Draft:Grace Shipping Company

• Comment: Interesting, but the sources are not enough to satisfy WP:NCORP. DoubleGrazing (talk) 13:52, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

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Pacific Mail Steamship Company's shipping lines on a world map. (1921)

Grace Shipping was a key part of W. R. Grace for most of the corporation's history. Grace's main business was cargo shipping, operating the Grace Line:

• Grace Line began service in 1882, with ports of call between Peru and New York. The main source of shipping revenue was the from the exporting of guano from the Chincha Islands of Peru to fertilizer manufacturers in the United States.
• Regular steamship service was established in 1893, with a subsidiary called the New York & Pacific Steamship Co..

Beginning of the 20th Century

The New York & Pacific Steamships, where built outside the United States. These ships sailed under the British flag because foreign built ships before 1905 were banned from the US registry.

US-flag service began in 1912 with the Atlantic and Pacific Steamship Company. In 1913, the company acquired the SS Santa Cruz for service from the West Coast of the U.S. to the Pacific coast of South America. The ship had been acquired from William Cramp & Sons of Philadelphia.

The activities of both companies and the parent firm were consolidated into the Grace Steamship Company beginning in 1916. The firm originally specialized in traffic to the west coast of South America; then later expanded into the Caribbean.

Grace Line Advertisement (1928)

File:Santa foursisters ship grace line.jpg

Santa Rosa Class ships of the Grace Line (1932-1958)

In 1916, Grace acquired a controlling interest in the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. In 1921, Pacific received five 535 ft. President class ships from the United States Shipping Board for Transpacific operations. These ships were the

• President Cleveland (ex Golden State)
• President Lincoln (ex Hoosier State)
• President Pierce (ex Hawkeye State)
• President Taft (ex Buckeye State)
• President Wilson (ex Empire State)

1920s

In 1923, the US Shipping board decided to place the five ships up for bid and Dollar Shipping Company won the bid. With no large ships for the transpacific operations, Grace sold the Pacific Mail, its registered name, and goodwill to Dollar. Now without a transpacific service, Grace did not need the six intercoastal freighters and sold them to the American Hawaiian Line. At this time, Grace formed the Panama Mail Steamship Company, to operate the smaller ships that were formerly owned and used by the Pacific Mail in the Central American trade. These ships were not involved in the sale to Dollar.

Two of the first ships in the fleet were the SS Santa Paula and SS Santa Rosa.

• 
  SS Santa Paula, c. 1916
• 
  SS Santa Rosa would later become the USS Santa Rosa.

Passenger Service (West Coast of South America-United States)

The Grace Lines started with five ships for service from New York City to as far as Chile. There ships were the SS Santa Ana, Santa Luisa, Santa Elina, Santa Teresa, and Santa Leonora.

Panagra Flight (circa 1930s-1940s)

Entrance of Parent Company into the Airline Industry

With the experience of Grace Shipping in South America, the parent company of W.R. Grace and Company was, in 1928, able to enter into a joint venture with Pan American Airways for the creation of Panagra (Pan American-Grace Airways) in South America. The financial stability and experience of the two companies in South America appeared to be a key reason for the Postmaster General to allow US mail service to be handled by this air cargo service.

1930s

In order to comply with existing U.S. Mail contracts, the Grace Line acquired four Santa Rosa class ships from the Federal Shipbuilding Company of Kearney, New Jersey. The ships were designed by William Francis Gibbs of the naval architecture company Gibbs & Cox. The four ships were the SS Santa Paula, Santa Elena, Santa Rosa, and Santa Lucia.

The 1932 Santa Paula was a replacement for the 1916 Santa Paula. The 1932 ships would be put into service in World War ll under the command of the U.S. War Shipping Administration (WSA). Only two ships would survive, the Santa Paula and the Santa Rosa.

In 1934, Grace Line and the Panama Pacific Line announced a collaborative service for fast passenger service between New York and West Coast of the U.S., by means of the Panama Canal. The first ship to launch service from the Grace Line was the Santa Lucia.

In 1936, Grace Line would acquire the Red D Line (the Atlantic and Caribbean Steam Navigation Company).

In 1938 the Colombian Line merged with Grace Line bringing an end to the Colombian Line. During World War II, Grace Lines operated transport for the U.S. War Shipping Administration, including the SS Sea Marlin.

• 
  S.S. Santa Paula (1932)
• 
  S.S. Santa Rosa (1932)
• 
  SS Santa Lucia, later to become the US Leedstown.

1940s-1950s

SS Santa Barbara Dining Room, circa 1946.

After the war, the Grace line operated 23 ships totaling 188,000 gross tons, and an additional 14 more on bareboat charters.

In 1956, Gibbs & Cox designed the replacements for the Santa Rosa and Santa Paula, the new Santa Rosa (1958) and Santa Paula (1958). Newport News Shipping Company built the ships. The ships had the following features:

• Aluminum paneling for fire protection
• Gyrofin stabilizers were fitted to improve stability.
• Each Room had its own bathroom.
• Extended automatic conveyors for palletized cargo in the holds (cargo compartments)

• 
  The SS Santa Rosa (1958) would later become the SS Emerald.
• 
  The SS Santa Eliana, which would later become the SS Mayaguez, c. 1975

1960s

In 1960, the Grace Line sought to begin containerizing its South American cargo operations by converting the conventional freighters Santa Eliana and Santa Leonor into fully cellular container ships. However, the effort was stymied by the opposition of longshoremen in New York and Venezuela, and the ships were repeatedly laid up idle and were ultimately sold to the domestic container line Sea-Land Service in 1964. Sea-Land immediately modified the two ships to carry its 35-foot containers. The Santa Eliana was temporarily named the Sea and the Santa Leonor became the Land. The ships were employed on the U.S. coastwise and Puerto Rican trades.

In 1963, Grace made a second attempt to containerize its South American trade when it ordered the four M-class combination passenger-cargo ships Santa Magdalena, Santa Maria, Santa Mariana, and Santa Mercedes with partial cellular holds, but they were no more successful as mixing conventional break-bulk cargo and containers in the same ship negated the operating economies that full containerization promised. In 1965, the Santa Magdalena, the first of the class, was delivered to Grace Line on February 4, 1965.

The ships were designed by George G. Sharpe Company, naval architects and engineers. As an engineering company, operations analysis (operations research) of the trade route was made to determine:

• The characteristics of the cargo moving on the route.
• Establish the feasibility of mechanical handling of cargo in units.

This operations analysis included:

• A detail study of the cargo commodities transported on the route.
• Analyses of weight, dimensions, net cubic volume, gross cubic volume, port of origin, and port of destination.
• A classification of the cargo concerning its susceptibility to unitization.

In conjunction with trade forecasts prepared by Grace economists, trends in cargo carryings were:

• Analyzed
• Projected into the future.

In December of 1969, Grace Line was sold to Prudential Lines for $44.5 million, with the merged company renamed Prudential Grace Line. Spyros S. Skouras was elected president. A Pacific and Atlantic Division were created. The divisions were managed as follows:

• Arthur C. Novacek, the last president of the Grace Line, headed the Atlantic Division.
• Edmund J. Camuti, the former traffic vice president for the Prudential Line, headed the Pacific Division.

1970s

It was taken over by Delta Steamship Lines of New Orleans, Louisiana in 1978, allowing Delta to carry on shipping services to Latin America from both the U.S. Atlantic and Pacific Coasts. However, the purchase saw the extinguishing the name Grace in ocean shipping.

Also in 1978, the Santa Paula (1958) was converted into a floating hotel in Kuwait, the Kuwait Marriott Hotel. Twenty years after it first set sail, it became a floating hotel. The hotel later became the Ramada al Salaam.

1980s

Of the M-class ships, the Santa Mercedes was converted into a training ship called the Patriot State for the Massachusetts Maritime Academy after its acquisition in 1984 by the Massachusetts Maritime Administration.