pplpod

The sea otter, Enhydra lutris, is the heaviest member of the weasel family and one of the smallest marine mammals, and it survives the freezing North Pacific with no blubber. Its fur holds up to 150,000 hairs per square centimeter, with barbed guard hairs and underfur that trap air when groomed. Diving compresses that air layer, so otters run a metabolism two to three times that of a similar land...

The 2021 viral song about the Wellerman bringing sugar, tea and rum is named for three real British brothers, Edward, George and Joseph Weller, who reached Sydney in 1829 and in 1831 set up at Otago Heads in New Zealand, 17 years before Dunedin was founded. Their money came from supplying shore based whalers stranded in isolated bays, and their supply ships and employees became known as the Weller...

In 1826 French naval officer Jules Dumont d'Urville reported a 33 meter wave in the Indian Ocean, and scientist Francois Arago mocked him, insisting waves could not exceed 30 feet. Oceanographers trusted a Gaussian model built on significant wave height, and survivorship bias hid the evidence: ships that met giant waves rarely returned. That changed on January 1, 1995 at the Draupner gas platform...

Robin Knox-Johnston, born in Putney in 1939, served in the Merchant Navy and Royal Naval Reserve before sailing the 32 foot ketch Suhaili, built on Norwegian lifeboat lines, from Bombay to England, going broke on the way and working as a stevedore in South Africa. His wife Sue, whom he had known since age eight, would not sail home with their baby daughter, and they divorced in 1967. On June 14, 1...

A 1936 car accident shattered the arms of young French naval officer Jacques-Yves Cousteau, born in 1910, and ended his hopes of flying. Swimming in the Mediterranean at Toulon to recover, he borrowed a pair of Fernez goggles and became obsessed with the underwater world. During the German occupation he did covert intelligence work while filming 18 Meters Deep on held breath. In 1943 he and engine...

A black and white cat later nicknamed Unsinkable Sam survived the sinking of the Bismarck in May 1941, then the torpedoing of HMS Cossack, then the loss of HMS Ark Royal, before retiring to mouse catching in a Gibraltar office with six lives to go. Ship's cats earned their berth by killing rats that chewed rope, hulls and grain and carried plague fleas. Domesticated about 10,000 years ago in the F...

The Eddystone rocks, a submerged gneiss reef 9 to 12 miles off Cornwall in the approach to Plymouth Sound, were hidden at high spring tides, and ships steering clear of them wrecked on France and the Channel Islands instead. Henry Winstanley began a tower there in the 1690s during the Nine Years' War, was seized by a French privateer, and was released on the orders of Louis XIV, who said France wa...

The ship that opened the Age of Discovery was no towering galleon. A 15th century caravel ran roughly 12 to 18 meters long, carried only 50 to 60 tons, and had a narrow hull about three and a half times longer than wide, letting it beat to windward off a deadly lee shore where round hulled cogs and naus were helpless. Its name runs from Portuguese caravela through Late Latin caravus to Byzantine G...

On the evening of March 8, 1862, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton feared a single Confederate ship might steam up the Potomac and shell the White House. The threat was the CSS Virginia, built on the burned hull and surviving steam engines of the frigate USS Merrimack after secessionists took the Gosport Navy Yard in April 1861. Confederate Navy Secretary Stephen Mallory wanted one invincible weapon...

Sea glass is human trash turned into a collectible by the ocean, and the change is as much chemistry as friction. Seawater is an alkaline solution that slowly leaches sodium and calcium from glass through hydration, leaving a microscopic crust of silica that scatters light and gives true sea glass its frosted look. Glass tumbled in fresh water, such as along the Great Lakes, is called beach glass...

The crow's nest is the lookout at the very top of a ship's mainmast, distinct from the top, the lower platform where sailors handled sails and sharpshooters fired in battle. Sitting far from the ship's center of mass, it turns every pitch, roll, and yaw of the hull into wide, violent arcs, so a 10 degree roll could fling a lookout dozens of feet in seconds. The seasickness was so notorious that a...

In the 1850s a man could take a free beer in a San Francisco tavern and wake up at sea, bound for China. Shanghaiing, named for a frequent destination of these ships, grew from the Gold Rush, when whole crews abandoned their ships in San Francisco Bay to chase gold, leaving captains desperate for bodies. A 1790 federal law made leaving a ship before the voyage ended a crime punishable by imprisonm...

