Update: Fire on Car Carrier Felicity Ace, Adrift Off Azores, Burning Out

Posted on by February 21, 2022

Reuters is reporting that the fire, which swept through the car carrier Felicity Ace carrying thousands of luxury cars, leaving it adrift off Portugal’s Azores islands has lost its intensity, probably because there is little left to burn, a port official said.

The Felicity Ace, carrying around 4,000 vehicles including Porsches, Audis, and Bentleys, some electric with lithium-ion batteries, caught fire in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on Wednesday.

“The fire has subsided in recent hours,” João Mendes Cabeças, captain of the nearest port in the Azorean island of Faial, told Lusa news agency, saying there was probably little combustible material left to burn.

Continue reading →

Black History Month — First Black Liberty Ship Captain, Hugh Mulzac, Says No To Jim Crow

Posted on by February 20, 2022

Hugh Mulzak served as the first Black Liberty ship captain in World War II. When offered the command, he refused to sail with a segregated crew. An updated repost in honor of Black History Month.

Born in 1886 on Union Island in Saint Vincent Grenadines, he went to sea at 21 and served on British, Norwegian, and American sail and steam-powered ships. After studying at the Swansea Nautical College in South Wales, he earned a mate’s license in 1910. He served as a deck officer on four ships during World War I.

In 1918, he became a naturalized US citizen and in 1920 sat for his Master’s license, earning a perfect score on the test. Despite his experience and qualifications, he was generally only able to find work aboard American ships as a messman or cook. Mulzak has been described as “the most over-qualified ship’s cook in maritime history.”

Continue reading →

Twelve Missing After Euroferry Olympia Catches Fire Near Corfu

Posted on by February 19, 2022

This has been a bad week for shipboard fires. The car carrier Felicity Ace caught fire Wednesday in the Atlantic, off the Azores, and is still burning and adrift, awaiting salvage tugs. Fortunately, the 22 person crew was evacuated safely.

Yesterday, a blaze swept through the Euroferry Olympia, a ferry sailing from Greece to Italy. Reuters reports that of the 241 passengers and 51 crew on board when the fire broke out, 12 people are still missing. Rescue vessels moved most of the 280 people who were rescued to the nearby island of Corfu.

Continue reading →

Black History Month Repost — William Tillman and the Privateer Jefferson Davis

Posted on by February 18, 2022

A repost in honor of Black History Month. 

William Tillman was one of the first black heroes of the American Civil War. He was not a soldier but rather a 27-year-old  cook-steward on the schooner S.J. Waring.  On July 7, 1861, the schooner was captured by the Confederate privateer Jefferson Davis while about 150 miles from Sandy Hook, New York.  Captain Smith, the master of the S.J. Waring was taken aboard the Jefferson Davis, and a five-man prize crew was put aboard the schooner, with orders to sail her to a Southern port where the ship and her cargo would be sold.

Continue reading →

Car Carrier Felicity Ace on Fire and Adrift in the Atlantic

Posted on by February 17, 2022

The car carrier Felicity Ace caught fire yesterday in the Atlantic Ocean, 90 miles southwest of the Azores. The Portuguese Navy and four merchant ships in the area responded to the car carrier’s distress call. The crew of 22 were all safely evacuated and transported by helicopter to Faial island. The ship is now adrift and on fire, awaiting salvage tugs. No details are currently available as to the cause of the fire, other than that it broke out one of the ship’s cargo decks.

The Felicity Ace had departed from the port in Emden, Germany on February 10, carrying vehicles from a number of Volkswagen Auto Group brands, including Porsche, Bentley, Audi, and VW. The ship was originally expected to arrive at Davisville, Rhode Island on the morning of February 23.

Continue reading →

Hybrid Cruise Ship Le Commandant Charcot Assists RRS Sir David Attenborough in Antarctic Ice

Posted on by February 16, 2022

Britain’s new polar expedition ship, the RRS Sir David Attenborough, encountered particularly difficult sea ice conditions during a resupply mission as part of the research ship’s first polar expedition. It was assisted in its attempt to deliver the supplies to support the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, by a new and distinctive expedition cruise ship, Le Commandant Charcot, operated by the French cruise company Compagnie du Ponant.

RRS Sir David Attenborough is capable of breaking through 1-meter thick ice at a speed of three knots. It is a Polar Class 5 vessel, classed as “ice-capable” but not an icebreaker. Le Commandant Charcot is an LNG-fueled electric hybrid icebreaker cruise ship; the first PC2 Polar Class cruise ship with the ability to break through ice up to 2.5-meter thick at a speed of three knots.

Continue reading →

Black History Month Repost — Harriet Tubman & the Great Combahee Ferry Raid

Posted on by February 15, 2022

Born a slave, Harriet Tubman escaped and would become a leading “conductor” on the “Underground Railroad” which helped slaves escape from bondage in the South to freedom in the North and in Canada, prior to the Civil War.  Nicknamed “Moses,” she is said to have made more than nineteen trips back into the slave-holding South to rescue an estimated 70 slaves. Tubman’s greatest rescue mission, however, came when she planned and help lead a Union riverboat raid at Combahee Ferry in South Carolina on the second of June, 1863, freeing over 720 slaves.

In honor both of Harriet Tubman and Black History Month, here is an updated repost about the Great Combahee Ferry Raid.

Tubman and black Union soldiers under the command of Union Colonel James Montgomery set off on three small Federal gunboats; the Sentinel, Harriet A. Weed, and John Adams; from Beaufort, South Carolina up the Combahee River. Tubman had scouted the route previously to identify the location of Confederate mines and troops and to determine where best to land to free the plantation slaves.  One of the gunboats, the Sentinel, ran aground shortly after leaving Beaufort while the other two continued upriver.

