Thoon Kramom (Thai: ทูลกระหม่อม, RTGS: Thun Kramom, also spelled Kramoom, Kramon and Kramoon) was a wooden-hulled barque owned by the Siamese (Thai) royal government of King Chulalongkorn. It was built in 1866 in Bangkok, and was used as a trading vessel, counting among its captains the future Danish shipping magnate Hans Niels Andersen, who sailed it to England in 1883 with a cargo of teak. The ship was later converted for use by the Royal Siamese Navy as a training ship, and saw action in the 1893 Paknam Incident. The last sailing ship in the navy, it went out of service and became wrecked by the 1900s.
The Thoon Kramom was built in Bangkok in 1866,[1] under the orders, according to some Thai sources, of Prince Vongsadhiraj Sanid.[2][3] The ship, registered in Bangkok, was a wooden-hulled barque with a net register tonnage of 475, and measured 151 feet in length, 28 in breadth, and 15 in depth (46 by 8.5 by 4.6 metres).[1] Sources from its later naval career record a displacement of 800 tons.[4]
By the 1870s, the Thoon Kramom was owned by the royal government of King Chulalongkorn, and was among some fifty vessels that comprised Siam's merchant fleet at the time.[5] The management of the ship was handled by the Hanseatic trading company Pickenpack, Thies & Co.,[6] and it mostly made journeys to Singapore and Bombay. From 1876, the ship was captained by P. W. Vorrath (a German), who later passed the role to his Danish first mate Hans Niels Andersen.[5]
In 1883, Andersen took the ship on its most significant voyage, carrying a shipload of teak to England. Along the way, the crew witnessed the aftermath of the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa as the ship passed the Sunda Strait at the end of August.[7] Thoon Kramom rounded the Cape of Good Hope and docked in Falmouth before continuing to Liverpool, where its cargo was sold for a profit of almost 100 percent. Andersen returned with a shipment of coal, which was sold to the Siamese navy after a journey totalling almost eleven months.[6] The sale—the first direct export of Siamese teak to Europe—marked a pivotal moment in the development of the country's teak industry, after which many European companies began scrambling for a share in the rapidly developing trade.[8]
Sometime after the journey, the ship was transferred to the Royal Siamese Navy.[9] Andersen settled in Bangkok and would go on to found the East Asiatic Company, the shipping line that would become one of Denmark's largest corporations during the first half of the 20th century.[6]
In the 2010s, a replica ship, the Sirimahannop, was commissioned by the owners of Asiatique, a themed shopping mall that now occupies the East Asiatic Company's former dockyards. Built by the Bangkok Dock Company, the ship was floated out in 2020, and is permanently moored at Asiatique, serving as a floating restaurant and bar.[14]