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The deadliest peacetime maritime disaster was not the Titanic but the collision of the Philippine ferry MV Doña Paz and the tanker MT Vector on December 20, 1987. The ferry was built in Hiroshima in 1963 as the Himeyuri Maru, rated for 608 passengers. Sulpicio Lines bought her in 1975 and renamed her Don Sulpicio, and after a June 1979 fire gutted her, with all 1,164 aboard surviving, insurers declared her a constructive total loss. Sulpicio bought the wreck back, repaired her, and returned her to service as the Doña Paz on a twice-weekly Manila to Tacloban route via Catbalogan. She left Tacloban at 6:30 a.m. at the peak of Christmas travel, and at 10:40 p.m. in the Tablas Strait she met the Vector, chartered by Caltex and carrying 8,800 barrels of mostly gasoline, with no valid license, no lookout, and no qualified master.

The gasoline ignited and the sea itself burned. The ferry's lights failed, life jacket cabinets were padlocked, an apprentice alone was on the bridge, and the captain was reportedly watching a Betamax movie while officers drank beer. The Doña Paz sank within two hours and the Vector within four. Authorities took eight hours to register the collision and eight more to start searching. The passing cargo ship MV Don Claudio pulled 25 people from the burning oil with cargo nets: 23 ferry passengers and two Vector crew. No Doña Paz crew survived. The manifest listed 1,493 passengers and 59 crew, but illegal gangway tickets and unlisted children meant far more, and a 1999 presidential task force counted over 4,300 passengers, for a death toll recognized at around 4,385.

• Sulpicio argued that anyone not on its manifest was never aboard and owed nothing.
• The Philippine Supreme Court held the Vector's owners liable and ruled that unlisted victims' families could claim compensation.
• Caltex was cleared of liability under the charter party arrangement.
• Fourteen-year-old survivor Valeriana Duma's story went undocumented until a 2012 television program.
• In April 2019 the RV Petrel found the Doña Paz upright about 500 meters down, with the Vector about two kilometers away.

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In 1869 Scottish shipowner John "Jock" Willis commissioned the Cutty Sark at Dumbarton to beat his rival Thermopylae in the China tea trade, where the first fresh crop into London fetched a premium. Her composite build paired a wrought iron frame with teak and American rock elm planking, sheathed below the waterline in Muntz metal that leached copper and kept barnacles off, and her prismatic coefficient of 0.628 gave her a knife-edged hull. She was named for the short linen shift worn by the witch Nannie Dee in Robert Burns's Tam o' Shanter, and her figurehead still holds the horse's tail the witch tore off. In the great race of 1872 from Shanghai she led Thermopylae by about 400 miles until her rudder snapped in a gale near the Sunda Strait. Captain George Moody refused to seek shelter, and carpenter Henry Henderson built a new rudder at sea over six days, arriving a week behind.

The Suez Canal, opened the same year she was built, and the fuel-saving compound steam engine soon pushed sailing ships out of the tea trade, and she was reduced to hauling castor oil, jute, and coal. In 1880 first mate Sidney Smith killed seaman John Francis, Captain James Wallace let him escape in Indonesia, and after days becalmed in the Java Sea with a mutinous crew, Wallace jumped overboard. His replacement William Bruce embezzled wages and sold the crew's food. Revival came in the Australian wool trade under Captain Richard Woodget, who drove her through iceberg fields in the Roaring Forties, and in 1889 she overtook the steamer SS Britannia at 17 knots.

• Sold to a Portuguese firm in 1895, she became the Ferreira, which her crew called Little Shirt.
• In 1922, as the last working clipper, she was spotted in Falmouth by retired captain Wilfred Dowman, who bought her.
• She survived an 800-ton tanker ramming her bow on the Thames in 1952 and went on display at Greenwich in 1954.
• On May 21, 2007, an industrial vacuum left plugged in overheated and set her ablaze, but over half her original fabric was in storage.
• Restorers raised the ship three meters on steel struts so her hull no longer sags on its keel.

