Maritime Museum of San Diego

A floating museum of historic vessels including the 1863 tall ship Star of India — the world's oldest active sailing ship

The Maritime Museum of San Diego is a floating collection of historic vessels moored along the Embarcadero, with the 1863 iron barque Star of India as the centrepiece. The museum's fleet includes a 1914 steam ferryboat, a Cold War-era Soviet submarine, a 1904 steam yacht, and a replica of the Spanish galleon San Salvador — the ship Juan Cabrillo sailed into San Diego Bay in 1542.

Visitors board and explore the interiors of most vessels. The Star of India's hold and crew quarters show the conditions of nineteenth-century ocean passage. The B-39 Soviet submarine is tight, claustrophobic, and deeply strange — all the instrumentation is in Cyrillic. The San Salvador replica was built from scratch using period techniques and is one of the more ambitious historical reconstruction projects in American maritime heritage.

The museum sits directly on the waterfront, accessible from the Embarcadero path. The aircraft carrier USS Midway is moored a short walk south.

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A story
The Star of India was built on the Isle of Man in 1863, served as a cargo ship, transported immigrants to New Zealand, worked the Alaska salmon trade, and ended up abandoned at a San Diego dock in the 1920s. The Maritime Museum acquired it in 1927 for $9, spent thirty years restoring it, and sailed it for the first time since 1923 in 1976. It still sails occasionally, making it the oldest square-rigged vessel still under sail in the world.