Enchantment of the Seas
Two news stories recently on drugs aboard cruise ships suggest two very different types of drug problems. U.S. Customs and Border Protection raided the MSC Poesia, on Jan. 4, prior to the ship departing on a “Jam Cruise” a floating music festival featuring 44 performers and bands. As reported by NBC Miami: “The raids resulted in 15 seizures of LSD, marijuana, mushrooms, hash oil, prescription drugs, Ecstasy, and drug paraphernalia, all in mostly small quantities.”
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This Thursday, January 13th, the three ships of the 
A disturbing report published yesterday in the
Two hundred years ago today the USS Revenge, under the command of Oliver Hazard Perry, sank in the waters off Rhode Island. On Friday, divers, Charles Buffum, Mike Fournier and Craig Harger, announced that they believe that they have located the wreck. In the wreckage they have found four 42-inch long cannons, an anchor, canister shot, and other metal objects that make them confident that they have the right ship. They do not have a positive identification however and some have noted that the Revenge was originally armed with 6 pounders with a length of 72″. Whether the ship was subsequently rearmed with carronades is the subject of discussion as well as whether the published photographs of the guns show trunnions indicating a conventional gun or lugs indicating carronades.
This week 
A Ukrainian sailor, on a Dutch ship in international waters steaming toward Houston, Texas, got into a fight with a fellow crew member New Year’s Eve and the next morning was found dead in his cabin. An autopsy is being performed to determine the cause of death as the various authorities discuss the jurisdiction if it is determined that a crime has been committed.
There is no bad time to read Melville. For the past 15 years in early January, the 
On the night of December 7,1942 ten British commandos set off in five wood and canvas canoes from a British submarine in the Bay of Biscay off the coast of occupied France. Their intent was to paddle 75 miles up the Gironde estuary and attack and sink German ships with limpet mines in the harbor of Bordeaux. Only two of the ten commandos survived but they succeeded in sinking one ship and severely damaging four others, as well as disrupting port operations for months. The British Prime Minister Winston Churchill believed the mission shortened the Second World War by six months.
Rather than pressuring the Japanese to stop whaling, the vigilante violence of the 
As Shakespeare noted, “the course of true love never did run smooth.” That was literally the case when, in early October, Tokelaun teenager Filo Filo, with two of his friends, set off to visit a young lady on the neighboring Fakaofo atoll, some sixty miles away. The skiff ran out of fuel and the boys drifted for fifty days across nearly 1,000 miles of the Pacific ocean in the small aluminum dinghy before being rescued by a passing fishing vessel. Now the young lady whose face launched the stolen skiff has been revealed. She has been communicating with her young suitor by Facebook. Thanks to
An interesting if odd news item today: