ARA Presidente Sarmiento

Type

Frigate

Period

19th Century

Nation

Other

Overview: ARA Presidente Sarmiento is an Argentine Navy sail training frigate, launched in 1897 by Laird Brothers of Birkenhead, England, and named after former President Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. She is widely regarded as the last intact cruising training ship surviving from the 1890s and holds status as a National Historic Monument of Argentina. Specifications: The steel-hulled ship displaces about 2,750 tonnes on a hull roughly 81 m long with a 13.11 m beam and 5.64 m draught. She carried a full ship rig across three masts (mainmast 54.3 m, foremast 52 m, mizzenmast 42.5 m) totaling 21 sails and about 2,300 m² of sail area, combined with a 3-cylinder compound steam engine of roughly 1,000 hp fed by coal-fired boilers — for modeling purposes she reads as a full-rigged ship rather than a barque despite loose grouping with other 1890s training "barks." Later fittings included four 5-inch gun mounts amidships and a bow torpedo tube using gravity expulsion; some documentation suggests armor plating was planned for the mounts but the installations survive bare. Service History: Built for the Argentine Naval Academy, the ship completed thirty-seven annual training cruises, including six full circumnavigations of the globe, carrying generations of naval cadets. She was retired as a seagoing vessel in 1938, continued limited unrigged service on Argentine rivers into the 1950s, and was finally decommissioned as a stationary training ship in 1961. Notable Facts: Preserved today in her original 1898 configuration as a museum ship in Puerto Madero, Buenos Aires, she is moored near the smaller historic corvette ARA Uruguay as part of the Museum of Sea and Navigation. Her welded-shut bow torpedo scuttle still displays a torpedo on the main deck as if ready to load, and the ship appeared on Argentina's 5-peso coin between 1961 and 1968.