For four generations of Coast Guard cadets, getting their “sea legs” and literally “learning the ropes” has come aboard the Coast Guard sailing ship Eagle.

Cadets graduate to serve on icebreakers and fast cutters, fly helicopters and four-engine Hercules transports, lead search-and-rescue operations, and interdict drug shipments.

Since 1946, nearly all start their careers aboard the Eagle.

The steel-hulled barque — the name for three-masted sailing ships — has an unusual history as a former Nazi training ship, which the U.S. took as a war prize after World War II.

Next year, the Eagle will celebrate 80 years as part of the Coast Guard. Its alumni rank from ensigns to admirals.

“About 600 cadets each year spend time on the Eagle, so if you multiply that by 80 years, you are talking about thousands of Coast Guard officers who began their careers here,” said Capt. Kristopher Ensley, the Eagle’s commander

Ensley, 50, said he was once a 17-year-old cadet who “didn’t know starboard from port.”

By the end of his training on the Eagle, he’d mastered steering, tacking, ropes and unfurling the canvas — all the timeless basics of sailing ships.

“I became a little bit salty,” Ensley said.

The Eagle allows cadets to tie their careers to the traditions of the seagoing force, its captain said.

“Everything is out in the open air,” Ensley said. “The bridge, the decks — you get wet, you get cold, you get tired, you get hungry. That’s part of helping build the Coast Guard leaders we need who are able to withstand those rigors.”

During a five-month voyage this year, Eagle sailed from New London to Vancouver Island in Canada. It made port calls in Costa Rica, Mexico, California, Oregon and Washington, and it twice passed through the Panama Canal.

The Eagle made stops at Los Angeles Fleet Week and the Portland Rose Festival, and it tied up at the Seattle waterfront near Pike Place Market. Overall, more than 41,000 people climbed aboard to learn about sailing and the Coast Guard.

Cadet Jonathan Hurley, 21, of Seattle, plans on making the Coast Guard a career — hopefully on icebreakers. But he started out on the Eagle, like his fellow future officers.

“Not everybody in the Coast Guard gets to go on the Eagle, but everyone who goes to the Coast Guard Academy does,” Hurley said.

The ship is the second-oldest among those operated by the Defense Department or Department of Homeland Security. The only ship older is the USS Constitution, “Old Ironsides,” the frigate commissioned in 1797 that remains on the Navy’s active-ship registry at the Charlestown Navy Yard near Boston.

Unlike the Constitution, the Eagle did not begin life in a New England shipyard. It’s a war prize, taken from Germany at the end of World War II as partial reparations for the costs of the conflict inflicted by the Axis powers on the Allies.

For the first 10 years of its life, the Eagle was the Horst Wessel, a training ship for German navy cadets named after a brownshirt “stormtrooper” killed in 1930 in his Berlin apartment by a member of the German communist Red Front Fighters League.

When the barque was commissioned in 1936 as a training ship at the Blohm+Voss shipyard in Hamburg, it was named for Wessel. Adolf Hitler attended the ceremony and walked the ship’s deck.

The Horst Wessel bore Nazi symbols, including a golden eagle figurehead that once held a swastika.

After the war, the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, France and other Allied nations took several ships as war prizes from the Axis powers, Germany, Italy and Japan.

The United States received the Horst Wessel as one of its prizes.

A decision on what to do with it came at an opportune time. The Coast Guard had lost its prior sail-powered training ship in a storm, then used a sailing ship on loan from the government-in-exile of Nazi-occupied Denmark. With the war over, the Danes asked for the ship’s return.

On May 15, 1946, the ship was officially rechristened as the Coast Guard barque Eagle.

Because Navy, Coast Guard and merchant marine sailors were in short supply in Europe as American troops and equipment were returned to the United States, the War Department approved a plan to use some of the German crew, along with Americans, to sail the ship to the Coast Guard Academy at New London, Conn.

The trip almost ended in disaster: The ship skirted a powerful hurricane off the coast of North America before reaching safety.

After an overhaul and a coat of white paint, the Eagle has been an American sailing icon and training ground for future leaders for eight decades.

The ship’s second core mission is public port visits, used to inform Americans and others about the Coast Guard mission — and perhaps spur recruitment of future cadets.

Inside the ship are historical artifacts from its days before the Allies captured it. A large HORST WESSEL nameplate in Gothic script that once adorned the ship is atop an interior stairway.

A metal map shows the course of the trip to bring the ship from Germany to New London, and it bears the names of the German sailors, who were interned as prisoners of war upon their arrival. The captain’s quarters have the 1930s dark wood paneling of the original construction.

The Eagle has sailed to Germany, now a longtime U.S. ally in NATO, even returning to the shipyard where it was built.

After the current U.S. government shutdown ends, the Coast Guard will announce the 2026 itinerary of the Eagle in its 80th year of service.