Continue reading →

Repost: Celebrating Frederick Douglass on Valentine’s Day — “I Will Take to the Water”

Posted on by February 14, 2022

Happy Valentine’s Day! In honor of both the day and Black History Month, an updated repost about Frederick Douglass. But what does Valentine’s Day have to do with Frederick Douglass?  As a slave, Douglass never knew the date of his birth, so he chose to celebrate it every year on February 14th.

Frederick Douglass was born around 1818. From an early age, he developed a close attachment to ships and the sea. His path to freedom led directly through the docks and shipyards of Baltimore, Maryland.

Continue reading →

Update: The Weather Window That Never Opened, Sails of Change Postpones Jules Verne Attempt

Posted on by February 13, 2022

In November we posted about the maxi-trimaran Sails of Change (ex-Spindrift 2) and its crew of 11, waiting to set off from La Trinité-sur-Mer, in southwest Brittany, on their latest attempt to claim the Jules Verne Trophy. To win the trophy, they would have to beat the around the world record of 40d 23h 30′ 30″ set by Francis Joyon and his crew in 2017.

To beat the record, they needed exactly the right winds and weather to carry them through the first section of the route. Between November 1 and the end of January, they were waiting for a particular weather window that never opened. Lacking a suitable weather pattern for the maxi-trimaran to have a realistic chance of beating the record, team leaders Dona Bertarelli and Yann Guichard announced the end of voyage standby and their plans to start the attempt again later this year.

Continue reading →

Putin’s Yacht Graceful Makes Hasty Departure from Germany

Posted on by February 12, 2022

German media reports that the 83-meter yacht, Graceful, believed to be owned by Vladimir Putin, has made a hasty departure from Hamburg, Germany, bound for Russia, before finishing repairs and renovations at the Blohm and Voss shipyard. Some speculate that the move is meant to avoid confiscation or sanctions in the event Russia invades Ukraine and triggers reprisals. Graceful was spotted on a public maritime-traffic-tracking site sailing for Kaliningrad.

Graceful is the largest and most expensive of four yachts believed to be owned by Putin. The other yachts are the 57-meter Olympia, the 54-meter Chayka, and the 35-meter Petrel.  Collectively, the yachts are estimated to be valued at approximately $200 million.

Black History Month: Remembering Jesse L. Brown, First African-American Naval Pilot

Posted on by February 11, 2022

In honor of Black History Month, an updated repost about the first African-American pilot in the US Navy, Jesse L. Brown.

The story goes that when young Jesse Leroy Brown worked in the cotton fields of Mississippi beside his sharecropper father, whenever he would see a plane in the sky above, he would declare that one day, he would be a pilot. No one took him seriously.

Nevertheless, the young man, born in born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in 1926, made a name for himself as an athlete in high school and won honors as a math student. In 1944, Jesse Brown was enrolled as the only black student in the engineering program at Ohio State Univesity.

Continue reading →

Descendants of the Clotilda, the Last Slave Ship, Commemorate Discovery of the Wreck

Posted on by February 10, 2022

For several years, we have followed the search for and the ultimate discovery of the schooner Clotilda, believed to be the last ship to carry enslaved Africans to the United States. Now, descendants of the survivors are commemorating the discovery of the wreck of the infamous slave ship and the resilience of the 110 captives who survived the voyage. 

The international slave trade had been illegal in the United States since 1807. Nevertheless, in the autumn of 1859, or the summer of 1860, depending on the source, Captain William Foster brought the schooner, Clotilda, into Mobile Bay with a cargo of 110 captives from West Africa. Federal authorities had been tipped off to the arrival of the schooner. Fearful of criminal charges, Captain Foster arrived in the river at night and transferred his human cargo to a riverboat, then burned and scuttled the Clotilda. 

Continue reading →

Flagship Niagara to Sail Again in 2022

Posted on by February 9, 2022

Officials from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC) have confirmed that Brig Niagara, Pennsylvania’s Flagship, will sail the Great Lakes again this summer.

Erie News Now reports that because of concerns over COVID-19, Niagara hasn’t sailed since 2019 — except to travel to dry dock in Cleveland for some critical maintenance and repairs.

In a news release issued in December by the Flagship Niagara League, as the freshly repaired and repainted brig returned to the Port of Erie, officials said, “Once inspected by the U.S. Coast Guard, dockside tours will resume at the Erie Maritime Museum.  Next year, (2022) Niagara will return to her normal schedule of sail training and sailing to all five Great Lakes as part of Tall Ships Challenge in 2022.”

Continue reading →

Update: Crystal Serenity and Crystal Symphony Arrested in the Bahamas

Posted on by February 8, 2022

In late January, we posted about how the cruise ship Crystal Symphony, which had been bound for Miami, suddenly changed course and diverted to the Bahamas, after a United States federal judge ordered the ship seized over a lawsuit regarding unpaid fuel bills. Not long after, the Crystal Symphony followed the Serenity‘s example.

Admiralty law has caught up with the errant ships. Both the Crystal Serenity and Crystal Symphony are now in Freeport, Bahamas and both ships have been arrested for unpaid bills.

Continue reading →

Iceland to End Whaling by 2024 Citing Falling Demand & Continued Controversy

Posted on by February 7, 2022

The government of Iceland has announced an end to commercial whaling by 2024.

“There are few justifications to authorize whale hunting beyond 2024,” when current quotas expire, Minister of Fisheries and Agriculture Svandís Svavarsdóttir said in an op-ed in Friday’s Morgunblaðið newspaper.

The minister wrote it was “undisputed” that whale hunting had not had much economic significance to Iceland in recent years, with no big whale caught in the last three years, except for one minke whale in 2021.

Continue reading →