Anglonautes > English vocabulary > Transports

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Vocabulary > Transports > Ship / Boat

Getting there is half the fun!
Collection: Ad*Access
Company: Cunard White Star Line
Product: relaxing atmosphere
Publication: New Yorker
Publication Type: Magazine
Year: 1952
Number of Pages: 1
Transcription: © Cunard White Star Limited, 1999
Subject: Transportation--Ships
Illustration--Drawing
Item Number: T3486
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/adaccess.T3486/

Mike Roper Fran Matera 18.12.2004
http://www.kingfeatures.com/features/comics/sroper/about.htm

water

waterfront

sea

go through stormy seas

heavy seas

take to the seas

Photographer Alan Villiers (1903-1982 )
chronicles the last days of merchant sailing
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/gallery/2009/mar/18/alan-villiers-sailing-ships-photography?picture=344763272
http://www.nmm.ac.uk/explore/sea-and-ships/facts/ships-and-seafarers/the-photography-of-alan-villiers

sail
http://www.nps.gov/safr/forteachers/upload/shape_of_ships.pdf

set sail for...

set off

knot

ocean

coast

coastguards

vessel

merchant marine vessel

ship

cargo ship

654-foot ship

warship, warships

propeller-driven ship

naval vessel

lie

lie in the ordinary

lie moored at...

shipyard
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jul/01/glasgow-shipyards-closure-threat

yard

harbour (Br) / harbor (Am)
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/1-in-8-million/index.html

boat
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/may/14/father-son-die-river-avon

small motorised boat

sailboat

boat > Patrick Harris, the Boat Dweller
Known as Captain Pat, Mr. Harris, 58,
lives on a 1920s sailboat and makes his living giving tours of New York Harbor.
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/1-in-8-million/index.html

riverboat

boatyard

tug
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2012/apr/10/titanic-events-100th-anniversary-belfast

tow

anchor

drop anchor

off the coast

pontoon

dock

cast off

vessel

trawler

freighter

harbor area

marina

at the marina

berth

dock slip

yacht

megayachts / colossal cruisers
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/13/travel/escapes/13yacht.html

cruise
http://www.guardian.co.uk/antarctic/story/0,,2216335,00.html

cruise ship
http://www.guardian.co.uk/antarctic/story/0,,2215951,00.html

a 2,000-passenger cruise ship

cabin cruiser
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2216283,00.html

adventure cruising
http://travel.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/travel/holiday_type/cruises/article2929544.ece

voyage

maiden voyage
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/10/science/a-new-look-at-natures-role-in-the-titanics-sinking.html

journey

draft

deep

dinghy

lower a dinghy

get ashore

sail

sail single-handedly around the world non-stop

sailor

old salt

captain

mutiny

an 160,000 gross ton vessel

passenger ship

liner
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/10/science/a-new-look-at-natures-role-in-the-titanics-sinking.html

luxurious fittings

Queen Mary 2

set a new record for the Atlantic crossing

deck

footbridge

gangway

engine room

double bottom ≠ double hull

steel sheath

dockside

port side

starboard side

the ship's starboard

luxury liner

Cutty Sark
the world's last remaining tea clipper
and one of Britain's most important maritime treasures

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/cutty-sark

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/23/in-praise-of-restored-cutty-sark
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/interactive/2012/apr/23/cutty-sark-restoration-interactive-guide
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2084503,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/gallery/2007/may/21/1?picture=329885920
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/leader/2007/05/up_from_the_ashes.html
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/archives/2007/05/21/the_heartstopping_beauty_of_cutty_sark_.html
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/podcasts/2007/05/audio_stephen_archer_on_the_cu.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/flash/0,,1675617,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1817806.ece
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1819354.ece
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article506862.ece

"All Details Are Lacking."

The New York Herald's headline announcing the sinking of the Titanic
is evidence of how little the newspapers first knew of the disaster and the fate of the ship's passengers.
The Herald was among the first New York papers to print news of the Titanic tragedy.
Although the evening Globe and Commercial Advertiser had more extensive coverage of the disaster,
most of the other morning papers did not begin their coverage until April 16, 1912.
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/trm096.html

New York Herald,
April 15, 1912
Serial & Government Publications Division (53.1)
American Treasures of The Library of Congress

Eva Hart is pictured as a seven-year-old in this photograph taken in 1912

with her father, Benjamin, and mother, Esther.

Eva and her mother survived the sinking of the British liner Titanic

on April 14, 1912 off Newfoundland,

but her father perished in the disaster.

Associated Press

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Titanic at 100 years April 6, 2012
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2012/04/the_titanic_at_100_years.html

Titanic

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/t/titanic/index.html

Titanic at 100 years April 6, 2012

The sinking of the RMS Titanic caused the deaths of 1,517
of its 2,229 passengers and crew (official numbers vary slightly)
in one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history.
The 712 survivors were taken aboard the RMS Carpathia.
Few disasters have had such resonance and far-reaching effects
on the fabric of society as the sinking of the Titanic.
It affected attitudes toward social injustice,
altered the way the North Atlantic passenger trade was conducted,
changed the regulations for numbers of lifeboats carried aboard passenger vessels
and created an International Ice Patrol
(where commercial ships crossing the North Atlantic still, today,
radio in their positions and ice sightings).
The 1985 discovery of the Titanic wreck on the ocean floor
marked a turning point for public awareness of the ocean
and for the development of new areas of science and technology.
April 15, 2012 will mark the 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster.
It has become one of the most famous ships in history,
her memory kept alive by numerous books, films, exhibits and memorials

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2012/04/the_titanic_at_100_years.html

wreck

wreckage

on the ocean floor
at a depth of more than 10,000ft
and about 350 miles south of Newfoundland

crew members

stricken ship
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/04/stricken-ship-leaks-fuel-wales
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weather/Story/0,,2250664,00.html

adrift
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/us/03rescue.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/antarctic/story/0,,2216335,00.html

hit an iceberg
http://www.guardian.co.uk/graphic/0,,2215989,00.html

holed ship
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article2928759.ece

take on water

overturn
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2216283,00.html

capsize
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/may/14/father-son-die-river-avon
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2216283,00.html

hull
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/04/stricken-ship-leaks-fuel-wales

be listed

listing
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-24-listing-ship_x.htm

list to one side

tilting

heel starboard
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article2928759.ece

go down

sink
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2007/nov/23/antarctica?picture=331353209

unsinkable
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/07/world/europe/20120407_TITANIC_FEATURE.html

bobbing lifeboats
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/11/23/world/1123-ship2_10.html

run aground
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weather/Story/0,,2250664,00.html

drown

perish at sea / the sinking of the SS Atlantic 1873
http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1745723,00.html

distress alert

send out an SOS

send out an emergency radio message

don survival suits

life raft

survival

survivor

rescue

rescuer

helicopter

airlift

hoist into / cram in

be hoisted into two National Guard Pave Hawk helicopters

winch ... to safety
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weather/Story/0,,2250664,00.html

poor weather

very challenging weather

10-foot seas

in choppy seas

extremely choppy conditions

roiling waters

the turbulent Pacific Ocean

be stranded

the Coastguard
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1305095,00.html

Coast Guard plane

coastguards
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weather/Story/0,,2250664,00.html

death at sea

ship graveyard

river

barge

off Trevose Head

rigging

off the Alaska coast

off Norfolk

Frozen in time, Endurance's end

Audrey Gillan The Guardian Thursday September 22, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/sep/22/arts.artsnews1

The Endurance / Sir Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated Imperial Transatlantic Expedition of 1914-1916
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/sep/22/arts.artsnews1

Captain Robert Scott's Terra Nova expedition of 1910-1914
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/dec/06/captain-scott-expedition-south-pole-letter

Peary Discovers the North Pole After Eight Trials in 23 Years
Notifies The New York Times That He Reached it on April 6, 1909
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0406.html

John Fairfax,

Who Rowed Across Oceans,

Dies at 74

February 18, 2012
The New York Times
By MARGALIT FOX

He crossed the Atlantic because it was there, and the Pacific because it was also there.

He made both crossings in a rowboat because it, too, was there, and because the lure of sea, spray and sinew, and the history-making chance to traverse two oceans without steam or sail, proved irresistible.

