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Robert Fulton was born in 1765 on a farm in Little Britain, Pennsylvania, and first made his living as a portrait painter in Philadelphia, earning enough by 1785 to buy a farm near Pittsburgh for his mother. Tuberculosis in 1786 sent him to England for the sea air, where he studied under Benjamin West and then caught canal mania. He patented a dredging machine, promoted inclined planes to replace...

The Mayflower was an aging cargo ship that had hauled wine between England and France and reeked of it. Its passengers included English separatists who had fled to Leiden in Holland, where farmers were forced into grueling textile work washing wool. With the 12 year truce between the Dutch and Spain ending and King James I courting Dutch alliances, they chose North America despite Jamestown's deat...

Robert FitzRoy was born in 1805, a descendant of King Charles II, joined the Royal Navy at 12, and became the first officer to score full marks on the lieutenant's exam. In 1828, in his early 20s, he took temporary command of HMS Beagle off Tierra del Fuego after Captain Pringle Stokes died by suicide, a loss that left him with a lifelong fear of breaking down under the isolation of command. When...

Eddie Aikau was born in May 1946 in Kahului, Maui, the third of six children of Solomon and Henrietta Aikau, and a descendant of Hewahewa, high priest to Kamehameha I and Kamehameha II. In 1959 the family moved to Oahu and lived rent free on a nine acre Chinese cemetery in exchange for keeping the grounds. At 16 Eddie left school and worked at a Dole pineapple cannery to buy his first surfboard. H...

The standard diving dress, the classic copper hat rig, could weigh up to 190 pounds of canvas, rubber, lead, and spun copper, and it began as firefighting gear. In 1820s England, John Deane watched horses trapped in a burning stable and in 1823 patented a smoke helmet fed by a hose and a double bellows. Lacking capital, the Deane brothers sold the patent to their employer Edward Barnard, who broug...

The blue-ringed octopuses of the genus Hapalochlaena are only about five to eight inches long, yet one carries enough venom to kill more than 20 adults. Found from Japan to Australia across the Pacific and Indian Oceans, they live two to three years, hide shyly in shells and rock crevices, and camouflage with pigment cells called chromatophores. When threatened, one turns bright yellow and flashes...

For roughly 2,000 years, the ama, or sea women, of Japan have freedived into cold coastal water on a single breath. Hard records place them in the Heian period, when they gathered seaweed, shellfish, sea urchins, and above all abalone, which was presented as a sacred offering to emperors and major shrines. They worked without goggles until the late 19th or early 20th century, finding their catch b...

The name Jolly Roger first appears firmly in Captain Charles Johnson's 1724 A General History of the Pirates, where Bartholomew Roberts and Francis Spriggs both call their quite different flags by it, and neither featured a skull and crossbones. Theories trace it to Old Roger, slang for the devil, to the French jolie rouge for the red flags of privateers, or to roger meaning rogue. Black with a wh...

In September 1522 the survivors of the Magellan and Elcano expedition, the first to circle the globe, reached the Cape Verde Islands with logs saying Wednesday, July 9, while locals said Thursday, July 10. Sailing west had cost them a day, as the 14th century geographer Abu'l-Fida had predicted. The International Date Line roughly follows the 180 degree meridian, but the 1884 International Meridia...

Portolan charts are medieval nautical maps of the Mediterranean whose coastlines are startlingly accurate. The name, applied in the 1890s, comes from the Italian portolano, a book of sailing directions, but surviving charts from before 1500 are mostly drawn on vellum and covered in rhumb lines radiating from compass roses in 16 and later 32 directions. Sailors held one bearing along a line to thei...

When a great whale dies and its lungs deflate, its body, slightly denser than seawater, sinks fast enough to pass the midwater scavengers, and cold and pressure keep gases dissolved so it reaches the deep seafloor intact. The first clue came in 1854, when a new mussel species was taken from floating whale blubber, and in the 1960s trawlers hauled up Osteopelta limpets attached to whale bone. On Fe...

The diving bell rests on a principle Aristotle recorded in the 4th century BC: an upturned cauldron forced straight down traps its air. In 1535 Guglielmo de Lorena used a bell to explore Roman barges in Lake Nemi, staying down over an hour until cold and exhaustion drove him up. The 1600s brought an underwater gold rush: Edward Bendall cleared a wreck from Boston Harbor in 1642, Albrecht von Treil...

