Showing posts with the label Ship

Ernest Bazin: The Ship That Rolled on Wheels

Jan 23, 2024

Between 1892 and 1893, French inventor Ernest Bazin filed patent for an unusual ship design. Instead of gliding through water, which had hit...

MS Hans Hedtoft: Denmark’s Titanic

Oct 3, 2023

Nearly five decades after the sinking of the Titanic , another tragedy struck in the oceans. A Danish liner was on her maiden voyage off the...

Princess May’s Dramatic Grounding

Jan 23, 2023

In August 1910, a Canadian steamship named Princess May ran aground near Sentinel Island, off the coast of Alaska, in the most spectacular ...

Khian Sea: The Wandering Garbage Barge

Dec 6, 2022

Every year, millions of tons of garbage are shipped out by wealthy countries to poorer countries in Africa, Asia and South America to be rec...

Wilhelm Gustloff: The Deadliest Ship Disaster You Never Heard Of

Aug 22, 2022

The sinking of the British ocean liner Titanic in 1912, with over 1,500 fatalities, is probably the most famous shipwreck of all time, but n...

Belyana: Russia’s Giant Wooden Boats

Dec 22, 2021

The Belyana were some of the largest wooden ships ever built. Yet, they were only meant for a single journey. They were built to transport...

The World’s Largest Sailing Ship

Aug 12, 2021

On December 14, 1907, a large sailing ship wrecked off the coast of Annet, in the Isles of Scilly, killing all but two of her eighteen crew ...

HMS Diamond Rock: The Stone Frigate

Jun 11, 2021

South of Martinique, an island in the eastern Caribbean Sea, lies a small basalt island called Diamond Rock. With an imposing peak of 175 me...

Women And Children Last: The Infamous Sinking of La Bourgogne

May 3, 2021

The sinking of the French ocean liner SS La Bourgogne on the morning of 4 July 1898 was one of the most disgraceful of disasters in mariti...

Dazzle Camouflage: Hiding in Plain Sight

Mar 5, 2021

Unlike a submarine that can lurk beneath the waves, or an artillery tank that can camouflage itself among trees and the surrounding terrain,...

Flettner Rotor: Sailing Ships Without Sails

Feb 16, 2021

In 1926, a 2,000-ton steel-hulled schooner named Buckau made an extraordinary crossing across the Atlantic. Although the Buckau was techni...

SS Baychimo: The Unsinkable Ghost Ship

Dec 16, 2020

Ships aren’t meant to sink, but sometimes you have to wonder what miraculous forces kept a vessel afloat. The SS Baychimo was such a ship. ...

The Grain Race

Apr 9, 2020

By the end of the 19th century, steam-powered vessels had almost completely replaced sailing ships in the commercial shipping business. But ...

HMS Zubian: The Conjoined Ship

Jan 8, 2020

It is not unusual for navies to cannibalize ships decommissioned or rendered unserviceable by accidents for parts, but rarely an entire new ...

HMS Porcupine: The Warship That Became Two

Jan 8, 2020

In 1939, the British Royal Navy ordered Vickers-Armstrongs on the River Tyne to build a new P-class destroyer named HMS Porcupine . The ship...

Caligula’s Pleasure Ships of Lake Nemi

Nov 18, 2019

Two thousand years ago, the debauched Roman emperor Caligula ordered the construction of two large floating pleasure barges on the relativel...

Disposable Ships

Oct 12, 2019

Before the Industrial Revolution, the British shipbuilding industry was completely dependent on the countries around the Baltic Sea for timb...

Russia’s Circular Warships

Sep 28, 2019

In the latter half of the 19th century, ships began to transition from wood to iron and many engineers thought the time was ripe to experime...

Lake Titicaca’s 150-year Old Steamship That Runs on Dung

Aug 10, 2019

The BAP Puno. Photo credit: Peruvian Navy . Lake Titicaca, the largest lake in South America, is situated high up in the Andes on the bord...

The Warship That Couldn’t Stay Afloat

May 30, 2019

During the American Civil War, the Union Navy designed a class of warships called “Casco” that could submerge its hull at will to make the b...