In 1969, after six months alone on the Atlantic battling storms, sharks and encroaching madness, John Fairfax, who died this month at 74, became the first lone oarsman in recorded history to traverse any ocean.

In 1972, he and his girlfriend, Sylvia Cook, sharing a boat, became the first people to row across the Pacific, a yearlong ordeal during which their craft was thought lost. (The couple survived the voyage, and so, for quite some time, did their romance.)

Both journeys were the subject of fevered coverage by the news media. They inspired two memoirs by Mr. Fairfax, “Britannia: Rowing Alone Across the Atlantic” and, with Ms. Cook, “Oars Across the Pacific,” both published in the early 1970s.

Mr. Fairfax died on Feb. 8 at his home in Henderson, Nev., near Las Vegas. The apparent cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Tiffany. A professional astrologer, she is his only immediate survivor. Ms. Cook, who became an upholsterer and spent the rest of her life quietly on dry land (though she remained a close friend of Mr. Fairfax), lives outside London.

For all its bravura, Mr. Fairfax’s seafaring almost pales beside his earlier ventures. Footloose and handsome, he was a flesh-and-blood character out of Graham Greene, with more than a dash of Hemingway and Ian Fleming shaken in.

At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle.

At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate. To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his being a pirate, he briefly managed a mink farm, one of the few truly dull entries on his otherwise crackling résumé, which lately included a career as a professional gambler.

Mr. Fairfax was among the last avatars of a centuries-old figure: the lone-wolf explorer, whose exploits are conceived to satisfy few but himself. His was a solitary, contemplative art that has been all but lost amid the contrived derring-do of adventure-based reality television.

The only child of an English father and a Bulgarian mother, John Fairfax was born on May 21, 1937, in Rome, where his mother had family; he scarcely knew his father, who worked in London for the BBC.

Seeking to give her son structure, his mother enrolled him at 6 in the Italian Boy Scouts. It was there, Mr. Fairfax said, that he acquired his love of nature — and his determination to bend it to his will.

On a camping trip when he was 9, John concluded a fight with another boy by filching the scoutmaster’s pistol and shooting up the campsite. No one was injured, but his scouting career was over.

His parents’ marriage dissolved soon afterward, and he moved with his mother to Buenos Aires. A bright, impassioned dreamer, he devoured tales of adventure, including an account of the voyage of Frank Samuelsen and George Harbo, Norwegians who in 1896 were the first to row across the Atlantic. John vowed that he would one day make the crossing alone.

At 13, in thrall to Tarzan, he ran away from home to live in the jungle. He survived there as a trapper with the aid of local peasants, returning to town periodically to sell the jaguar and ocelot skins he had collected.

He later studied literature and philosophy at a university in Buenos Aires and at 20, despondent over a failed love affair, resolved to kill himself by letting a jaguar attack him. When the planned confrontation ensued, however, reason prevailed — as did the gun he had with him.

In Panama, he met a pirate, applied for a job as a pirate’s apprentice and was taken on. He spent three years smuggling guns, liquor and cigarettes around the world, becoming captain of one of his boss’s boats, work that gave him superb navigational skills.

When piracy lost its luster, he gave his boss the slip and fetched up in 1960s London, at loose ends. He revived his boyhood dream of crossing the ocean and, since his pirate duties had entailed no rowing, he began to train.

He rowed daily on the Serpentine, the lake in Hyde Park. Barely more than half a mile long, it was about one eight-thousandth the width of the Atlantic, but it would do.

On Jan. 20, 1969, Mr. Fairfax pushed off from the Canary Islands, bound for Florida. His 22-foot craft, the Britannia, was the Rolls-Royce of rowboats: made of mahogany, it had been created for the voyage by the eminent English boat designer Uffa Fox. It was self-righting, self-bailing and partly covered.

Aboard were provisions (Spam, oatmeal, brandy); water; and a temperamental radio. There was no support boat and no chase plane — only Mr. Fairfax and the sea. He caught fish and sometimes boarded passing ships to cadge food, water and showers.

The long, empty days spawned a temporary madness. Desperate for female company, he talked ardently to the planet Venus.

On July 19, 1969 — Day 180 — Mr. Fairfax, tanned, tired and about 20 pounds lighter, made landfall at Hollywood, Fla. “This is bloody stupid,” he said as he came ashore. Two years later, he was at it again.

This time Ms. Cook, a secretary and competitive rower he had met in London, was aboard. Their new boat, the Britannia II, also a Fox design, was about 36 feet long, large enough for two though still little more than a toy on the Pacific.

“He’s always been a gambler,” Ms. Cook, 73, recalled by telephone on Wednesday. “He was going to the casino every night when I met him — it was craps in those days. And at the end of the day, adventures are a kind of gamble, aren’t they?”

Their crossing, from San Francisco to Hayman Island, Australia, took 361 days — from April 26, 1971, to April 22, 1972 — and was an 8,000-mile cornucopia of disaster.

“It was very, very rough, and our rudder got snapped clean off,” Ms. Cook said. “We were frequently swamped, and at night you didn’t know if the boat was the right way up or the wrong way up.”

Mr. Fairfax was bitten on the arm by a shark, and he and Ms. Cook became trapped in a cyclone, lashing themselves to the boat until it subsided. Unreachable by radio for a time, they were presumed lost.

For all that, Ms. Cook said, there were abundant pleasures. “The nights not too hot, sunny days when you could just row,” she recalled. “You just hear the clunking of the rowlocks, and you stop rowing and hear little splashings of the sea.”

Mr. Fairfax was often asked why he chose a rowboat to beard two roiling oceans. “Almost anybody with a little bit of know-how can sail,” he said in a profile on the Web site of the Ocean Rowing Society International, which adjudicates ocean rowing records. “I’m after a battle with nature, primitive and raw.”

Such battles are a young man’s game. With Ms. Cook, Mr. Fairfax went back to the Pacific in the mid-’70s to try to salvage a cache of lead ingots from a downed ship they had spied on their crossing. But the plan proved unworkable, and he never returned to sea.

In recent years, Mr. Fairfax made his living playing baccarat, the card game also favored by James Bond.

Baccarat is equal parts skill and chance. It lets the player wield consummate mastery while consigning him simultaneously to the caprices of fate.

John Fairfax, Who Rowed Across Oceans, Dies at 74, NYT, 18.2.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/us/john-fairfax-who-rowed-across-oceans-dies-at-74.html

Silver Treasure,

Worth $18 Million, Found in North Atlantic

October 10, 2011
The New York Times
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

Sea explorers announced Monday the discovery of a new sunken treasure that they plan to retrieve from the bottom of the North Atlantic.

Off Ireland in 1917, a German torpedo sank the British steam ship Mantola, sending the vessel and its cargo of an estimated 20 tons of silver to the seabed more than a mile down. At today’s prices, the metal would be worth about $18 million.

Odyssey Marine Exploration, based in Tampa, Fla., said it had visually confirmed the identity of the Mantola with a tethered robot last month during an expedition and had been contracted by the British Department for Transport (a successor to the Ministry of War Transport) to retrieve the lost riches.

In recent years, cash-strapped governments have started looking to lost cargoes as a way to raise money. They do so because the latest generation of robots, lights, cameras and claws can withstand the deep’s crushing pressures and have opened up a new world of shipwreck recovery.

“A lot of new and interesting opportunities are presenting themselves,” said Greg Stemm, the chief executive of Odyssey. The new finding, he added, is the company’s second discovery of a deep-ocean wreck for the British government this year.

In such arrangements, private companies put their own money at risk in costly expeditions and split any profits. In this case, Odyssey is to get 80 percent of the silver’s value and the British government 20 percent. It plans to attempt the recovery this spring, along with that of its previous find.

Last month, Odyssey announced its discovery of the British steam ship Gairsoppa off Ireland and estimated its cargo at up to 240 tons of silver — a trove worth more than $200 million. The Gairsoppa was torpedoed in 1941.

Both ships had been owned by the British Indian Steam Navigation Company and both were found by Odyssey during expeditions in the past few months. Odyssey said that the Mantola’s sinking in 1917 had prompted the British government to pay out an insurance claim on about 600,000 troy ounces of silver, or more than 20 tons.