In the winter of 1611, trapped in pack ice with no rations left, the crew of the Discovery set explorer Henry Hudson and eight others adrift in a small boat and sailed away. That is mutiny at its starkest, the moment a hierarchy loses the collective obedience it depends on. Article 94 of the US Uniform Code of Military Justice separates mutiny, the intent to usurp military authority, from sedition...

Before foghorns, keeping ships off the rocks in fog meant conch shells, gongs, bells, and cannon. Trinity House favored explosive signals, and its Signal Fog Mark I had keepers at places like Portland Bill wire and fire two gun cotton charges every five minutes for as long as the fog lasted. In 1837 Maine even tried a machine struck triangle with four foot sides. The breakthrough came from Robert...

Marie Tharp, born in 1920 in Ypsilanti, Michigan, rode along with her father, a USDA soil surveyor, and attended more than 17 schools before he retired in 1931. Her mother died when she was 15. She changed majors every semester at Ohio University and graduated in 1943 in English and music, but when World War II emptied the classrooms, the University of Michigan opened its petroleum geology program...

HMS Victory, the oldest commissioned warship in the world, began as a troubled project at Chatham Dockyard in the late 1750s. The first rate ship of the line took roughly 6,000 trees, mostly oak, but Britain's run of victories in 1759 ended the urgency, and her frame sat unfinished for nearly three years. That delay seasoned the timber and is a key reason she survives. At her 1765 launch she was a...

The Umibozu, or sea monk, is a yokai of Japanese sailor lore: a giant, dark, bald headed figure that rises from the waist up out of calm night water that suddenly turns violent. Some accounts make it roughly human size, others tens of meters tall. It may smash a ship with its hands or ask for a ladle and bail seawater into the boat until it sinks, so sailors handed over a ladle with the bottom kno...

Grace Horsley Darling was born in Bamburgh on England's northeast coast and moved as a baby to the Farne Islands, where her father William kept a light for Trinity House on 70 pounds a year. The seventh of nine children, she grew up on Brownsman Island and, from about age 11, on Longstone, a barren slab of rock where a family of 11 shared one round room heated by a single stove. In the early hours...

Hydrothermal vents form where tectonic plates pull apart at mid ocean ridges. Seawater seeps into the crust, is superheated by magma to as much as 464 degrees Celsius, and is kept from boiling by the weight of the ocean above, becoming a supercritical fluid that strips sulfur, iron, copper, and zinc from the rock. When it hits water near two degrees Celsius, the metals precipitate instantly. Black...

The RMS Olympic was White Star Line's answer to Cunard's fast Lusitania and Mauretania. Unable to afford the coal to beat them on speed, J. Bruce Ismay's company, backed by J.P. Morgan, bet on size and luxury and gave Harland and Wolff in Belfast a cost plus five percent contract. Known in the yard as hull 400, she was launched in 1910 with her hull painted pale gray for the press photos, and offe...

The Klabautermann is a water sprite of German, Dutch, and Frisian sailor lore: a figure about two feet tall with a red beard, green teeth, a red or gray jacket, a round hat or nightcap, and a caulking hammer or tobacco pipe. He is bound to the ship's timber. One tradition held that the soul of a stillborn or unbaptized child buried beneath a tree passed into the wood, and on the island of Rugen, c...

The Cape of Good Hope is not Africa's southern tip. That is Cape Agulhas, about 150 kilometers to the east southeast, where the warm Agulhas current meets the cold Benguela current and breeds hurricane force winds and waves up to ten stories high. The rocky peninsula matters because it is where ships stop heading south and start heading east. Around 600 BC, Pharaoh Necho II reportedly sent Phoenic...

Joshua Slocum, the first person to sail single handed around the globe, never learned to swim and saw no point in it a thousand miles from land. Born into a family of 11 children near Nova Scotia's Bay of Fundy, he hated the smell of leather in his father's boot shop, left for good at 16 after his mother died, and studied mathematics, lunar observations, and dead reckoning during off watches until...

The RMS Empress of Ireland, launched in 1906 for Canadian Pacific Steamships, carried immigrants between Liverpool and Quebec City and offered new steerage cabins with doors that closed. After the Titanic she was refitted in 1912 with lifeboat room for 1,686 people, more than she was licensed to carry, yet her 24 watertight doors still had to be shut by hand. On her 96th voyage, under Captain Henr...

On June 7, 1958, about 15,000 people watched the largest ship yet built for North America's Great Lakes slide into the water. It took the sponsor three swings to break the champagne bottle, a spectator died of a heart attack, and the SS Edmund Fitzgerald dropped in sideways, drenching the crowd and slamming into a concrete pier. Financed with $7 million by Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance and bu...