Hilary Tunstall-Behrens was a young instructor in the british Outward Bound School, founded during the Second World War in Aberdovey by Lawrence Holt and Kurt Hahn.

In may 1951 he read in the press that the Pamir and the Passat were to be refitted to serve as sail-training ships and he determined to visit them in Kiel.

The captain Grubbe intended to assume a double function of cargo transport and sail training by boarding fifty cadets of all nationalities in each ship. Over two hundred candidates had already written or come even without any announcement.

Mr Tunstall-Behrens was tasked to set up a preliminary nautical school until the end of works in the Howald shipyard. The school was set in a castle on the shores of Plöner lake near Kiel with a hundred of cadets, all volunteers, mainly germans with a few englishmen and one italian.

The 15 December 1951, the Pamir was towed out of the basin, covered with flags and four shields with the arms of the cities of Luebeck, Dantzig, Hamburg and Kiel. She arrived in Hamburg the 23 December. After Christmas, she loaded cement (420 wagons of ten tons each were necessary to fill her!).

Beginning January 1952, she left Hamburg and exited the mouth of Elbe january the 12th. January the 18th, due to a gale in the Channel, the captain radioed an S.O.S. to evacuate the cadets. The Margate lifeboat reached the Pamir but she eventually went by without assistance. She reached Rio end February 1952 and then sailed back to Rotterdam with iron ore loaded in Vitoria.

Back to Hamburg beginning of June, he learnt that Schlieven went bankrupt. He returned in England and the Pamir and the Passat laid up in Hamburg.

Twenty-eight years after Heinrich Hauser and three years after William Stark he took photos and published an account on this voyage titled PAMIR A Voyage To Rio In A Four-Masted Barque. One can still find the used book (see references). A movie has also been shot.