The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse marking the shoals which have become known as the “graveyard of ships,” is often referred to as Hamilton’s lighthouse. (The current lighthouse is the second built at the site.) The story goes that when the teen-aged Alexander Hamilton was sent from St. Croix to the North American colonies to pursue an education in the summer of 1772, he sailed on the Thunderbolt, which caught fire off Cape Hatteras and very nearly sank. Young Alexander was said to have helped fight the fire. The ship is said to have come perilously close to drifting onto the deadly Diamond Shoals. Years later, in 1802, as Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton recalled his brush with death and supported building a lighthouse on Cape Hatteras.
That is the story anyway. Is any of it true? Hard to say. As the Secretary of the Treasury, the first lighthouse authorized by the Department of the Treasury was not the Hatteras lighthouse but the Boston light as well as several other lighthouses in New England. That may not challenge the story, but it complicates it.
They usually make it look so easy. The 
After being 
For those near New York harbor, there is a very interesting exhibit opening on the historic 
I first arrived in New York harbor forty years ago, as a freshly minted naval architect working for Moore McCormack. In those days, the Brooklyn docks were crowded with US flag shipping companies, many with their headquarters or sales offices in Lower Manhattan. Just to the north, in the narrow streets of Tribecca and Soho were clusters of little workshops where often elderly craftsmen repaired or calibrated chronometers and sextants, and rebuilt or reconditioned everything from pumps and valves to ship’s order telegraphs to the old tube radar sets. 
For Royal Navy sailors and British soldiers in the West Indies during the 18th century, rum was a refuge for the discomforts of the duties of the day. The rum also may have been killing them. It wasn’t the alcohol, but the way it was distilled that proved deadly.
Yesterday, we posted about signing aboard as trainee crew on the square rigged barque Picton Castle, to sail all or part of the way around the world. But what if you want to sail in a globe girdling ocean race instead of on a beautiful square-rigger? To participate in an around the world ocean race usually requires millions and often tens of millions of dollars, but there is an alternative — the