pplpod

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Built by Caledon in Dundee and completed in 1902, the Leyland Line cotton carrier SS Californian was the largest ship yet built in the city, and moving her boilers crushed roads and burst water pipes. In April 1912 she carried no passengers when Captain Stanley Lord stopped her in an ice field at 10:20 p.m. on April 14. Wireless operator Cyril Evans warned nearby ships, and the Titanic's Jack Phillips, working Cape Race, replied keep out, standard shorthand for a busy channel. Evans shut down at 11:35 p.m. and went to bed, as there was then no rule for round the clock radio watch.

Third Officer Charles Groves saw a large ship stop, and between midnight and 2 a.m. Second Officer Herbert Stone and apprentice James Gibson watched eight white rockets. Lord, told by speaking tube, asked if they were company signals and ordered more Morse lamp signaling but never woke Evans. The US and British inquiries condemned him, and Leyland dismissed him. After Robert Ballard's 1985 discovery showed the Titanic sank 13 miles from her broadcast position, a 1992 reappraisal found the ships were beyond each other's horizon but the rockets were visible, and that the Californian could not have arrived before the sinking.

• The Californian had 35 first class berths: 10 pounds to Boston, 50 back to Liverpool.
• Her scrap log for the night was destroyed and the official log mentioned no rockets.
• Crew members leaked the story to New England newspapers after she docked in Boston.
• In November 1915 she was torpedoed by U-34 and later U-35 but stayed afloat on an even keel.
• A French patrol boat finally scuttled her 34 hours after the first hit, in 10,000 feet of water.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

While rival lines chased the Blue Riband with overpowered liners, Cunard ordered the modest RMS Carpathia, launched in 1902: about 558 feet long, around 14 knots, fitted for second and third class passengers and frozen meat, with fuel efficient quadruple expansion engines that spared her the vibration of faster ships. By 1905 she was refit for over 2,500 passengers, adding first class. On the night of April 14 to 15, 1912, off duty wireless operator Harold Cottam was about to sleep when he messaged the Titanic at 12:11 a.m. and received its distress call instead.

Captain Arthur Rostron turned at once, cut heating and hot water to send all steam to the engines, set up triage in the dining rooms, and drove 58 miles through the ice field in three and a half hours. Arriving at 4 a.m., the crew took in over 700 survivors by 9 a.m. Rostron chose New York over closer ports and allowed wireless use only for survivor names, relayed to USS Chester. In the First World War the Carpathia carried troops in dazzle camouflage until July 17, 1918, when U-55 torpedoed her; 218 of 223 aboard escaped in 11 lifeboats before HMS Snowdrop drove the submarine off.

• Rostron was knighted and received the Congressional Gold Medal from President Taft.
• Survivors including Margaret Brown funded medals for the crew.
• A life jacket kept by a young Croatian waiter survives in a museum in Croatia.
• Carpathia was the fifth Cunard ship sunk in five weeks.
• Her wreck was found in 2000, upright 500 feet down off Ireland, by a team funded by Clive Cussler's NUMA.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The sea otter, Enhydra lutris, is the heaviest member of the weasel family and one of the smallest marine mammals, and it survives the freezing North Pacific with no blubber. Its fur holds up to 150,000 hairs per square centimeter, with barbed guard hairs and underfur that trap air when groomed. Diving compresses that air layer, so otters run a metabolism two to three times that of a similar land mammal and eat 25 to 38 percent of their body weight daily. They have dense bones, lungs two and a half times larger than expected, and multi lobed kidneys that let them drink seawater. They forage in one to four minute dives across more than a hundred prey species.

Mothers blow air into pups' fur so they float while she dives, and males grip females by the nose when mating, leaving scars. After Vitus Bering's shipwrecked crew brought pelts back from the Commander Islands in the 1740s, the soft gold trade cut otters from 150,000 to 300,000 to about 1,000 to 2,000 by the 1911 treaty, while Russian traders forced Aleut men to hunt and the Aleut population fell from about 20,000 to 2,000. Every California otter descends from about 50 found near Bixby Creek Bridge in 1938. As a keystone species they keep urchins from turning kelp forests into barrens.

