pplpod

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...

The Sargasso Sea has no coastline. It sits inside the North Atlantic gyre, bounded by the Gulf Stream to the west, the North Atlantic Current to the north, the Canary Current to the east, and the North Atlantic Equatorial Current to the south, a clockwise vortex driven by wind and the Coriolis effect. Roughly 1,100 by 3,200 kilometers, between 20 and 35 degrees north with Bermuda near its western...

James Cook was born in Yorkshire in 1728 to a farming family and at 16 became a shop boy in the fishing village of Staithes, lasting about 18 months before moving to Whitby to apprentice on colliers hauling coal in the North Sea. He taught himself algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and astronomy, earned his mariner's license, and at 26 turned down command of a merchant ship to join the Royal Navy as...

On the night of February 17, 1864, the H.L. Hunley became the first combat submarine to sink an enemy warship. It grew out of the Union blockade strangling Southern ports, which led New Orleans financier and customs official Horace Lawson Hunley and builder James McClintock to try underwater attack. Their first boat, the Pioneer, was tested in the Mississippi in 1862 and scuttled as Union forces t...

The deadliest peacetime maritime disaster was not the Titanic but the collision of the Philippine ferry MV Doña Paz and the tanker MT Vector on December 20, 1987. The ferry was built in Hiroshima in 1963 as the Himeyuri Maru, rated for 608 passengers. Sulpicio Lines bought her in 1975 and renamed her Don Sulpicio, and after a June 1979 fire gutted her, with all 1,164 aboard surviving, insurers dec...

In 1869 Scottish shipowner John "Jock" Willis commissioned the Cutty Sark at Dumbarton to beat his rival Thermopylae in the China tea trade, where the first fresh crop into London fetched a premium. Her composite build paired a wrought iron frame with teak and American rock elm planking, sheathed below the waterline in Muntz metal that leached copper and kept barnacles off, and her prismatic coeff...

The ship the world called Evergreen is actually the Ever Given; Evergreen is the Taiwanese operator whose name is painted on the hull. Built by Imabari Shipbuilding in Marugame, Japan, with her keel laid in December 2015 and completion in September 2018, she is an Imabari 20,000 class vessel 399.94 meters long, longer than the Empire State Building laid on its side, 58.8 meters wide, with a 16-met...

Davy Jones's Locker first appears in print in a 1726 voyage narrative attributed to Daniel Defoe, likely drawn from real mariners' speech, where a pirate threatens to toss his captives into it. There it is only a euphemism for drowning and the ocean floor. By 1751 a satirical novel had given the idea a body: a fiend with saucer eyes, three rows of sharp teeth, horns, a tail, and blue smoke pouring...

The Exxon Valdez was built by National Steel and Shipbuilding Company in San Diego, ordered in August 1984 and launched in October 1986: a 987-foot very large crude carrier with a full load displacement over 240,000 long tons, room for 1.48 million barrels, a 31,650 horsepower diesel, and a crew of just 21. Like most tankers of its day it had a single hull, since a double hull cost more steel and...

Before dawn on July 11, 1881, aboard HMS Inconstant off Australia, 16-year-old midshipman Prince George, the future King George V, and 13 others saw a ship crossing their bow glowing with a strange red light, masts and sails sharp against the dark. A man sent forward to the forecastle found nothing, and later that morning the sailor who first reported it fell from the mast and died. The legend beh...

A tidal bore is a wave that runs up a river against its current, and the largest, on China's Qiantang River, can reach 9 meters and travel 40 kilometers per hour. The word comes through Old English from the Old Norse bara, meaning wave or swell. Unlike seismic tsunamis, bores are driven by the moon and sun, and they need two ingredients: a macrotidal range of more than about 6 meters and a funnel-...

