrying nitrate from Chile or grain from Australia back to Europe, and the type represents the final and largest generation of commercial sailing cargo ships before steam and later diesel power made large ocean sail cargo vessels commercially obsolete by the mid-twentieth century.