Texas Seaport Museum and the Elissa

The Elissa was launched at Alexander Hall and Company's yard in Aberdeen, Scotland, on October 27, 1877, an iron-hulled, three-masted barque 162 feet long. She sailed her first voyage that December with Welsh coal for Brazil and spent the next ninety years as a tramp freighter under British, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and Greek owners. She called at Galveston in 1883 and 1886. Her rig was cut down, engines went in, her bow was snubbed off, and by the late 1960s, renamed Achaios, she was smuggling in the Adriatic.

The maritime historian Peter Throckmorton spotted her at Piraeus and mortgaged his house to buy her, and in 1974 Galveston Historical Foundation bought her as a restoration project. Restoration in Galveston began in 1978, and by 1982 staff and volunteers had her sailing again. She carries nineteen sails, is a National Historic Landmark and the official tall ship of Texas, and still goes to sea.

She is moored at the Galveston Historic Seaport on Pier 22, where the museum's Ship to Shore exhibit follows immigrants from the sea voyage to arrival at Galveston in the 1880s. An immigration database drawn from passenger manifests lets visitors look up ancestors who landed in Texas.