Mr. Stemm said the Mantola’s silver should make “a great target for testing some new technology” of deep-sea retrieval.

The Mantola was less than a year old when, on Feb. 4, 1917, she steamed out of London on her last voyage, bound for Calcutta. According to Odyssey, the ship carried 18 passengers, 165 crew members and diverse cargo. The captain was David James Chivas, the great-nephew of the Chivas Brothers, known for their Chivas Regal brand of Scotch whiskey.

Four days out of port, a German submarine fired a torpedo and the ship sank with minimal loss of life.

In an expedition last month, Odyssey lowered a tethered robot that positively identified the wreck. The evidence included the ship’s dimensions, its layout and a display of painted letters on the stern that fit the words “Mantola” and “Glasgow,” the ship’s home port.

Photographs show the hulk covered in rivulets of rust known as rusticles, which look like brownish icicles. One picture shows a large sea creature poised near the ship’s railing.

Silver Treasure, Worth $18 Million, Found in North Atlantic, NYT, 10.10.2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/science/11shipwreck.html

Millvina Dean, Titanic’s Last Survivor, Dies at 97

June 1, 2009
The New York Times
By JOHN F. BURNS

LONDON — Millvina Dean, who as an infant passenger aboard the Titanic was lowered into a lifeboat in a canvas mail sack and lived to become the ship’s last survivor, died Sunday at a nursing home in Southampton, the English port from which the Titanic embarked on its fateful voyage, according to staff at the home.

She was 97 and had been in poor health for several weeks.

The youngest of the ship’s 705 survivors, Ms. Dean was only 9 weeks old when the Titanic hit an iceberg in waters off Newfoundland on the night of April 14, 1912, setting off what was then considered the greatest maritime disaster in history.

She survived with her mother, Georgetta, and 2-year-old brother when they, like many other survivors, were picked up by the liner Carpathia and taken to New York.

Her father, Bertram Dean, was among more than 1,500 passengers and crew members who died in the sinking, a fact that Ms. Dean, in an interview at the Southampton nursing home last month, attributed partly to the fact that the Dean family was traveling in third class, or steerage, as the cheapest form of passage was known.

Some versions of the disaster have contended that the crew was under orders to give priority aboard lifeboats to first- and second-class passengers, and even that doors were kept locked that would have given people in steerage faster access to the lifeboats through parts of the ship dedicated to higher-paying passengers. Though these assertions have been disputed, Ms. Dean said that she believed them to be true, and that her father might otherwise have survived.

“It couldn’t happen nowadays, and it’s so wrong, so unjust,” she said, emphasizing her point with a line from a Rudyard Kipling poem about class distinctions in the British Army in colonial India: “What do they say? ‘Judy O’Grady and the colonel’s lady are sisters under the skin.’ That’s the way it should have been that night, but it wasn’t.”

Mr. Dean, 29, who had been running a pub in London, was taking his family to a new life in Kansas City, Mo., where a cousin who immigrated before him had helped buy a tobacconist’s shop that Mr. Dean planned to run. But with the family breadwinner gone, his widow spent only a week in New York before returning with her children to England.

Millvina Dean — a name she used throughout her life, though she was christened Elizabeth Gladys Dean — spent her early years on a farm owned by her grandfather, a Southampton veterinarian.

She never married and spent her working life as an assistant and secretary in small businesses in Southampton. Among other jobs, she worked at a greyhound racing track and, during World War II, in the British government’s map-making office. For more than 20 years, until she retired, she worked in an engineering office.

The celebrity that came from being part of the disaster, and eventually living almost a century beyond it, was something she always had trouble grasping. She told visitors in later years that she was “such an ordinary person” that she found it surprising that anybody took much interest in her.

In the nursing home interview, she said that for decades after the sinking, she never spoke of it or her part in it to people she met or worked with. She said she had not thought it appropriate, partly because she remembered nothing about it and partly because she did not want to be seen as drawing attention to herself.

But that changed, she said, after Sept. 1, 1985, when a joint French-American team located the wreck of the Titanic, in water more than 2 miles deep, 370 miles east of Mistaken Point, Newfoundland. That set off a wave of interest in the ship and its fate that crested in 1996 with James Cameron’s blockbuster movie “Titanic,” starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio.

“Nobody knew about me and the Titanic, to be honest, nobody took any interest, so I took no interest either,” she said. “But then they found the wreck, and after they found the wreck, they found me.”

In the last 20 years of her life, she went to gatherings in the United States, Canada and a handful of European countries to participate in events related to the sinking.

Ms. Dean said all she knew of what happened during the sinking she had learned from her mother: “She told me that they heard a tremendous crash, and that my father went up on deck, then came back down again and said, ‘Get the children up and take them to the deck as soon as possible, because the ship has struck an iceberg.’ ”

On deck, mother and daughter were separated from father and son, and it was only at daylight, hours after they boarded the Carpathia, that she and her mother were reunited with her brother, Bertram Vere Dean. A carpenter, he died in 1997.

After failing health forced her to move to the nursing home, Ms. Dean, struggling to pay the residential cost of nearly $5,000 a month, began selling her Titanic mementos at auction, including a canvas mailbag that her mother used to carry the few belongings the family acquired during its week in New York.

She had hoped that the mailbag would prove to be the one used to lower her into the lifeboat, but when experts decided it was not, it brought only £1,500, about $2,400.

“Such a pity,” Ms. Dean said in the interview, with a quick smile. “If it had been the mailbag they used for me, it would have been £100,000!”

In recent weeks, news accounts of her plight caught the attention of Ms. Winslet and Mr. DiCaprio, and they, together with Mr. Cameron, contributed to the Millvina Fund, set up to meet the nursing home costs.

Ms. Dean died, on the 98th anniversary of the ship’s launching, without ever having seen the movie, which she attributed to reluctance to be reminded of what happened to her father. “It would have made me think, did he jump overboard or did he go down with the ship?’” she said. “I would have been very emotional.”

As for her own survival, she said that as a “very down-to-earth person,” she had little time for the metaphysical speculations urged on her over the years about why fate, or divine providence, had chosen her to survive the sinking as an infant, then allowed her to outlive everyone else who escaped.

“Heaven and hell — how can you believe in something up in the sky?” she said. Then, smiling again, she added, “Still, I’d love to be proved wrong.”

Millvina Dean, Titanic’s Last Survivor, Dies at 97, NYT, 1.6.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/world/europe/01dean.html

Icy Rescue as Seas Claim a Cruise Ship

November 24, 2007
The New York Times
By GRAHAM BOWLEY and ANDREW C. REVKIN

They were modern adventure travelers, following the doomed route of Sir Ernest Shackleton to the frozen ends of the earth. They paid $7,000 to $16,000 to cruise on a ship that had proudly plowed the Antarctic for 40 years.

But sometime early yesterday, the Explorer, fondly known in the maritime world as “the little red ship,” quietly struck ice.

There were the alarms, then the captain’s voice on the public address system calling the 100 passengers and the crew of about 50 to the lecture hall, according to passengers’ accounts on the radio and others relayed from rescuers and the tour operator.

In the lecture hall, they were told that water was creeping in through a fist-size hole punched into the ship’s starboard. As it flooded the grinding engine room, the power failed. The ship ceased responding.

“We all got a little nervous when the ship began to list sharply, and the lifeboats still hadn’t been lowered,” John Cartwright, a Canadian, told CBC radio.

About 1:30 a.m., the passengers climbed down ladders on the ship’s side into open lifeboats and inflatable craft. They bobbed for some four hours in the rough seas and biting winds as the sun rose and the day broadened, sandwiched between the 20-degree air and the nearly freezing waters, huddled under thin foil blankets, marking time. Their ship traced loose circles in the steely ocean.

And then a research ship and a Norwegian cruise liner that had heard the distress call approached.

“There was a long line of black rubber Zodiac boats and a handful of orange lifeboats strung out, and it was very surreal because it was a very beautiful morning with the sun glistening off the relatively calm sea,” said Jon Bowermaster, a travel writer and filmmaker who was aboard the ship, the National Geographic Endeavour, and was reached by satellite phone. “And all you could think was how relieved these people must have been when they saw these two big ships coming.”

