An interrupted broadcast of a football game, a newsbreak during a performance by the New York Philharmonic, a weather report followed by an announcement from President Roosevelt that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor. Reports of attacks on the Philippines. Here is a compilation of news reports from Sunday, December 7th, 1941, eighty-two years ago today.
Photo: US Coast Guard
For the last twenty years, Sally Snowman has worked as the keeper of the Boston Light on Little Brewster Island. She was the first woman to serve as lighthouse keeper at the lighthouse in Boston Harbor, the oldest continually used and last staffed lighthouse in the country, dating back to before the Revolutionary War.
Boston Light, located nearly 10 miles southeast of Boston, was originally built in 1716 and has a light that flashes 27 miles across the Atlantic Ocean.
Now that she is retiring at the end of the month, she will also be the last keeper of the Boston Light and indeed the last lighthouse keeper in the United States.
Documentary filmmakers Yvonne Drebert and Zach Melnick were looking for invasive mussels on the bottom of Lake Huron in Canada when they came across the 150-foot-long shipwreck of the Africa.
On the morning of 4 October 1895, the Africa departed from Ashtabula, Ohio, carrying coal over Lake Huron to Owen Sound, Ontario. But it didn’t make it. The ship sank in during an early-season snowstorm. The steamer’s 11-person crew died.
Drebert and Melnick aren’t saying exactly where they’ve located the ship because it’s now considered a protected grave site, but she does say it’s off the west coast of the Bruce Peninsula in about 280 feet of water or 85 metres down.
Thanks to Alaric Bond for contributing to this post.
Film crew accidentally discovers 1800s shipwreck off Lake Huron in Ontario
Endeavour replica image: ANMM
For more than a decade, we have followed the work of researchers from Rhode Island and Australia in their efforts to locate the wreck of Captain James Cook’s famous barque, HMB Endeavour, that sailed from 1768-1771 on a voyage of discovery to Australia and New Zealand.
Now, the Australian National Maritime Museum (ANMM)believes that its researchers have conclusively identified the wreck of the barque, in Newport, Rhode Island based on historical records and the characteristics of the much-degraded wooden hull.
On Sunday, the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Mason received a distress call from the M/V Central Park, a 20,000 DWT oil/chemical tanker, in the Gulf of Aden, that reported they were under attack by an unknown entity. Five armed individuals had boarded the tanker. The tanker’s crew barricaded themselves in the tanker’s citadel, an armored panic room.
When the USS Mason and other coalition vessels arrived at the Central Park, they demanded the release of the ship. Five gunmen attempted to flee from the tanker in a skiff. The crew of Mason pursued the skiff as it headed toward Yemen with the ship’s embarked helicopter and ultimately forced the five to surrender. They were detained for questioning.
In 1986, a massive iceberg, almost five times larger than New York City, calved off West Antarctica’s Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf. The iceberg, designated A23a, immediately grounded on the floor of the Weddell Sea, where it remained stuck for almost four decades.
Now, the world’s largest and among the world’s oldest icebergs is on the move, drifting into what is known as “iceberg alley” on the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. Recent satellite images reveal that the berg, weighing nearly a trillion metric tonnes, is now drifting quickly past the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, aided by strong winds and currents.
So, why, after almost 40 years, is A23a on the move now?
Happy Evacuation Day! 240 years ago today, on November 25, 1783, the last shot of the American Revolution was fired by a gunner on a departing Royal Navy ship at jeering crowds gathered on the shore of Staten Island, at the mouth of New York Harbor. The shot went wide, missing its target.
Sir Guy Carleton had ordered his troops to sail at noon on November 25th. George Washington and an honor guard from the Continental Army marched in shortly thereafter. Before Washington could arrive, officially ending the seven-year occupation of New York, the British flag, which had been nailed to a greased flag pole at the Battery, needed to be taken down. John Van Arsdale, a survivor of a British prison ship, climbed the greasy pole, ripped down the Union Jack, and nailed up the Stars and Stripes. For years, greased pole climbing contests were popular in celebrations of Evacuation Day in New York.
Happy Thanksgiving to those on this side of the pond and below the 49th parallel. (The Canadians celebrated the holiday in October.)