Messages in bottles began as science, not romance. Around 310 BC Theophrastus, a protege of Aristotle, released sealed bottles to test whether the Mediterranean was fed by water flowing in from the Atlantic, and in the mid 1700s Benjamin Franklin and others used drift bottles to locate the Gulf Stream. In the early 20th century British marine biologist George Parker Bidder III built seabed drifter...

The Santa Maria was no custom flagship. Built in Pontevedra, Galicia, and launched as La Gallega, she was a secondhand commercial carrack, or nao, that Christopher Columbus leased from Juan de la Cosa, who sailed as her master. With three masts, high castles fore and aft, a main deck of about 62 feet, and a displacement of roughly 150 tons, she was square-rigged and slow beside the 50-ton caravels...

Bernard Moitessier was born in 1925 in French Indochina and learned seafaring as a crew member on traditional trade junks. In 1952 he bought a rotting junk in Indonesia to sail single-handed to France, stopped a leak in the Indian Ocean by diving under the hull with a greased, tarred canvas patch, and after 85 days wrecked on Diego Garcia because his dead reckoning missed a three-knot current. He...

The legend of the SS Ourang Medan, a name meaning Man of Medan, describes a freighter found intact with every crew member dead on their backs, faces frozen in terror, and not a mark on any body, even the ship's dog. The story exists in two versions. In 1940 the ship sends distress calls from south of the Solomon Islands asking for a doctor, then a warship, ending with the phrase "crew has" and sil...

In the late 1830s Isambard Kingdom Brunel and the Great Western Steamship Company planned a safe wooden paddle steamer to follow their success with the Great Western. Then in 1838 two associates rode the iron-hulled Rainbow, and Brunel switched to iron, which avoided the hogging that limited wooden ships to about 300 feet. In 1840, after seeing the screw-driven SS Archimedes, he scrapped half-buil...

For centuries history books showed Vitus Bering as a soft-faced gentleman in a powdered wig, but in 1991 a Russian-Danish team exhumed his grave on a remote island and found a skull with a heavy, angular face. Historians now suspect the famous portrait shows his uncle. Born in Denmark in 1681, Bering joined Peter the Great's new Russian Navy in 1704 and spent the Great Northern War mastering light...

The animals behind many mermaid sightings are manatees: grazers of up to 1,300 pounds that eat as much as 110 pounds of seagrass and other plants a day and whose closest land relatives are elephants and hyraxes. Members of the order Sirenia with the dugong, they descend from four legged shoreline mammals of about 60 million years ago. The name may come from the Latin manus, hand, or a Carib word f...

A clipper was defined not by its rig but by a philosophy: speed over cargo space and operating cost, delivered by a long narrow hull, a hollow bow, and a sharp V shaped deadrise under an enormous sail area. The design traces to the small Baltimore clippers of the Chesapeake, rarely over 200 tons, which as War of 1812 privateers like the Chasseur could sail about 45 degrees into the wind and escape...

The Portuguese man o' war is not a jellyfish but a siphonophore, a colony of zooids that all grow from one fertilized egg and share identical DNA. Through gene expression each zooid locks into a job: dactylozooids hunt and defend, gastrozooids digest, and gonozooids reproduce. Its float, the pneumatophore, can reach 30 centimeters and holds air plus up to 13 percent carbon monoxide made by a gas g...

Ferdinand Magellan, born around 1480 into minor Portuguese nobility, spent eight years fighting in India and Southeast Asia, where at Malacca he uncovered a plot and saved his friend Francisco Serrao. Serrao's letters from the Moluccas described the spice wealth there. A leg wound in Morocco left Magellan with a limp, false charges of trading with the enemy ruined him, and King Manuel I rejected h...

Francis Drake, born around 1540 in Devon to a Protestant farmer and preacher, learned seamanship on a small trading ship and in the 1560s joined his relative John Hawkins in a crown backed push into the West African slave trade. In 1568 a Spanish surprise attack at San Juan de Ulua slaughtered hundreds of English sailors, and Drake fled in the Judith, leaving Hawkins surrounded. Shut out of legiti...