In October 844, 80 longships sailed up the Guadalquivir River in the Emirate of Cordoba and besieged Seville, a reach made possible by one technology. The longship's roots run from Bronze Age Swedish petroglyphs around 1800 BC and the Hjortspring boat of about 350 BC to the Nydam ship of around 320 AD, which introduced clinker building with overlapping planks fastened by thousands of iron rivets s...

Duke Kahanamoku was born in Honolulu in 1890, three years before the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. Duke was his given name, inherited from his father, who was named for Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, and his family were of alii descent and served the Kamehameha royals as kahu. He left the Kamehameha Schools to help support his family and grew up on Waikiki Beach, surfing a 16 foot, 114 pou...

The astrolabe, from the Greek for star taker, is a handheld brass model of the sky that tells time, finds latitude, surveys heights, and predicts the solstice. Its base, the mater, holds interchangeable plates called tympans engraved for specific latitudes using stereographic projection, and over them turns the rete, an open star map whose pointers were shaped like leaves, hands, dogs' heads, or d...

The HMS Wager began around 1734 as an East Indiaman, a wide cargo hauler, and the Royal Navy bought her for a little over 3,900 pounds and spent about 7,000 more at Deptford Dockyard to make her a 28 gun sixth rate. Assigned as the supply ship for Commodore George Anson's 1,800 man expedition against Spain's Pacific coast of South America, she was crewed with aged, sick, and invalid men while the...

In 1768 the British Board of Customs asked Benjamin Franklin why mail packets from Falmouth, Cornwall took weeks longer to reach New York than American merchant ships. His cousin Timothy Folger, a Nantucket whaling captain, explained that the British sailed straight into a fast current that whalers read through water temperature, color, and whale behavior, and in 1769 Franklin sent the British a c...

A letter of marque and reprisal was the paper that separated a privateer from a pirate: carry it and you were a prisoner of war with a lawyer, lose it and you were hostis humani generis, an enemy of mankind bound for the gallows. Henry III issued early commissions around 1243 and the first documented letter appeared under Edward I in 1295, letting a robbed merchant recover his exact losses from th...

On July 10, 1985, French agents sank the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior at Marsden Wharf in Auckland, New Zealand, in an operation code named Operation Satanique. France had tested nuclear weapons at Mururoa Atoll in French Polynesia since 1966, South Pacific nations had signed the Treaty of Rarotonga declaring a nuclear free zone, and Greenpeace, fresh from relocating about 300 Marshall Isla...

The RMS Queen Mary began in December 1930 as Hull 534 at the John Brown and Company shipyard in Clydebank, Scotland, and the Great Depression halted work in December 1931, leaving rooks nesting in the rusting frame for over two years. A British government loan revived her on condition that bitter rivals Cunard and White Star merge, and by 1934 they were Cunard White Star. Cunard meant to name her...

On January 17, 1955, the USS Nautilus (SSN-571) backed away from its pier on the Thames River in Groton, Connecticut, with Hyman G. Rickover, the father of the nuclear Navy, aboard and press boats swarming. A terrifying noise from the starboard reduction gear turned out to be a loose locking pin on a retaining nut, and minutes later a signalman blinked the message: underway on nuclear power. Autho...

The bowline appears on the 26th century BC solar ship of the pharaoh Khufu, and more than 4,500 years later the Federal Aviation Administration recommends it for tying down light aircraft while UK firefighters must pass a test tying it. Its job is to make a fixed loop that will not shrink, and the rabbit out of the hole mnemonic describes a structure identical to the sheet bend. Under load the kno...

In 1894, eight-year-old William Francis Gibbs watched the liner SS St. Louis launch at a Philadelphia shipyard and decided he would build the greatest American ship in history. He made his name redesigning the Leviathan, a German ship seized as a World War I prize, and cemented it with his first original design, the SS Malolo, which was rammed amidships by a freighter in fog during sea trials yet...

DSV Alvin, the deep research submersible built by the General Mills Electronics Group, was commissioned on June 5, 1964, owned by the U.S. Navy, operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and named for Allyn Vine. Unlike fuel-buoyed bathyscaphes, it used syntactic foam, hollow glass microspheres in epoxy, to stay maneuverable at 17 tons, carrying a pilot and two observers in a two-inch...

The word junk came from the Javanese and Malay jong, a Southeast Asian trading ship, through the Portuguese junco, and Europeans applied it to the quite different Chinese ships called chuan. Where Austronesian jong were built with lashed lugs, no iron, and twin side rudders, chuan used iron nails and clamps and, since the first century CE, a single central stern rudder. Evolving from bamboo rafts...