A section of the Endeavour was dedicated to medical emergencies. But none were reported, and the Norwegian liner, the Nordnorge, ended up taking all the Explorer’s evacuees.

It was not immediately possible yesterday to reach the passengers, among them 14 Americans, 24 Britons, 12 Canadians and a smattering of other nationalities. But they were in good spirits, said Capt. Arnvid Hansen of the Nordnorge, who was reached by telephone about 10 hours after the rescue.

The weather had turned worse, he said, but despite snow and wind, the passengers had begun to leave the ship for the solid ground of King George Island. “They are healthy, no problem,” he said. The authorities said they would head to Chile on Saturday, weather permitting, and from there return home.

And so the 154 people who survived a modern Titanic have fallen into that strange category of luck — the kind that would not be necessary had not horrendous bad fortune preceded it.

The accident occurred well north of the Antarctic Circle in an island chain that is part of the Antarctic peninsula, which juts close to South America and where a sharp warming of temperatures has occurred in recent years. It is prime territory for a new travel industry catering to an often young clientele enthusiastic about the wild in an age of environmental uncertainty.

The tour operator, G.A.P. Adventures, is based in Toronto, and offers cruises to the Antarctic, Greenland, Scotland and the Amazon. It normally sends a dozen cruises a year into the Antarctic, all on the Explorer.

On the “Spirit of Shackleton” tour, the passengers stopped at the Falkland Islands and South Georgia Island before heading for the tip of Antarctica. Scientists on board give lectures on wildlife, geology and climate change. Their stops were to include the grave where Shackleton was buried after his fatal heart attack in 1922.

G.A.P. said it had never had an accident with one of its ships before. But in March, two Canadian women and an Australian man died after a safari van chartered by the company collided with a truck in Kenya.

The Antarctic adventure niche has its own trade group, the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators. Its members make up a growing chunk of the $21 billion cruise industry. But regulatory authority over its members can be as confusing as in the rest of the cruise world, with a network of nations, flags and maritime rules colliding.

The Explorer is registered in Liberia. Built in Finland in 1969, it was designed to operate in Antarctic and Arctic waters, according to a spokesman for G.A.P., Dan Brown. It was small, to move swiftly through dangerous waters, and had a double bottom, a second layer of steel.

But the vessel did not have a double hull, a complete second steel sheath, the kind developed after the Titanic sank.

There appeared to be questions about its safety record. Mr. Brown said “some deficiencies” were found in tests in March in Chile and in May in Scotland. On its Web site, Lloyd’s List said the British authorities had reported deficiencies, including missing rescue plans, and lifeboat maintenance problems, while watertight doors were deemed “not as required,” and fire safety measures were also criticized.

The ship later passed a safety test with “flying colors,” the company said, and Mr. Brown said the earlier problems “were not serious enough for the boat to be taken out of use.”

The Explorer had been in trouble before, struggling in heavy Antarctic seas in the same region in February 1972 when it took on water. The passengers, mostly Americans, were rescued by the Chilean Navy. The ship was refurbished and went on to become the first passenger vessel to navigate the Northwest Passage at the other end of the globe.

On this trip, it left from Ushuaia, on the southern tip of Argentina, on Nov. 11, and was to return Thursday.

But the Explorer’s fate was sealed by yesterday afternoon, after hours of listing, awash in ice floes. Even its captain and chief officer, who had stayed to operate the bilge pumps in the hope of salvation, had long before evacuated when the Chilean Navy said the little red ship had gone down.

A few hours before, Stefan Lundgren, a member of the Endeavour staff who had also worked on the Explorer, described watching the ship fade. “For me she was a beautiful lady — boats are ladies,” he said to a reporter aboard the Endeavour. “For every new owner, she gets a new face-lift. As an old woman, she’s a tough lady. She doesn’t want to give up, I can tell you.”

Reporting was contributed by Dorothy Spears from the Antarctic,

Ian Austen from Ottawa, Pascale Bonnefoy from Santiago, Chile,

and Michael M. Grynbaum from New York.

Icy Rescue as Seas Claim a Cruise Ship, NYT, 24.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/24/world/americas/24ship.html?hp

Shipwreck Teaches Students About History

July 9, 2007
Filed at 3:40 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ON THE JAMES RIVER, Va. (AP) -- Five 13-year-olds in life jackets crowded inside the cabin of a small research boat and stared at a bank of computer monitors.

Suddenly, a dark gray mass appeared on one of the screens -- a sonar image of the wreckage of the Civil War-era frigate USS Cumberland.

As members of the Cumberland Club, the kids studied artifacts from the ship, then helped researchers beam sonar to the bottom of the James River near the coal piers in Newport News to check on the condition of the ship itself.

The U.S. Navy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration hold the summer enrichment program, which gives students a hands-on feel for what it's like to be historians, archaeologists and marine scientists.

''It was fun to be able to do things that are important that kids don't usually get to do,'' said Jazmine Brooks of Norfolk, who'll be in eighth grade in the fall.

The Cumberland Club, now in its second year, is free to the middle school students and funded by a grant. To be selected, students wrote essays on ''Why is history important?''

Before their river outing, the 18 students spent a week studying and going to the naval museum and The USS Monitor Center at The Mariners' Museum in Newport News to learn about conservation and archaeology techniques and the history of the Cumberland.

The ship, launched in 1842, sailed to a number of Mediterranean ports, served in the Gulf of Mexico during the Mexican-American War and patrolled the coast of Africa to suppress the slave trade.

The Cumberland was anchored off Newport News on March 8, 1862, when the CSS Virginia arrived to attack a Union blockade. The Virginia pushed her iron ram into the Cumberland's side and the ship began to sink, its gun crews continuing to fire. About 100 men died.

The fight demonstrated the superiority of armored, steam-powered ships over traditional wooden sailing ships.

The next day, the Virginia and the Monitor fought a battle that ended in a standoff. The Virginia had torn off most of its iron spar when it backed away from the Cumberland, and some historians think the Monitor was spared from further damage because the spar could have penetrated the hull below its armor.

Today, the Cumberland's wreckage is protected by law. The Cumberland Club students got to handle some artifacts that belong to the Hampton Roads Naval Museum.

On one afternoon, the students looked for damage as they turned over the pieces in their gloved hands, then photographed the items for the museum's records and wrote reports describing the objects and recommending how to conserve them.

Most of the items were fairly easy to identify: a door hinge, a pulley, a spike.

Cameron Parsons and David Hart, 13-year-olds from Virginia Beach, weren't sure what they had been given. It looked like two small pieces of wood held together by three rivets. One rivet was inscribed ''Philada.''

''That's cool,'' said Michael V. Taylor, the museum's preservation officer. ''I have no idea what it is.''

David, using a magnifying glass, spotted on the ''Philada'' rivet what looked like an engraving of the scales of justice. Maybe the artifact was associated with the ship's legal officer, Taylor told the boys.

They may get to find out for sure. NOAA's Office of Ocean Exploration is providing $1,000 for enhanced restoration for Cumberland artifacts, and the Cumberland Club voted to use the money in part to conserve the ''Philada'' piece.

Cameron said he enjoyed studying the artifacts ''because we're finding real stuff, not recreation stuff that adults set up for us.''

''And it's fun to see stuff that people used like a really long time ago,'' David added.

The following week, in late June, the students spent a day aboard the Bay Hydrographer, a 56-foot NOAA research vessel. They helped researchers use side scan and multibeam sonar to scan the Cumberland wreckage, as well as the nearby wrecks of the Confederate ship CSS Florida, which accidentally sank on Nov. 28, 1864, and a third, unknown ship.

James S. Schmidt, contract archaeologist with the underwater archaeology branch of The Naval Historical Center, will crunch the data collected.

Taylor believes the program will have a lasting impression on the students.

While many kids spend their summers hanging out, Taylor said, ''Cumberland kids get to say, `I went out on an archaeological expedition with The Naval Historical Center on a NOAA boat and we went to the wrecks of the Cumberland and the Confederate Florida. You know, they're important wrecks and important cultural resources.'''