• They store prey in loose skin pouches under the forelegs, favoring the left one.
• Floating on their backs, they smash shells on a chest rock up to 45 times in 15 seconds.
• Resting rafts wrap themselves in kelp to avoid drifting out to sea.
• By eating crabs in estuaries they help eelgrass bind sediment against erosion.
• Their appetite for abalone, Dungeness crab and clams puts them in conflict with shellfish fisheries.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The 2021 viral song about the Wellerman bringing sugar, tea and rum is named for three real British brothers, Edward, George and Joseph Weller, who reached Sydney in 1829 and in 1831 set up at Otago Heads in New Zealand, 17 years before Dunedin was founded. Their money came from supplying shore based whalers stranded in isolated bays, and their supply ships and employees became known as the Wellermen. By 1834 their Otakou station produced 310 tons of whale oil with 85 staff, part of a chain of seven stations, and they also traded timber, flax, potatoes, dried fish, gunpowder, rum and preserved tattooed Maori heads.

Joseph died of tuberculosis in 1835. The southern right whales they hunted, slow, coastal and buoyant when killed, were slaughtered until the population collapsed. Edward and George turned to buying millions of acres through dubious deals, but after British rule arrived in 1840 around the Treaty of Waitangi, a court of claims voided their purchases, and they were bankrupt by 1840. Otakou closed in 1841 after producing 10 tons. In 1966 folklorist Neil Colquhoun recorded the ballad from an 80 year old man, and in 2021 Scottish singer Nathan Evans's cover hit number one in the UK.

• The song follows the whaling ship Billy o' Tea in a weeks long fight with a whale.
• Tonguing meant stripping blubber from a carcass on the beach and boiling it down in iron pots.
• Strictly it is not a shanty but a forebitter, sung for entertainment off watch.
• A dance remix by 220 Kid and Billen Ted helped it top the charts.
• The brothers' legacy on the map is Weller's Rock, Te Umukuri, a lookout for the returning right whales.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In 1826 French naval officer Jules Dumont d'Urville reported a 33 meter wave in the Indian Ocean, and scientist Francois Arago mocked him, insisting waves could not exceed 30 feet. Oceanographers trusted a Gaussian model built on significant wave height, and survivorship bias hid the evidence: ships that met giant waves rarely returned. That changed on January 1, 1995 at the Draupner gas platform in the North Sea, where a downward laser in a 12 meter sea recorded a single 25.6 meter wave at 15:24 UTC, and damage high on the rig confirmed it. A rogue wave is defined as more than twice the significant wave height, and unlike a tsunami it forms and breaks in deep water.

The European Space Agency's MaxWave project in 2004 found more than ten waves over 25 meters in three weeks of satellite radar, and RRS Discovery measured waves up to 29.1 meters near Scotland in 2000. That reframed losses like the German freighter München in 1978 and the MV Derbyshire in 1980. Rogue waves can form through current focusing against opposing winds, crossing seas meeting near 120 degrees, or modulational instability in which one wave drains energy from its neighbors, the so called vampire wave. The same math has since appeared in liquid helium, microwave cavities and fiber optic light pulses.

• The München's lifeboat pins, 20 meters above the waterline, were bent backward from bow to stern.
• The Derbyshire's hatch covers failed under the pressure of about 20 meters of water.
• A breaking rogue wave can exceed 100 metric tons per square meter, enough to cause brittle fracture in mild steel.
• In 2019 Oxford and Edinburgh researchers recreated the Draupner wave in a lab tank.
• Older ship designs assumed breaking forces of about 15 tons per square meter.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Robin Knox-Johnston, born in Putney in 1939, served in the Merchant Navy and Royal Naval Reserve before sailing the 32 foot ketch Suhaili, built on Norwegian lifeboat lines, from Bombay to England, going broke on the way and working as a stevedore in South Africa. His wife Sue, whom he had known since age eight, would not sail home with their baby daughter, and they divorced in 1967. On June 14, 1968 he left Falmouth in Suhaili as one of nine entrants in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race to sail solo and nonstop around the world.

