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Registered to carry 6,660 standard containers, the ships in
this class are the largest containerships built in the 20th
Century. With the three ships built so far being named
Sovereign Maersk, Sally Maersk
and Susan Maersk, they are referred to as the
S Class. There are plans to build larger containerships in
the 21st Century, although with many ports barely deep
enough to take this size of ship and the giant cranes at
their limits, ports would have to spend massive amounts of
money dredging and replacing their cranes in order to
accommodate them. Sovereign Maersk’s
maiden voyage called at the port of Singapore October 11th
1997 and loaded/unloaded 2,100 containers in a turnaround
time of about 13 hours. This port holds the record of
handling 229 containers per hour.
Captain Peter Maersk Moller founded the Maersk shipping
company in 1904 by operating a single steamship between
Denmark and the Far East under the name Ssvendborg. This
line evolved into what is now an internationally known
standard bearer of Danish history. Maersk’s
involvement in shipbuilding began when they founded the
Odense Steel Shipyard Company in 1917. This yard situated
near the Odense Canal has the capacity to build ships up to
40,000 dead weight tons. After ships began exceeding 40,000
DWT in 1957, Maersk built a new yard at Lindo capable of
constructing 200,000 DWT ships. The emergence of the first
super tanker in 1966 at 210,000 DWT forced them to build an
even larger dry dock with the capacity to build ships up to
650,000 DWT. Following the Exxon Valdez tanker spillage in
1989 and the Federal Oil Polution Act that followed in
1990, this yard completed the first 300,000 DWT
double-hulled ultra large tanker in 1993.
In the late 1990s, Maersk took over the United States largest shipping
company Sealand. This company entered the containership business in 1956.
They began by operating a T2 oil tanker named Ideal X that
carried petroleum below decks and 58 of the newly designed standard containers
on a specially built deck above the oil pipes and valves on the original
deck. Sealand’s first fully containerized ship Gateway City
entered service in 1957 capable of carrying 226 containers at a speed
of 15 knots. The Sealand ship Elizabethport was the first containership
to transit the Panama Canal, this being on her inaugural voyage between
the ports of Elizabeth and Long Beach. The Elizabethport class
ships were also the first to be lengthened by adding a new mid section
to the existing stern and bow. With that work complete, they were capable
of carrying 476 containers. Their first D-9 class ship Sea-Land
Patriot also broke new ground when it became the first diesel-powered
containership to fly the American flag in 1979. After the takeover of
Sealand, Maersk/Sealand became the largest container shipping company
in the world with a total of 550,000 containers and 250 ships.
Update: Emma Maersk entered
service in 2006 capable of carrying over 11,000 standard containers.
This ship is 1,290 feet long, 185 feet wide and 110,000 gross registered
tons. Click on image to enlarge. |
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