------

On the Net:

Hampton Roads Naval Museum: http://www.hrnm.navy.mil

Shipwreck Teaches Students About History, NYT, 9.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Cumberland-Club.html

Last American to remember Titanic sinking dies

Sun May 7, 2006
4:38 PM ET
Reuters

BOSTON (Reuters) - The last American to remember seeing hundreds of fellow passengers drown in the icy North Atlantic when the Titanic sank 94 years ago has died at age 99, a funeral home spokesman said on Sunday.

Lillian Gertrud Asplund was returning home to the United States from Sweden with her parents and four brothers when the ship, believed to be "unsinkable," struck an iceberg on April 12, 1912. A U.S. Senate report said 1,523 people were killed.

Asplund died at home, a spokesman for the Nordgren Memorial Chapel, in Worcester, Massachusetts confirmed.

A lifetime resident of Massachusetts, Asplund was an intensely private person who shunned all publicity surrounding the disaster, one of the worst peacetime maritime accidents.

The funeral home spokesman said she instructed relatives to keep quiet about what she saw and even asked that the disaster not be mentioned in her obituary.

The two last Titanic survivors are said to be living in England but both women were infants when they were rescued and have no memories of that disastrous night, Titanic experts say.

Asplund lost more than half her family in the accident when her father and three brothers stayed behind as crewmen rushed the young girl, her younger brother and their mother into a lifeboat.

"We went to the upper deck. I could see the icebergs for a great distance around ... It was cold and the little ones were cuddling close to one another and trying to keep from under the feet of the many excited people ...," Asplund's mother told the Worcester Telegram & Gazette in an interview decades ago.

"My little girl, Lillie, accompanied me, and my husband said 'Go ahead, we will get into one of the other boats.' He smiled as he said it."

Asplund's mother, younger brother and uncle returned to the United States five days after the Titanic sank, the newspaper reported at the time.

Asplund never married, worked as a clerk at an insurance company and spent her life caring for her mother, reported the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, which republished her mother's recollections of the disaster on Sunday.

Last American to remember Titanic sinking dies, R, 7.5.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-05-07T203807Z_01_N07407634_RTRUKOC_0_US-LIFE-TITANIC.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsArt-L3-U.S.+NewsNews-8

The New Megayachts: Too Much of a Good Thing?

January 13, 2006
The New York Times
By MICHELLE HIGGINS

WHETHER it's providing a helicopter pad or installing jade-inlaid marble in the master bedroom, William S. Smith III has grown accustomed to satisfying every request from his custom-yacht customers - except when it comes to finding places where they can park their outsized boats.

Many megayachts have grown so big - sometimes as long as a football field - that their very size rules out docking at most marinas, which don't have large enough slips to accommodate them. To combat the crunch, Mr. Smith, vice president of Trinity Yachts in Gulfport, Miss., one of the top custom yacht builders in the world, has begun to design vessels based strictly on where the owners plan to take them.

"If an owner tells me he wants to be in St. Bart's on New Year's Eve, that means he can't build over 200 feet," Mr. Smith said. "If they tell us they want to do the Bahamas, which is relatively shallow, the boat can't have more than an eight-foot draft - no matter what size."

More and more, limitations like these are frustrating the growing megayacht crowd. In recent years, the production of these nautical behemoths, which range from 80 feet to more than 200 feet and can easily cost as much as $200 million, has been outpacing the availability of dockage long enough or deep enough to accommodate them.

There are an estimated 7,000 motor yachts over 80 feet long in use, said Jill Bobrow, editor in chief of ShowBoats International, a yachting magazine. That's up from about 4,000 a decade ago.

"Boats are getting bigger and bigger," Ms. Bobrow said. "It used to be that 200 feet was big. Now the largest boats are 400 feet." Contracts for motor yachts 150 feet and larger increased 15 percent, to 118 from 103, in 2005, according to ShowBoats International. Of those 118, 33 percent are more than 200 feet.

By contrast, there are roughly 440 marinas with berths big enough and water deep enough to accommodate vessels 100 feet or bigger, according to Superports, a British magazine that publishes an annual list of megayacht marinas. It is a problem that has vexed Ira and Audrey Kaufman ever since they built their dream boat, Gray Mist III, a 150-foot yacht fashioned after their home in Highland Park, Ill. - complete with antique furniture, a working fireplace and a dining table that seats 12 - about five years ago.

"Many places that we go to, you can't get in the marina because our draft is too deep," said Mr. Kaufman, 77, a senior managing director at Mesirow Financial. He ended up purchasing a dock slip at the Fisher Island Club, one of the few Miami-area marinas that can accommodate such a large boat. He estimates his dock slip would sell for about $7,000 a foot today. Most marinas have only a handful of slips for these large vessels. And because boating is seasonal - with owners typically heading to the Caribbean in the winter and the Mediterranean in the summer - megayachts are constantly competing for the same dock space.

"There's so few marinas now that you can get a boat in," Mr. Kaufman said. "There's not room." Without a spot at the dock, megayacht owners and their passengers are relegated to dropping anchor off the coast and lowering a dinghy to get ashore. But after spending untold millions on a yacht and used to getting the V.I.P. treatment everywhere else they go, most owners prefer not to do so.

"A lot of times, it's first come, first served," said Chris McChristian, who is working on his British captain's license and until recently worked as a pilot on a 107-foot yacht, the Anne-Marie, whose owner Mr. McChristian declined to identify. "If you get there and it's too tight, you'll go to a facility that's not as good or be at anchor somewhere having to commute in by tender. With owners, that's a very awkward position to be in." The megayachters, he added, "like to step on and off the boat."

But all that is about to change.

IN an effort to capitalize on the megadollars that megayachts can bring to a harbor area, coastal resorts around the globe are racing to build or retrofit their marinas to accommodate the colossal cruisers. Nowhere is the pursuit more pronounced than in the Caribbean, where there are still large chunks of undeveloped shores, and in Florida, where a real estate boom over the last few years has been fueling new waterfront developments.

From Miami to St. Thomas, new marinas with names like Super Yacht Harbor and Yacht Haven are being developed with berths for boats as long as 450 feet, roughly half the length of a 2,000-passenger cruise ship. To keep megayacht owners busy - not to mention spending - while their boats are parked at the marina, developers are surrounding their ports with high-end restaurants and retail shops. To entice yacht owners and their entourages to stay longer, they are also building luxury condominiums and five-star hotels.

As a result, a new real estate concept is beginning to emerge centered on the lifestyle of the boating elite. Island Capital Group in New York is transforming an existing port, Long Bay Harbor in St. Thomas, into a megayacht marina called Yacht Haven Grande with 48 slips averaging 120 feet in length. Twelve luxury condominiums, four waterfront restaurants, high-end shopping and a private yacht club around the 32-acre harbor are scheduled to open in the fall.

In Miami, Flagstone Property Group is designing Island Gardens, a $480 million development to be built on Watson Island, between downtown Miami and South Beach. Island Gardens will include a 50-slip Super-Yacht Harbor for vessels up to 450 feet, a Westin hotel and a Shangri-La Hotel, to open in 2008, offering round-the-clock butler service. Shangri-La will also manage 105 fractional-ownership residences on the site and CHI, a 20,000-square-foot spa.

Developers believe the megayachts will be an inherent attraction, drawing other visitors to the destination as well. "It's not only a place to visit for the megayacht owners, but also a great opportunity for people to enjoy viewing the megayachts," said Mehmet Bayraktar, chief executive of Flagstone Property Group. "That's how places like Monaco and Portofino became famous. People want to get close to that lifestyle."

Bigwig boaters who pull into these new marinas can expect white-glove treatment. Uniformed dockhands will greet owners upon arrival, help bring boats in and assist crews in obtaining provisions. The owner will be able to step off the boat for fine dining or for a massage. A concierge office will be available to arrange car services or sightseeing excursions.

Many port towns see these new developments as a way to increase the flow of high-end tourists and help their economies with new jobs and revenue from servicing the big boats that stop by - a 155-foot yacht can guzzle 16,000 gallons of gas at one fill up, for example - as well as pampering their owners. In 2002, the average expenditure of a megayacht visit to boatyards in Broward, Dade and Palm Beach Counties in Florida was $140,000, according to a report by Thomas J. Murray, a marine business specialist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science at the College of William & Mary. The direct economic impact of megayacht repair and maintenance projects at local boatyards was an estimated $181.6 million.

