The original Columbia was the first ship to circumnavigate the globe in 1787, with the Columbia River in Oregon named after it when it expolored the mouth of the river.
Built in large part from the plans for the HMS Bounty, which had similar dimensions. Disney's shipbuilders couldn't find plans for the original Columbia.
Capacity 300
Main mast is 84 feet tall hull is 110 feet long
ship has 10 cannons
Required a "E" ticket in 1959
Required a "D" ticket in 1964-1965
From WED Disneyland Dictionary 1968
Is a full-size, authentic replica of the first American ship to sail around the world (from 1787 to 1790). The Columbia is a full-rigged sailing ship built by skilled ship craftsmen (in Disneyland's own dry dock) from drawings of the original. Below decks are crews' bunks, open-hearth galley and forge, officers' cabins -- all fully equipped for "round the world" voyaging. It carries 305 passengers on the Rivers of America. During in-port days, the Columbia ties up in Fowlers Harbor where guests may climb aboard to view this replica museum.
Required a "D" ticket in 1970's
From Steve Birnbaum brings you the best of Disneyland 1982:
Though operating only on very busy days, this full-scale replica of the ten-gun, three-masted "Gem of the Ocean," the first American craft to circumnavigate the globe, is an imposing sight towering majestically over the treetops at Fowler's Harbor, opposite the Haunted Mansion, where she is usually moored. The original ship, a 212-ton merchant vessel registered as the Columbia Redivina, was constructed in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1787, at a cost of $50,000. Her maiden voyage, which began on September 30, 1787, took her around Cape Horn and into Nootka Sound, just off the coast of what is now Vancouver, British Columbia. On this trip, her first captain, later dismissed, cheated the ship's owners, tried to shortchange Nootka Indians from Oregon to Alaska in the fur trade, and, before sailing for China, mounted armed raiding parties to slip ashore at night and steal Indian furs to trade later for china, teak chests, spices, and tea. During her second voyage, made under the command of Captain Robert Gray, the Columbia River was discovered and became the vessel's namesake; her owners' names are still attached to many small harbors and coves along the river's shores. English and Russian ships, which had been trading furs in the Northwest for several years before this, had thought that the river's mouth was only a cove and never attempted to cross the sandbar that blocked the mouth. So when the Columbia sailed into the river, natives turned out by the hundreds to gaze at her in wonder, as Gray reported in his log. Under other captains, the Columbia made other fur-trading trips before she eventually disappeared "some- where in the Orient," without a trace (though some legends say that a crew member took her over and made her a pirateer). The only picture of the ship is a steel engraving in the Massachusetts Historical Society's Voyages of the Columbia, and it was this document, together with research in the Library of Congress and in ports along the Massachusetts coast, that inspired the designs for Disneyland's ship. Some of it was built in a dry dock adjoining the Rivers of America, and completed in a yard representative of an 18th-century New England ship- yard, using, in part, antique tools of the period. Measuring 110 feet from stem to stern, 83 feet 6 inches along the deck, and 27 feet 3 inches across the beam, with an 84-foot main mast, she was the first ship of her kind built in more than a century and had cost about $300,000 at her dedication on June 14, 1958. She has a steel hull, a deck planked with Douglas fir, and stays, shrouds, and ratlines made of steel-wire rope wrapped with Manila. The sails, which have been kept furled in re- cent years because they give far too much power for a craft plying waters as restricted as the Rivers of America, were originally made by the firm Pacific Sailmakers, who made sails for the ships seen in the films Mutiny on the Bounty and Captains Courageous.
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