Bark (4m).
L/B/D:
291.4 × 43.2 × 24.1 (88.8m × 13.2m × 7.3m). Tons:
2,385 grt. Hull:
steel. Des.:
Scott's Shipbuilding & Engineering Co., Greenock, Scotland; 1905.
Archibald Russell was built for John Hardie & Sons, one of the last British shipping companies to remain in sail and whose other vessels included
Hougomont and
Killoran. The ship was named for a member of the family whose business Hardie had taken over in 1885. The last large square-rigger built on the Clyde, she was one of the few such ships fitted with bilge keels to reduce rolling. On her first voyage she loaded nitrates in Chile and proceeded from there to Australia for wheat, returning to Falmouth in the good time of ninety-three days. She remained in general trade between Europe, Australia, and West Coast (U.S.) ports from Iquique to Tacoma right through World War I.
Laid up in 1923, she was sold to Gustaf Erikson of Mariehamn, Åland, who had previously acquired Hougomont and Killoran. After her first voyage under the Finnish flag, she was refitted to accommodate cadets, most of whom were Lithuanians training for the merchant marine. A mainstay of the grain race fleets until World War II, in 1929 Archibald Russell had the fastest homeward passage of the fourteen ships sailing that year. Seized by the British at Hull in 1939, she was used as a storage ship during the war and returned to Erikson in 1947. The cost of refitting her was prohibitive and she was broken up at Dunston in 1949.
Hurst, Square-Riggers: The Final Epoch. Lubbock, Last of the Windjammers.