Already, yacht owners and real estate investors are showing interest in the houses and condominiums being designed around the harbors. The first phase of construction at Cupecoy Yacht Club, a new marina development being built on St. Martin by the real estate arm of Orient-Express Hotels, is not expected to be finished until fall 2007. But 20 percent of its 169 planned condominiums sold within two months of the project's announcement last year. Sales included condominium units with one to four bedrooms and a penthouse for $1.3 million; the sales generated $23 million in revenue.

Chub Cay Marina & Resort, a private island in the Bahamas that is being redeveloped to expand a marina for megayachts, has sold roughly 75 percent of its new 57 colonial-style villas and has raised the prices to $1 million to $3 million, from the $850,000 to $2.5 million range it had been charging. On West Caicos, an 11-square-mile island in the Turks and Caicos where a new marina resembling an 18th-century seaside village is planned, 15 of 30 Ritz-Carlton-branded condominiums have been sold.

For the most part, because the megayacht industry is still relatively new, developers are taking an "if you build it, they will come" approach with the marinas. In a few cases, megayachts have already shown up at unfinished developments.

At West Caicos Reserve, there are no fuel, no restaurants and no hotel rooms yet at the 12-acre harbor. But megayachts have already been stopping by.

"We don't know how they found us already," said Alan Lisenby, managing director of Logwood Development Company, the developer of West Caicos Reserve. Because the marina is not yet officially open or providing services, Logwood is not charging the yachts for mooring in the harbor.

"Basically, we'll let them stay for free if we can take their picture," Mr. Lisenby said.

The New Megayachts: Too Much of a Good Thing?, NYT, 13.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/13/travel/escapes/13yacht.html?hp

Sailing

'I'm fried.

I got to the stage where I nearly pulled out ...'

Ellen MacArthur tells the story of her record-breaking solo journey round the world, a remarkable tale of endurance, fear, exhaustion and, ultimately, exhilaration as she battled against the sea and the elements

08 February 2005
The Independent

Day 1, Monday, 28 November 2004

I feel relief to be over the line, relief to be going. I was so nervous and very emotional even just seeing the guys in the helicopter above this morning... It's going to be a tough one this, I can feel it.

Day 3, Tuesday, 30 November 2004

Right now we are on top of a low pressure system between the Spanish and Portuguese coast. It's pretty windy and the wind is going to increase over the next half hour. It's been a pretty painful night, quite light winds, trying to get towards the low. We've been trying to get between the [areas of] low and the high pressure but, unfortunately, we haven't been able to manage to do that as quickly as we wanted.

Day 4, Wednesday, 1 December 2004

Right now our boat speed is just eight knots and I'm heading for the Canary Islands. Can't leave the boat for five minutes without something happening - hope it's going to stabilise soon... Dry mouth ... not eating properly yet ... not totally got my head in to this ... going to try and fix the leak on the fresh water tank to make myself feel happier. Problem is that with the wind shifting all the time, I don't want to get stuck down below, as I keep having to rush on deck to trim the sheets.

Day 8, Sunday, 5 December 2004

The Doldrums. It's unbelievably hot, and it's good to be on a multihull because you're moving quickly and you've got a nice breeze over the deck but it's very hot and humid. The cabin temperature is around 32C inside and 29C at night - it takes a lot of your energy away.

Day 9, Monday, 6 December 2004

The sky is full of huge great big black clouds and there is no moon at the moment which is even worse. I must have changed sails about six or seven times during the night and goodness knows how many times during the day yesterday. My body is OK but I'm losing a lot of fluids. I'm trying to drink a huge amount because it's just so warm on board, particularly when I'm charging the batteries. The cabin turns into even more of an oven - more like a sauna! I've got lots of salt sores all over my hands and my arms, which appear when you get sweaty for a long period of time. There's no escape from it, there's nowhere to go. All the water around you is salty, you're salty, so your sweat is salty!

Day 10, Tuesday, 7 December 2005

Sometimes it just hits you. I was asleep in the cuddy (between the cockpit and the cabin), and woke up and I know when I wake up that if I feel a bit funny, that's not the time to push. You have to either get more rest, or do something to take your mind off the enormity of it. I'm very pleased with the Equator time, it's fantastic to always be ahead of the record but to cross the Equator over 14 hours ahead of Francis was brilliant. We know it's still very early days and although it's a good feeling to be ahead and cruising south with good breeze, it's also a moment where you know it's just one of the milestones and a lot could change between now and later, there's no doubt about it.

Day 12, Thursday, 9 December 2004

Still heading south in the South Atlantic and we're approaching a group of islands called the islands of Trinidad. It's getting a little bit less hot which is fantastic - now at 16 degrees south so it's not quite as tropical as it was a few days ago. Didn't have a great night really - conditions were up and down a bit and I was very worried about what's going to happen in the south because we're going to have an absolute shocker. The closer you get, the more you realise it's going to be pretty horrible and we're going to have to plunge south pretty soon - we're going to be down at 40 degrees south before we know it, and it's not the best zone for icebergs.

Day 16, Monday, 13 December 2004

I got some sleep this morning and some this afternoon, but I need more, I need a lot more. I'm absolutely fried, last night was the absolute pits. I nearly had to pull out. It was that close, I got to the stage where I couldn't breathe in the boat, I couldn't charge the batteries, I couldn't make any water. I was absolutely at my wit's end. The main thing is the fumes; the fumes from the exhaust are now not coming into the boat, because they were the biggest issue as I couldn't go anywhere in the boat without asphyxiating myself.

Day 17, Tuesday, 14 December 2004

The motto for today is "Sleep more, suffer less". I tried to engrave this on my brain last night, and try with all my energy to sleep -easier said than done sometimes, but, hey, we have to try. The sky is grey but I like that ... I almost prefer it to the beating sun of the equator. The trials and tribulations of the past few days seem miles away. Things are under control, and we're heading south!

Day 18, Wednesday, 15 December 2004

Things are getting a little bit chilly and the water temperature has dropped down to about 15C. The sky is very grey and the sun has disappeared - we're in our first Southern Ocean depression. We're heading down there for a long time so mentally things are changing - and physically things are obviously changing too as it gets colder.

Day 19, Thursday, 16 December 2004

I feel different. I feel much better than I have been over the past few weeks, I feel more positive. A little bit more cooler in the temperature ... I probably feel more comfortable in the Southern Ocean than the Equator when it was so hot. I'm sure that's going to change and I'm going to look forward to getting that heater on as we go further south.

Day 20, Friday, 17 December 2004

We've got reasonable boat speed this morning and we've got good breeze. I'm sailing along with blue skies which makes a huge difference after what we were sailing in yesterday in the front of the depression. There's quite a few petrels and albatrosses around. And we've just in the last hour dropped below 40 south, so we're now officially in the Southern Ocean! The Indian Ocean is renowned for its depressions which fly down off Africa. You have to be extra vigilant to see what's coming and, obviously, try not to get stuck in something which is particularly venomous.

Day 21, Saturday, 18 December 2004

It's like sailing over mountains. It's like driving an all-terrain vehicle very fast over mountains. Sometimes you are coasting down the hills and other times, you're fighting up the hills and that's just what it's like. Except that the mountains are moving - you're always sliding along with the mountains. It is absolutely spectacular and the seas really are big. Day 21 today and I've finished my Week Three food bag. It will be Week Four next which is quite cool, and when I finish Week Five we'll be half way round.

Day 22, Sunday, 19 December 2004

Right now, we're north-west of Marion Island, we're about 250 miles north of the Antarctic convergence and we're heading just north of east at the moment. We're ahead of Francis by nearly 24 hours after three weeks and it's good to have a lead on him.

Day 24, Tuesday, 21 December 2004

The last 36 hours even in the storm were just mind-blowing! To be in such huge seas and to see the power of nature - to be on an ocean that isn't flat in any way, it's a mountain range! There is no horizon because the sea is going up and down so much. It was an incredible experience and one that I wouldn't change for the world despite the fact that it was very windy and slightly frightening at times - it was just unbelievable. There is a storm coming which will hit us on Christmas Day.

