Albatross, originally named Albatros, later Alk, was a sailing ship that became famous when she sank in 1961 with a group of American teenagers on board. The events were the basis for the highly fictionalized 1996 film White Squall. Early history The Albatross was built as Albatros, a schooner, at the state shipyard (Rijkswerf) in Amsterdam, Netherlands, in 1920, to serve as a pilot boat (named Alk) in the North Sea. The ship spent two decades working the North Sea before being purchased by the German government in 1937. She served as a radio-station ship for submarines during the Second World War. In 1949, Royal Rotterdam Lloyd bought her for use as a training ship for future officers of their company (Dutch merchant marine). The fact that she was small made her ideal for this kind of work, and the dozen trainees could receive personal attention from the six or so professional crew. While under Dutch ownership she sailed the North Sea extensively, with occasional voyages as far as Spain and Portugal. The American aviator, filmmaker and novelist Ernest K. Gann purchased the Albatros in 1954, re-rigged her as a brigantine, and she cruised the Pacific for three years. According to Charles Gieg (The Last Voyage of the Albatros), the Albatros survived a tsunami in Hawaii during this time. She was also used in the 1958 film Twilight for the Gods (starring Rock Hudson and Arthur Kennedy), whose script and the underlying novel by the same title were written by the Albatros owner Gann. Albatross at the "Ocean Academy" and loss In 1959, Christopher B. Sheldon's Ocean Academy, Ltd., of Darien, Connecticut, acquired the ship to use her for trips combining preparatory college classes and sail training. Over the next three years, Christopher B. Sheldon, Ph.D., and his wife, Alice Strahan Sheldon, M.D., ran programs for up to fourteen students in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific Ocean. From fall 1960 to spring 1961, a crew of four instructors (including the Sheldons), a cook, George Ptacnik, and 13 students sailed the Albatross from the Bahamas through the Caribbean to the Galápagos Islands and back to the Caribbean; a fourteenth student had been on the ship for the first part of the voyage, but had left in Balboa, Panama. At the beginning of May, the Albatross was en route from Progreso, Mexico, to Nassau, the Bahamas. On 1 May, skipper Sheldon decided