Sea Cloud was built in Kiel, Germany as a Barque for E. F. Hutton & Co.. She was launched in 1931 as the Hussar II; at the time of her construction, she was the largest private yacht in the world. In 1935, United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union Joseph E. Davies obtained the ship after marrying Hutton’s ex-wife Marjorie Merriweather Post. Davies renamed the ship Sea Cloud. As a man with political influence, Davies entertained many high profile people on the ship, including Queen Elisabeth of Belgium. The ship even served as an informal embassy, as Soviet and United States officials stayed and met on the vessel.
Davies had first offered the ship to the Department of the Navy in 1941, but the Navy turned him down. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt objected to the ship entering service, remarking that she was too beautiful to be sacrificed. However, on January 7, 1942, the Navy reassessed their position, chartering the ship for $1 per year. The Navy sent Sea Cloud from Georgetown, South Carolina, to the United States Coast Guard Yard in Curtis Bay, Maryland, to be refitted as a “weather observation station vessel”, and had its masts removed. Sea Cloud was decommissioned on November 4, 1944 at the Bethlehem Steel Atlantic Yard and returned to Davies, along with $175,000 for conversion to pre-war appearance.
Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, purchased Sea Cloud in 1955, trading a secondhand Vickers Viscount for it. He renamed the ship Angelita after his daughter. The yacht served as a houseboat and government office. Following Trujillo’s assassination on May 20, 1961, his family attempted to smuggle themselves and Trujillo’s body to the Canary Islands aboard the Angelita, but were forced back by the Dominican Republic’s new government. Five years after Trujillo’s death, the ship, now named Patria, was sold to Operation Sea Cruises. Company president John Blue renamed her Antarna. He brought her to the United States, but port authorities docked the boat after a dispute.
After the ship stayed in port for eight years, Harmut Paschberg and a group of Hamburg associates purchased her, once again naming her Sea Cloud. Paschberg and thirty-eight other men sailed the ship to Europe, arriving in the Port of Hamburg on November 15, 1978. Sea Cloud spent eight months undergoing repairs in the now-named Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft shipyard, the very yard she was built in. She was redesigned with a sixty-four passenger capacity for a crew of sixty. The ship set sail on its first cruise in 1979, and is still operating as a cruise ship.