After losing his self steering gear off Australia, he balanced sails against rudder with bungee cords and slept in brief bursts. Bernard Moitessier quit the race for Tahiti, Donald Crowhurst faked his positions and died at sea, and Knox-Johnston sailed into Falmouth on April 22, 1969 as the only finisher. He gave his 5,000 pound prize for fastest time to Crowhurst's family, remarried Sue in 1972, and kept racing: in 1994 he and Peter Blake sailed the catamaran Enza around the world in just under 75 days. The compass stolen from Suhaili on his return was handed back by the thief's widow in 2022.

• He won the two handed Round Britain Race in 1970 and 1974.
• He persuaded Bill Pinkney to take the Capes route, making Pinkney the first Black man to circumnavigate that way.
• He founded the Clipper Round the World yacht race in 1996 for ordinary sailors.
• He was knighted in 1995 and finished the Velux 5 Oceans race at 68.
• At 75 he placed third in his class in the solo transatlantic Route du Rhum.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

A 1936 car accident shattered the arms of young French naval officer Jacques-Yves Cousteau, born in 1910, and ended his hopes of flying. Swimming in the Mediterranean at Toulon to recover, he borrowed a pair of Fernez goggles and became obsessed with the underwater world. During the German occupation he did covert intelligence work while filming 18 Meters Deep on held breath. In 1943 he and engineer Emile Gagnan adapted Gagnan's gas regulator, built to feed cooking gas to car engines, into the Aqualung, whose diaphragm delivered air at the pressure of the surrounding water. Austrian diver Hans Hass later disputed who was first.

In 1950 Cousteau leased a former British minesweeper for one franc a year and made it the Calypso. His 1956 film The Silent World, made with Louis Malle, won the Palme d'Or and an Academy Award, and his 1966 series The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau made his red cap famous. In 1960 his public campaign stopped a French plan to dump radioactive waste in the Mediterranean. His later life brought the death of his son Philippe in a 1979 flying boat crash, a 1995 lawsuit against his son Jean-Michel, a secret second family revealed in 1991, and a stark 1991 statement on overpopulation.

• From the Calypso he deduced that porpoises used natural sonar to find the deepest channel.
• The SP-350 diving saucer of 1959 carried two people to 350 meters.
• His Conshelf habitats kept aquanauts living on the seafloor for weeks through saturation diving.
• He called himself an oceanographic technician rather than a scientist.
• The invasive algae Caulerpa taxifolia is widely suspected to have escaped from the Monaco museum he directed.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

A black and white cat later nicknamed Unsinkable Sam survived the sinking of the Bismarck in May 1941, then the torpedoing of HMS Cossack, then the loss of HMS Ark Royal, before retiring to mouse catching in a Gibraltar office with six lives to go. Ship's cats earned their berth by killing rats that chewed rope, hulls and grain and carried plague fleas. Domesticated about 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, cats spread along Mediterranean trade routes by the 8th century BCE and reached Viking ports by the 7th century CE. Sailors prized extra toed polydactyl cats and read weather in a cat's sneezes and grooming, which may reflect a real sensitivity to falling barometric pressure.

In the Second World War cats became crew. Blackie of HMS Prince of Wales was photographed with Churchill in August 1941 and renamed Churchill. Convoy of HMS Hermione had his own hammock and died with 87 men when she was torpedoed. Simon of HMS Amethyst was wounded by shrapnel in the 1949 Yangtze incident, kept hunting rats, was named Able Seacat and remains the only cat awarded the Dickin Medal. In May 1914 Emmy abandoned the Empress of Ireland and her kittens in Quebec City, hours before the liner sank with over 1,000 lives.