What do whaling ships, a child’s nursery rhyme, a female magazine editor, and Abraham Lincoln have to do with Thanksgiving? An updated repost.
Until the Civil War, Thanksgiving was a sporadically celebrated regional holiday. Today, Thanksgiving is one of the central creation myths of the founding of the United States, although not universally admired. The story is based on an account of a one-time feast of thanksgiving in the Plymouth colony of Massachusetts during a period of atypically good relations with local tribes.
The actual history of what happened in 1621 bears little resemblance to what most Americans are taught in grade school, historians say. There was likely no turkey served. There were no feathered headdresses worn. And, initially, there was no effort by the Pilgrims to invite the local Native American tribe to the feast they’d made possible.
Thanksgiving only became a national holiday in 1863. Before the celebration spread across the country, Thanksgiving was most popular in New England. On 19th-century American whaling ships, which sailed from New England ports, they celebrated only the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Of the three holidays, Thanksgiving may have been the most popular. On Norfolk Island in the Pacific, they also celebrate Thanksgiving, the holiday brought to the island by visiting American whaling ships.
Yemen’s Houthi rebels seized the vehicle carrier Galaxy Leader in the Red Sea on Sunday, officials said, taking over two dozen crew members hostage.
The Iran-backed Houthi rebels said they hijacked the ship over its connection to Israel. The group warned that it would continue to target ships in international waters that were linked to or owned by Israelis until the end of Israel’s campaign against Gaza’s Hamas rulers.
The government of Israel denies that the ship is Israeli. The Times of Israel reports that the Bahaman-flagged vessel is registered under a British company, which is partially owned by Israeli tycoon Abraham Ungar, who goes by Rami. The vessel was leased out to a Japanese company at the time of the hijacking.
Don Walsh, a pioneering US Navy explorer, died on Nov. 12 at his home in Myrtle Point, Ore. He was 92. On Jan. 23, 1960, Walsh was a Navy lieutenant in command of the bathyscaphe Trieste, when he and Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard dove to the bottom of the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, reaching and measuring the deepest point in the world’s oceans.
Walsh and Piccard spent 20 minutes at the ocean floor, taking measurements and peering through the super-fortified viewing holes in the Trieste. What they saw opened new frontiers in deep-sea marine biology. They reported spotting fish, shrimp, and jellyfish at depths below 30,000 feet. The observations were the first eyewitness clues to the range of life that could survive in the most extreme depths.
Over the Veterans’ Day weekend, the iron-hulled sailing ship Star of India left her dock at the Maritime Museum of San Diego, setting sail, for the first time in five years, to celebrate her 160th birthday. A short news video:
World’s oldest active sailing ship, Star of India, sets sail for 160th birthday
A popular, full-day excursion to Blue Lagoon Island, from a cruise ship docked in Nassau in the Bahamas, ended in tragedy on Tuesday when a ferry boat loaded with 100 passengers rolled over and sank in choppy waters. A 75-year-old American woman from Colorado died in the partial capsize.
The NY Post reports that the ferry was nearing its destination when conditions on the water began to deteriorate.
“One of the crewmembers who was downstairs ran upstairs and was crying, absolutely bawling, and grabbing a life jacket. That’s when everybody was like … this is real, something’s happening,” American tourist Kelly Schissel said in a TikTok.
Intriguing news from Saildrone. The developer of ocean data collection using autonomous vehicles announced that it has received the first-ever classification for an autonomous, uncrewed surface vehicle (USV).
From their announcement:
The American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) has been a driving force in shaping the standards for safety and excellence in design and construction for the maritime industry for over 150 years. Saildrone is excited to announce that ABS has issued the first-ever class certificate for a commercial, uncrewed surface vehicle (USV) for the Saildrone Voyager.
The world’s newest island has risen from the Pacific Ocean off the Japanese island of Iwo Jima after an underwater volcanic eruption that began toward the end of October. In just 10 days, volcanic ash and rocks built up on the shallow seabed, forming an island that emerged from below the water’s surface. The eruption has now subsided.
By early November it was approximately 100 meters in diameter and had reached a height of 20 meters above sea level, according to Yuji Usui from the Japan Meteorological Agency’s volcanic division.
