All but one of the menus are from 1914 voyages of Cap Finisterre between Hamburg, Germany and Buenos Aires, Argentina. The other menu is from a 1906 voyage of the Cap Vilano. All are written in both German and Spanish, and the menus exhibit dishes from both countries.
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Description or title of item, PSNCA.H.044: German steamship menus collection, Preservation Society of Newport County, Newport, RI.
The collection is organized chronologically in a single series.
The Hamburg-South America Line (Hamburg Südamerikanische Dampfschifffahrts-Gesellschaft A/S & Co KG or Hamburg Süd) operated both the Cap Vilano (named after named after Cape Vilán, Spain) and Cap Finisterre (named after the cape in Galicia, Spain). Blohm & Voss manufactured both ships.
The oldest menu in the collection is from the Cap Vilano, from October 1906, not long after the ship’s maiden voyage in late August of that year. Since the ship departed Hamburg on 7 November 1906, the menu must have come from a journey east from South America. During World War I, the Brazilian government seized the ship, renaming it Sobral, and it was later sold and rebuilt for trips between Marseille and the Middle East, the Europe-Indochina line, and the Black Sea under the name Général Metzinger. A German bombing raid sank the ship in June 1940 off the coast of Normandy.
The Cap Finisterre operated as part of the Hamburg Süd line from 1911 to the outbreak of World War I in August 1914. Though the German Navy planned to requisition the ship during the war, this never happened. In 1920, as part of war reparations, the ship was transferred to Japan, its name changed to Taiyō Maru; its subsequent voyages crossed the Pacific rather than the Atlantic. An American submarine sank the vessel in 1942, killing over 800 people, mostly civilians.
The Cap Finisterre left Hamburg on January 13, 1914, so it seems likely the menu from February 13, 1914 is from a return journey from Buenos Aires to Hamburg. Later that year, the ship departed Hamburg for Buenos Aires on June 3, so the menus from June 17 and 20 are probably from that voyage. The menus from July 1914 are more likely from a journey east from Buenos Aires to Hamburg. These menus represent one of the last, if not the last, passenger voyages the ship made between these two cities.
Gift of Paul F. Miller, February 17, 1989.
Archivist Genna Duplisea arranged the items chronologically and wrote the finding aid in June 2025.
Additional accruals are not expected.
This collection has been fully digitized and is available for viewing online at