Belem, a 128-year-old multicultural symbol

At 128 years old, the Belem, a flagship of French maritime heritage, has experienced several shipowners and several lives, came very close to oblivion and destruction before becoming a preserved training ship, a symbol of know-how. of the French merchant navy.

Less than three months before the opening of the Paris Games, the three-masted ship cast off on Saturday morning in the Greek port of Piraeus, Greece, with the Olympic flame on board, for a journey to France and Marseille . Year of the first Olympic Games of the modern era, 1896 also marks the birth of the Belem, produced at the Dubigeon shipyard in Nantes. A three-masted steel hull, 58 meters long, it bears the name of its trading post in Brazil. And it can carry up to 675 tonnes of cargo.

For this, he can count on his Parrots and Cockatois, his Imps or his Marquises: sails which, once all hoisted, reach a surface area of ​​1200 m2. At the time it was part of the fleet of six three-masted barques owned by the Crouan Fils shipping line. And it is nicknamed the “yacht” because of its clean lines.

Its territory is the Atlantic and crossings to the Antilles or South America. He carried out 33 commercial campaigns until 1914, transporting cocoa beans from the Amazon, rum and sugar cane to France. In 1914, victim of competition from steamboats, and as the First World War was about to sound the death knell for commercial sailing ships, she was saved from abandonment by the Duke of Westminster who transformed her into a yacht. The latter then sold it to the brewer Arthur Ernest Guinness, vice-president of the eponymous breweries, who renamed it Fantome II. It was then decommissioned in 1939 on the Isle of Wight (England) where it spent the five years of the Second World War.

Caught in the German bombings in Cowes Bay in 1941, the Fantôme II, which had miraculously escaped the volcanic eruption of Mount Pelée in Martinique in 1902, began a new life in 1951 as a training ship for orphans of the sea thanks to Italy, with the Victorio Cini Foundation.

And it was finally to France that the definitive rescue would come in 1978. A national subscription is launched at the initiative of the National Association for the salvage and conservation of old French ships (ASCANF), with which the Caisses d'Epargne and the French Navy are associated, and major hull works are undertaken. The Caisses d'Epargne finally offered the last French three-masted ship, classified as a historic monument in 1984, to the State which donated it to the Belem Foundation. On its site, the foundation today sets itself the mission of “welcoming as many visitors as possible to the quayside”.