How long the island will remain is unclear. The fragile nature of its composition, described as “crumbly” by Usui, makes it susceptible to erosion by ocean waves. Ongoing analysis by experts includes an examination of the deposits to determine exactly what it is made of.
Continue reading
Soldiers’ council of the Prinzregent Luitpold
In the US, today is Veteran’s Day, when we honor those who have served in the military. It coincides with Armistice Day, the anniversary of the signing of the armistice which ended World War I, on the 11th hour of the 11th day, of the 11th month of 1918, when the guns finally fell silent after four years of bloody conflict.
Today is a good time to recall the mutiny of the German High Seas Fleet, which played a significant role in finally ending the war. Here is an updated repost of an article from a few years ago about the naval mutinies.
The mutinies at Wilhelmshaven on October 29th and at Kiel on November 3, triggered the German revolution and swept aside the monarchy within a few days. The naval mutinies led directly to the end of the German Empire and to the establishment of the Weimar Republic.
SS Edmund Fitzgerald, an American Great Lakes ore carrier, sank 48 years ago today, on November 10, 1975, in a storm on Lake Superior. The crew of 29 was lost when the freighter, loaded with 26,000 tons of iron ore pellets, sank in 530 feet of water, about 15 nautical from Whitefish Bay. Exactly why and how the bulk carrier sank remains a mystery to this day. An updated repost.
The wreckage of the ship was located within days. The bow section was upright some distance from the stern which was upside down on the bottom. Roughly 200 feet of vessel around midships was missing.
A disturbing account of the Saga Cruises’ ship Spirit of Discovery that was caught in severe weather in the Bay of Biscay in which 100 passengers were injured. Five are reported to have been seriously injured.
BBC reports that the ship departed for a 14-day cruise around the Canary Islands on 24 October with about 1,000 people on board.
A decision was made to return to the UK early due to worsening weather, but on Saturday the vessel encountered a storm in the Bay of Biscay – where ships often encounter notoriously rough seas.
A wonderful story from Robyn White writing for Newsweek.
A pod of dolphins led a whale and her calf back to their migration route after they became lost and distressed, a heartwarming video shows. The albino mother humpback whale was found by the Dolphin Discovery Centre, near Bunbury’s Back Beach in Western Australia, after a few beachgoers noticed her in “distress.”
The whale—which had a dark front and a snowy-white back body—was at first mistaken for an orca by witnesses. But when the Dolphin Discovery Centre took a closer look, it realized it was an albino humpback whale, the Bunbury-based nonprofit said in a Facebook post. Continue reading
In August, we posted Panamax Meets Pana-Drought — Drought Restrictions In Canal Cause Delays and 200 Ship Backlog. A record drought associated with the naturally occurring El Nino climate pattern has resulted in one of the country’s driest years in over 70 years. In July, the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) reduced the average daily transit capacity in the canal to 32 vessels per day from 38.
Now, transit slots will be cut to 25 per day starting November 3 and will be gradually reduced further over the next three months to 18 slots on February 1, The cuts are anticipated to only worsen supply chain shortages. The Panama Canal handles an estimated 5 percent of seaborne trade.
Naglfar and Fenrir on the Tullstorp Runestone in Scania, Sweden
A second post suitable for Halloween week. In Norse mythology, there were two great ships. Skidbladnir, was a ship that could carry Odin and his followers in Asgard, which also could be folded into a cloth that would fit in a pocket when not in use.
An even larger ship, indeed the largest ship in the world, was the fearsome Naglfar, a ship built entirely from the untrimmed fingernails and toenails of the dead. According to the poem Völuspá, the ship will be sailed from Muspelheim (the land of fire) by the two jötnar (giants), Hrym, and Loki. It will carry the army of the dead to Ragnarök, the final climactic battle between Odin and his gods and the giants that will result in the end of the world of gods and men.
The story of Naglfar may have inspired or been inspired by the Scandinavian practices of preparing the dead before burial. This preparation included the trimming of hair, fingernails, and toenails. By ensuring that their deceased loved ones did not have untrimmed nails, they would not contribute to the construction of Naglfar and thus would help to delay the end of the world.