Day 25, Wednesday, 22 December 2004

I was a bit upset not to see the Crozet Islands yesterday and it doesn't look like I'm going to get to see the Kerguluen Islands either. But you're very aware of the islands as there are birds there and there is a lot more wildlife because of them. It's all pretty special and it's great to be down here and feeling those islands around us.

Day 26, Thursday, 23 December 2004

I am a bit shaken up after last night - it was a bit disturbed and it was pretty hard to get some sleep and conditions were a bit all over the place. It was more of a shock knowing that you had hit something [she describes it as a "living object"] but the boat seems OK. I was very, very lucky. There is very little time to even think about the fact that's its nearly Christmas Day and the fact that I'll be missing my family. So perhaps concentrating on the boat and the tactics is the best thing.

MacArthur spent the Christmas period battling huge storms and icebergs in the Southern Ocean. She heard about the Asian tsunami on the radio but was unaffected by any aftershocks

Day 36, Sunday, 2 January 2005

Just during daytime here, about four hours before sunset, I came across two icebergs both to the north of me. The first was kind of triangular shape, quite small, the second was significantly bigger and had several peaks to it. It's pretty hard to judge how big they are but I guess they were the size of ships - the second, the size of a large container ship. Obviously, the bergs are moving from the south towards the north, that's why they are all here. That movement has obviously continued - these bergs were pretty old, pretty melted and they were literally sitting in a small corridor of colder water which was moving south-north. I have crossed the dateline so I am now having 2 January again!

Day 40, Thursday, 6 January 2005

Yesterday was the worst day, with massive squalls, the same wind that was not predictable. I sat there reading people's e-mailed encouragement, and quite honestly cried.

Day 41, Friday, 7 January 2005

The support from you all writing in is just mind-blowing. I mean mind-blowing - I am lost for words. I refresh the page each time I log on for the weather and read as many as I can. You are unbelievable.

Day 44, Monday, 10 January 2005

Right now, as we approach Cape Horn I have been able to get a little bit of rest but it's still been incredibly stressful. I think the hardest thing for me is, because I push myself so hard, sailing the boat when she feels like she's not going at 100 per cent. In the night we had some squalls, then we had some lighter conditions, and I hesitated longer than I probably would have about putting the sail up just because I was concerned about the squall and that's a very, very stressful thing for me. If the boat's not sailing how she wants to be sailed, I really, really struggle to rest.

Day 46, Wednesday, 12 January 2005

We passed Cape Horn after 7 o'clock today and we've got horrendous conditions. Just before sunset yesterday evening I had to take the mainsail down. We've had up to 50 knots - actually, 52 knots during the night. Again, we've had 52 knots this morning and the seas are absolutely monstrous. This morning as it became light, I realised these are certainly some of the biggest seas I've been in. I'm looking out of the window and the sea to our port side is awash with white water. There is a huge wave just broken next to us and there must be a 200sq ft area of sea which is just foaming white water and then the next rough wave rolls up behind and away we go on another crazy.

Day 52, Tuesday, 18 January 2005

The waves are right on the nose of the boat and we're getting thrown around quite violently so it's not much fun at the moment. It will be nice to punch through to the other side of this and actually start making some decent progress to the north, albeit slow.

Day 56, Saturday, 22 January 2005

Right now, I feel achy, very, very tired and a bit relieved that we've got some light winds just for a while to have a stable boat so I can recover a little bit ... I just, generally, feel absolutely empty - it has been a real struggle from Cape Horn to here - every day has given us new challenges. The bad news is that the next few days will be terrible - I've got three days of basically no wind now so we will be going very, very slowly. We will almost certainly lose the lead. Last night I spent at least two hours up on deck because there were ships going past and I didn't want to go to sleep with the ships around.

Day 58, Monday, 24 January 2005

I'm hanging in there, bearing in mind that we'll be back in two weeks and if we're not back in two weeks, it doesn't matter anyway. So I've got to hang in there for two more weeks, that's the way I'm thinking and I'm trying to look after myself the best I can. I am exceptionally tired, I'm pretty exhausted and I'm fairly bruised. I've been up the mast again [to do a rig check], just this morning, so I'm feeling pretty battered again. The record is definitely within our sights - I'm not going to let go of that until the last second hand ticks over, that's for sure. We've been working on this project for two years, I've now been at sea for more than 50 days and now is not the time that I am going to throw my hands up in the air and give up, no way. We're level with Francis - we're not three days or five days behind him and we still have a chance.

Day 59, Tuesday, 25 January 2005

The South Atlantic is amazing, really, you couldn't wish for a more beautiful place to be sailing in. We've got eight to 10 knots of breeze, a boat that is slipping along at nine knots. We've got a beautiful moon - the most beautiful moon I have ever seen. It's like perfection, but you struggle to appreciate it. You don't get to live moments like this very often but the timing is not ideal and that is what makes it difficult. And you worry all the time - will we get stuck in the Doldrums for 36 hours? W hat does the northern hemisphere hold for us? All these questions: so much rattles around in your head 24 hours a day.

Day 66, Tuesday 1 February 2005

I'm looking forward to having a feeling in my mind where I can switch my brain off more than anything else.

Day 70, Saturday, 5 February 2005

The hardest part is that I know there is little resilience left. I am running so close to empty that I believe it is only the energy from others that is keeping me going. To put it briefly this trip has taken pretty much ALL I have, every last drop and ounce. I chose to do this and I really don't need any sympathy from anyone.

Day 72, Monday, 7 February 2005

The past 24 hours have been absolutely horrendous. It's been a very, very long trip and an exceptionally hard one. I cannot believe it. I don't think until I see faces again that itts really going to sink in. It's been an absolutely unbelievable journey both physically and mentally. I'm absolutely overjoyed

www.teamellen.com

Source : The Independent, 8.2.2005,
http://sport.independent.co.uk/general/story.jsp?story=608866

April 16 1912

The Titanic is sunk, with great loss of life

From The Guardian archive

April 16 1912
The Guardian

The maiden voyage of the White Star liner Titanic, the largest ship ever launched, has ended in disaster.

The Titanic started her trip from Southampton for New York on Wednesday. Late on Sunday night she struck an iceberg off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. By wireless telegraphy she sent out signals of distress, and several liners were near enough to catch and respond to the call.

Conflicting news, alarming and reassuring, was current yesterday. Even after midnight it was said all the passengers were safe. All reports, of course, depended on wireless telegrams over great distances.

Late last night the White Star officials in New York announced that a message had been received stating that the Titanic sank at 2.20 yesterday morning after all her passengers and crew had been transferred to another vessel. Later they admitted that many lives had been lost. An unofficial message from Cape Race, Newfoundland, stated that only 675 have been saved out of 2,200 to 2,400 persons on board. This was in some degree confirmed later by White Star officials in Liverpool, who said they were afraid the report was likely to prove true. Assuming that only 675 of the passengers and crew have been saved, and taking the smallest estimate of the number of people on board, the disaster is one of the most awful in the history of navigation, for at least 1,500 lives have been lost.

The stories of the disaster are more than usually conflicting, and it is quite impossible to reconcile the bulk of the earlier and optimistic reports with the sinister news received after midnight. There is unfortunately only too much reason to believe, however, that the latest and worse news is nearest the truth, for none of the later cables contradict each other.

The main hope that remains is that the Virginian or Parisian may have picked up more of the passengers and crew than those saved by the Carpathia. As to this there is no news at the time of writing. A list of the first class passengers (who are reported from New York to have been all saved) appears on page 6.

White Star statement in New York, 9.35pm. Mr Franklin said, "I was confident to-day when I made the statement that the Titanic was unsinkable that the steamship was safe and that there would be no loss of life. The first definite news to the contrary came in the message this evening from Captain Haddock".

9 50p.m. The White Star officials now admit that probably only 675 out of 2,200 passengers on board the Titanic have been saved.

From The Guardian archive > April 16 1912 > The Titanic is sunk, with great loss of life, G, Republished 16.4.2007, p. 34, http://digital.guardian.co.uk/guardian/2007/04/16/pages/ber34.shtml

February 12 1906

A leviathan battleship is launched

From the Guardian archive

February 12 1906
The Guardian

The special circumstances which have attended the building of the battleship Dreadnought brought to her launch today an atmosphere of excitement and expectation. The great gangs of men, roaring their chanties and waving their arms when she entered the sea, formed the right background for the ceremonial finish.