• Kiddo stowed away on the airship America in 1910 and was hung in a gunny sack under the gondola.
• Mrs. Chippy, a male cat on Shackleton's Endurance, was shot after the ship was crushed in the ice.
• The US Navy cat Pooley earned three service ribbons and four battle stars.
• The Royal Navy banned pets from ships in 1975 on hygiene grounds.
• Science fiction carried the tradition on, from Jonesy in Alien to Data's cat Spot.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The Eddystone rocks, a submerged gneiss reef 9 to 12 miles off Cornwall in the approach to Plymouth Sound, were hidden at high spring tides, and ships steering clear of them wrecked on France and the Channel Islands instead. Henry Winstanley began a tower there in the 1690s during the Nine Years' War, was seized by a French privateer, and was released on the orders of Louis XIV, who said France was at war with England, not humanity. His ornate octagonal tower, lit in 1698 with 60 candles behind 36 glass panes, was the first recorded open ocean lighthouse. It vanished in the Great Storm of November 27, 1703, with Winstanley and five men inside.

John Rudyerd's conical timber tower, built with Woolwich shipwrights and caulked like a hull, stood nearly 50 years until a December 1755 fire. Keeper Henry Hall, 94, swallowed molten lead from the burning roof and lived over a week; the lead cast of his stomach is in the National Museums of Scotland. John Smeaton's 1759 tower, shaped like an oak and built of dovetailed granite and Portland stone set with hydraulic lime, outlasted its own rock, which cracked beneath it. Its upper part was rebuilt on Plymouth Hoe, and James Douglass's 161 foot tower rose on the South Rock in 1882.

• Douglass's tower used over 62,000 cubic feet of granite and weighed more than 4,000 tons.
• Its seven ton rotating lens burned colza oil, reaching nearly 160,000 candle power in fog.
• Keepers hand cranked a one ton weight every hour to drive two fog bells.
• A helipad was added atop the lantern in 1980.
• In 1982 it became the first Trinity House offshore rock lighthouse to be fully automated, later running on solar power.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The ship that opened the Age of Discovery was no towering galleon. A 15th century caravel ran roughly 12 to 18 meters long, carried only 50 to 60 tons, and had a narrow hull about three and a half times longer than wide, letting it beat to windward off a deadly lee shore where round hulled cogs and naus were helpless. Its name runs from Portuguese caravela through Late Latin caravus to Byzantine Greek karabos, a light ship. Its triangular lateen sail spread through the Roman world by the 4th century, and in the 5th century shipwrights stripped costly brails and lead rings from square rigs to save money, pushing the industry to the cheaper lateen rig. Cost cutting also brought frame first carvel construction, shown in the Kelenderis ship mosaic.

Arab caliphates kept the Coptic and Greek shipyards running and carried the lateen rig west past Gibraltar. By the 13th century fishermen on the Atlantic coasts of Galicia, Portugal and Andalusia sailed open, undecked 20 ton caravels with five man crews over shifting sandbars. In the mid 15th century Prince Henry the Navigator gathered astronomers, Jewish mapmakers, Arab mathematicians and shipwrights at Sagres, and the enlarged caravel carried Diogo Cao and Bartolomeu Dias along Africa. In 1492 Columbus sailed with two caravels, the Niña and the Pinta, and refit the Niña with a square rig in the Canary Islands to run before the trade winds.

• The lateen sail works like a vertical airplane wing, generating lift instead of drag.
• A lateen rig can be dangerous with the wind dead astern, as its long yards swing wildly.
• The hybrid caravela redonda paired a square foresail with lateen sails aft.
• Added forecastles and sterncastles suited escort duty but eroded the caravel's sleek geometry.
• Its tiny cargo space doomed it once routes turned to profit, and the carrack, nau and galleon replaced it.