The RV Petrel continues its amazing streak of underwater discoveries. Now, it has located the wreckage of what is believed to be the USS Johnston at a depth of 20,400 ft in the Philippine Sea. The wreck is believed to … Continue reading
Category Archives: History
The so-called Ohio River ghost ship does not seem to be really haunted, except perhaps by a long and illustrious past. A vessel of many names, she has been known as Celt, Sachem, USS Phenakite, Sightseer, and Circle Line V. … Continue reading
I recently came back from a voyage on a small ship along the west coast of Iceland. One of the highlights of the trip were stops in ports in the Westfjords, an isolated peninsula in the northwest of the island. … Continue reading
The Battle of Leyte Gulf was fought seventy-five years ago this week between the US and Australian navies and the Imperial Japanese Navy. It was the largest naval battle of World War II and by some standards the largest naval … Continue reading
The RV Petrel has located the wreckage of the Japanese aircraft carrier Akagi, sunk in the Battle of Midway in June 1942. The ship is the second of two sunken Japanese carriers that the Petrel has located two days apart. … Continue reading
The Long Beach Bar Light was built in 1871 as a “screwpile” lighthouse on the North Fork of Eastern Long Island, off Orient, New York. Because a screwpile lighthouse is a lighthouse that stands on thin piles that are screwed … Continue reading
When Simeon Lowell moved his boat-building business to Amesbury, Massachusetts in 1793, I wonder whether he could have possibly imagined that the boat shop would still be producing boats, dories, and skiffs 226 years later. Lowell’s Boat Shop is the … Continue reading
Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, died almost exactly a year ago. Nevertheless, his passion for underwater archeology lives on in the operation of the Research Vessel Petrel, which is fully funded by Allen’s estate. The ship’s mission is to … Continue reading
One open question about the Bronze Age in the Middle East was where the tin was sourced. Bronze is an alloy of primarily copper and tin. Recently, scientists identified the surprising source of tin ingots found in three shipwrecks off … Continue reading
Civilian divers were on an archeological dive on the London, a Royal Navy ship built-in 1656 which exploded and sank in 1665 in the Thames Estuary. They were shocked to find a large World War II bomb in the wreck. … Continue reading
The recent activation by TRANSCOM of 28 cargo ships, makes it a good time to take a look back at eight iconic shps from the 1970s still in service today. When I was a young student of naval architecture at … Continue reading
Here is a wholly random question. When and where was William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet first performed on shipboard? The first recorded shipboard performance of Hamlet, and one of the earlier performances anywhere, was in September 1607 on the East India Company … Continue reading
More evidence that the first travelers to the Americas may have been sailors. The classic theory of the arrival of early people in North America was the Clovis model. The theory was that early humans migrated to North America by … Continue reading
I recently came across a reference for a “nocturnal for both bears.” It sounded, at first, like a piece of music written by Mussorgsky or perhaps Prokofiev, which it isn’t. It is a device used for telling time at night … Continue reading
Recent video of the extremely well-preserved wreck of Franklin’s ship Terror may shed new light on the many mysteries of Franklin’s lost expedition. In 1845, Captain Sir John Franklin departed England in command of two specially outfitted ships, Erebus and … Continue reading