Melville Memorial, 6 Pearl Street, Photo: Wally Gobetz
We missed the bicentennial of Herman Melville‘s birthday. He was born just over 200 years ago on August 1, 1819, in a boarding house on 6 Pearl Street, in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. In honor of the bicentennial here is an updated post from a few years ago on visiting Melville’s birthplace.
The boarding house where Melville was born is long gone. A 42-story gleaming glass and metal skyscraper, 17 State Street, rises where the building once stood. One photographer referred to the building as a “great white whale” which is certainly evocative. While the boarding house is gone, there is a plaque and bronze bust of Melville roughly on the site of the original structure.
At about 9AM on January 15, 1942, the British tanker 
In a blistering letter to his forces from the commander in charge of the Navy SEALs, Rear Adm. Colin Green, warns “We have a problem.” The sentence was in bold-faced print and underlined. The letter follows a series of incidents of alleged misbehavior by the elite special operations forces, including alleged illegal activity by two Navy SEAL teams.
The 
In the general category of you can’t make this stuff up, in early hours of Friday morning, a mass brawl broke out on the P&O Britannia, in which passengers used furniture and plates as weapons, according to witnesses. Six people—three men and three women—were treated for bruises and cuts sustained in the melee. The ship was returning from a week-long cruise to Norway’s fjords. The brawl reportedly followed an alcohol-fuelled afternoon of “patriotic” partying on the ship’s deck.
The 
Here is a visually stunning twelve-minute animation, Age of Sail by Google Spotlight Stories. The story itself is a bit anemic, but the visuals largely make up for it. The producers describe the video as follows:
A 15-year-old girl was allegedly plied with liquor aboard a Royal Caribbean ship by a group of men, before being taken to a cabin and gang-raped. She was on a seven-day cruise with her two sisters and grandparents beginning the day after Christmas in 2015. She alleges that everything but the rape took place in full view of crew and security cameras, yet nobody intervened to prevent the men from buying alcohol for her or leading her away to the cabin.
For a number of years, we have followed the 
In January 1968, the French submarine 
Earlier this year, technicians operating a robotic camera surveying a route for a natural gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea, were surprised to find a 500-year-old shipwreck virtually intact on the seafloor. The ship was found at a depth of 141 meters. The lack of oxygen in the cold and brackish waters of the Baltic Sea help to slow the decay of the ship, which is sitting on the bottom with two masts still rising vertically, the beakhead and bowsprit still projecting from the prow. The remains of a yard rests diagonally on deck while nearby an unlaunched ship’s boat sits snug against the portside gunnel. A bilge pump, capstain, and an anchor, still catted to the bow, are also visible. The shape of the ship’s anchor help date the ship to the late 15th or early 16th century. 
On April 23rd, 1945, the patrol boat 