The bow towered 30ft overhead and 20ft below the platform. The Dreadnought's bow had the usual ram formation. The forecastle is cut away at each side, bearing out the theory that the first pair of 12in guns will be mounted and two other pairs a little aft on the upper deck, the cut-away allowing them to be fired ahead.

A huge slice, 12in deep seemed gouged out of the hull right from bow to stern. This is the space on which the protecting belt of armour will be riveted. The sharp lines of the bow towered overhead, the perspective ran swiftly aft to the cup-like bulge amidships.

Tremendous preparation had been made to ensure a safe delivery to the sea. The massive cradle which held the ship in position was built of huge logs and held in position by huge iron clamps riveted into the ship's side. The ways were partly greased with margarine.

Very quietly, the King arrived at the appointed hour, leaning heavily on his stick. His Majesty did not look in his usual health, and it was obvious that the effort of speaking with his officers entailed considerable fatigue. Immediately the King was seen there was a loud roar of welcome, the workmen hammering their tools. The King walked into the little stall and grasped the flower-decked bottle of wine. The wine trickled down the grey bows.

The enormous bulk that seemed as immovable as a cathedral made a sudden perceptible little spring backwards and, as it seemed, upwards.

This changed at once to a sliding motion, and before the mind had conceived what had happened one was looking down on another great field of faces where a second before had stood this vast grey structure. The ship diminished sharply before one's eyes. There came a roar of hurrahs, the first sounds of the band playing "God save the King", tugs blowing their horns, the perfume of spilt wine and of flowers.

The sunlight showed the king and his admirals saluting Britain's greatest battleship, the waves flecking her monstrous sides.

[HMS Dreadnought, the first of a revolutionary but financially ruinous breed of battleship, was powered by steam turbines, with a top speed of 21 knots, and carried 10 12in guns]

From the Guardian archive > February 12 1906 > A leviathan battleship is launched, G, Republished 12.2.2007, p. 30, http://digital.guardian.co.uk/guardian/2007/02/12/pages/ber30.shtml

July 18, 1899

A disappointed ancient mariner

From the Guardian archive

Tuesday July 18, 1899
Guardian

The latest voyage of Captain William A Andrews, which was extensively advertised on both sides of the Atlantic, ended ingloriously.

The whole enterprise, from first to last, has been a series of disappointments. The original plan showed that Captain Andrews was to be accompanied in his open boat voyage across the Atlantic by the water-walker "Professor" Oldrieve, and an ocean swimmer.

But almost at the last moment Oldrieve met his death in other waters, and the "swimming net" appears not to have survived publication.

Then, as many readers will remember, Andrews was to bring with him in his little boat an American woman, Miss Belle Shane, 22 years of age.

Her baggage was to be limited to a comb, a tooth brush and a hand mirror. Andrews set sail from Atlantic City, New Jersey. Why this person abandoned the project is not clear.

His boat, a canvas-covered folding vessel, is sometimes spoken of in the owner's leaflets and newspaper cuttings as the Phantom Ship.

The start was made in fine weather. In the course of former trips, Captain Andrews had kept a log, but on this occasion he had felt indisposed to take so much trouble.

He slept during the night, first setting the sails of his boat, and leaving her to steer herself. "I can't account for my collapse," continued Andrews in narrating his experiences.

"In this boat I was overcome.

"Whilst sleeping I believe I was asphyxiated - I think by carbonic gas from the mineral water I had on board.

"When morning came I was dazed. Day after day I did not know anything. On the 27th of June I found myself alongside a steamer, the Camperdown. I did not see her coming until I was within three feet of her.

"I suppose they had been talking to me but I had heard othing. I put my hand on her and pushed off. After that - it seemed to me immediately after - I struck the Bremerhaven, and I asked the captain the date. He replied, 'The first of July.'

"When I realised that three days had intervened I concluded that there was a wheel loose in my head.

"I seemed to get worse whilst sleeping, and sometimes I was actually unaware of my existence. My feet and legs were swollen and I suffered in my throat and stomach".

He felt the loss of his little boat somewhat keenly. He states that he rapidly recovered his usual health aboard the Holbein. His intention had been to visit the Paris Exhibition next year and there show the Doree as "the smallest ship that ever attempted to cross the capricious Atlantic."

From the Guardian archive > July 18, 1899 > A disappointed ancient mariner, G,
Republished 18.7.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1823082,00.html

On This Day - May 3, 1845

From The Times Archive

A British ship is wrecked at Ventry in Dingle Bay, Co Kerry

ABOUT 5 o’clock on Sunday morning the beautiful sailing vessel Cleopatra, of Northumberland, bound for North America, with a cargo of brick and coal, from England, was dashed against the cliffs at the mouth of the harbour.

Scarcely had she struck against these immense rocks, when she was literally staved to pieces. The crew (nine in number) threw themselves into the deep, and were dashed about by the immense surges, which rose mountains high, when, most providentially, they were seen by a young fellow who immediately gave the alarm.

In a very short time many persons assembled over the wreck on the cliffs above. Two amongst them volunteered to descend by a rope to their relief. The brave fellows safely descended through the cliffs; threw the drowning men, now almost exhausted, the rope, and brought all safe ashore. The perpendicular altitude of the cliff is not less than 800 feet.

The conduct of the poor Roman Catholic people of Ventry on the above melancholy occasion was, we are informed, most heroic and generous. To rescue strangers — the crew of the vessel were Scotchmen — from a watery grave, they perilled their lives, reckless of their own fate, and bent only on effecting the safety of others.

The humanity of such people deserves a better return than the appellation of “savages”, as the Irish peasantry have been so frequently designated by their ignorant brethren in other parts of this empire.

From The Times Archives > On This Day - May 3, 1845, The Times, 3.5.2005,
http://www.newsint-archive.co.uk/pages/main.asp

From the Guardian archive

September 7, 1822

The power of the new steam ships

Saturday September 7, 1822
Guardian

The power of steam has now completely changed everything connected with naval polity.

The Rapid and the King of The Netherlands are established weekly betwixt London and Rotterdam. These are both steam-boats, and their arrivals can be so regularly calculated on, that the agents occasionally take a boat down the Thames, from a certainty that their meeting with them will not occasion the loss of a couple of hours.

By the way of Rotterdam, every letter from Russia, Prussia, Sweden, Denmark, Flanders, and Holland may be received by steam with as much regularity as those from Inverness, Portpatrick, or Falmouth.

The post office (having a monopoly of correspondence) should in justice direct a steam yacht at Rotterdam or Helveotsluys, to receive twice a week all the letters addressed to England from the north of Europe.

It is a fact that at present the expenses of the post office packets cost government more than they reap. There are four stations, Gottenburg, Flanders, and Helveotsluys for conveyance of the correspondence with England from the north of Europe. The two steam yachts, the King of The Netherlands and the Rapid, could deliver all the letters usually received by the media of these four stations, at trifling expense to the government, and in a much shorter period, generally, than any sailing vessel is capable of effecting.

The power and the advantages of steam have been well exemplified in his majesty's late voyage to Scotland when the James Watt steam-ship absolutely drew the Royal George sailing yacht to the Firth of Forth, leaving even frigates twenty-four hours behind them.

From the capital of the Russian empire, by steam, the regular communication could be reduced to ten days.

At present the regular course of post from St. Petersburg is twenty-one days. From Paris the communication should be daily, for the two days in each week on which French mails do not arrive are constantly supplied with information received by private expresses, to the great detriment of the post office revenues, and to the greater detriment of individual merchants.

From Spain, Portugal and the Mediterranean, all letters could be received by the way of Lisbon, or Ferrol, in the short period of sixty hours, by steam packets from either of these places to Falmouth.

So long as steam navigation is permitted by law, so long are the British merchants injured by the post office not adopting this plan for the conveyance of public mails.

    From the Guardian archive > September 7, 1822 >
    The power of the new steam ships, G, Republished 7.9.2006,
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,,1866389,00.html

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