The Peruvian Corporation, a UK-owned company, had controlled
Peru's railways and lake shipping since 1890. Traffic had outstripped the capacity of the corporation's hitherto largest lake steamer (1,809 tons), the smaller (546 tons) and ageing
Yavari and
Yapura. Accordingly, in 1929, the corporation ordered the
Ollanta to work along with the
Inca.
Earle's Shipbuilding of
Kingston upon Hull on the
Humber in
England built
Ollanta as a "knock down" ship; that is, they assembled her in their shipyard with bolts and nuts, marked each part with a number, and then disassembled her into many hundreds of pieces and sent her to Peru in kit form. The pieces were shipped by sea from King George Dock in Hull to
Mollendo on the
Pacific Ocean coast of Peru. They were then delivered by rail to
Puno on Lake Titicaca, where
Ollanta was finally riveted together and launched. Earle's put the engineer William Smale in charge of reassembling and launching
Ollanta. At 2,200 tons and long,
Ollanta was larger than any previous ship on Lake Titicaca. Titicaca, therefore, had no
slipway big enough to build her, so one of Smale's first tasks was to have one built. A major ship had not been launched on Lake Titicaca since the
Inca 25 years earlier in 1905, so no local suitably equipped workshops or skilled craftsmen were available for Smale to recruit. So, Smale made the best of local labour and improvised machine tools from railway equipment. Earle's sent a skilled team from England to help launch the ship, but Smale got
Ollanta completed before the team arrived, and launched the ship using his unaided local workmen.
Ollanta had the capacity for 950 tons of freight, 66 first-class passengers on the upper deck of her deckhouse, and 20 second-class passengers in the forward part of the ship. Her four oil-fired steam engines gave her a top speed of . She was the Peruvian Corporation's most luxurious steamer on the lake and the culmination of nearly 70 years' development of Titicaca steamers since the building of
Yavari started in 1862. In 1975, the Peruvian Corporation was nationalized and
Ollanta's ownership passed to the state railway company
ENAFER. She now belongs to ENAFER's successor
PeruRail, which has refurbished her to carry a total of 70 passengers.
Ollanta is no longer in scheduled service, but PeruRail leases her to be chartered for tourist cruises. ==References==