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The ship the world called Evergreen is actually the Ever Given; Evergreen is the Taiwanese operator whose name is painted on the hull. Built by Imabari Shipbuilding in Marugame, Japan, with her keel laid in December 2015 and completion in September 2018, she is an Imabari 20,000 class vessel 399.94 meters long, longer than the Empire State Building laid on its side, 58.8 meters wide, with a 16-meter draft and room for 20,124 TEUs. An 11-cylinder Mitsui MAN B&W diesel of nearly 80,000 horsepower drives her at up to 22.8 knots with a crew of just 25. She is owned by Japan's Shoei Kisen Kaisha, operated by Evergreen Marine, managed by Germany's Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, and flagged in Panama. On February 9, 2019, on the Elbe near Hamburg, she struck the empty, berthed ferry Finkenwerder, two minutes before high winds shut the river.

On March 23, 2021, bound from Malaysia to Rotterdam as the fifth ship in a northbound convoy and without the tug escort the two ships ahead had, she wedged diagonally across the Suez Canal near Manshiet Rugola in a dust storm with winds around 50 kilometers per hour. The towering wall of containers gave the wind a huge windage area, and the bank effect pulled her hull toward shore. Evergreen Marine blamed a strong wind, while Suez Canal Authority chairman Admiral Osama Rabie said weather was not the main reason. Over 200 vessels were trapped for six days until eight tugs, shoreline excavators, and a full moon spring tide that raised the water nearly half a meter freed her on March 29.

• Egypt impounded the ship in the Great Bitter Lake on April 13, 2021, first demanding $916 million, including $300 million for loss of reputation.
• The demand fell to $600 million, and the undisclosed settlement, reportedly around $540 million, included a 75-ton tugboat.
• Released on July 7, 2021, she reached Rotterdam on July 29, turning a nine-day trip into over four months.
• In a Qingdao dry dock the crushed bow damage reached the bow thruster tunnel, but collision bulkheads had kept her watertight.
• After nearly six weeks of repairs and a new bow, she was back in service by November 2021.

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Davy Jones's Locker first appears in print in a 1726 voyage narrative attributed to Daniel Defoe, likely drawn from real mariners' speech, where a pirate threatens to toss his captives into it. There it is only a euphemism for drowning and the ocean floor. By 1751 a satirical novel had given the idea a body: a fiend with saucer eyes, three rows of sharp teeth, horns, a tail, and blue smoke pouring from his nostrils, who perched in the rigging before hurricanes to mock doomed crews. Giving the indifferent sea a face acted as a psychological lightning rod, since a demon can be cursed and a random wave cannot. The name itself is never explained, and theories pull in the prophet Jonah, whose name may have drifted into Jones, and Saint David, the patron saint of Wales, whom Welsh sailors invoked in storms.

Folklore adds the West Indian duppy, a malevolent ghost, suggesting that multilingual crews blended Caribbean spirits, Welsh prayers, and Jonah into one nautical nightmare. More mundane theories point to a minor pirate named Davy Jones in the Indian Ocean in the 1630s, a clumsy, short-sighted sailor called Duffer Jones who kept falling overboard, and an alehouse keeper who locked drunk patrons in his cellar and sold them to ship captains short of men. As navigation improved, the monster lost his teeth. He became King Neptune's first assistant in rowdy equator crossing ceremonies where shellbacks hazed polywogs, and then a stage and screen character.

• A London West End pantomime featured Davy Jones by 1812.
• In the 1930s he turned up in animated cartoons as a goofy skeleton in a pirate hat.
• A 1960s sitcom about a rock band had a real pop star named Davy Jones, spawning decades of puns.
• In SpongeBob SquarePants the locker is a literal gym locker full of souls and smelly socks.
• In a 2022 UK High Court libel trial, a judge used the idiom to describe a phone dropped into the North Sea.

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The Exxon Valdez was built by National Steel and Shipbuilding Company in San Diego, ordered in August 1984 and launched in October 1986: a 987-foot very large crude carrier with a full load displacement over 240,000 long tons, room for 1.48 million barrels, a 31,650 horsepower diesel, and a crew of just 21. Like most tankers of its day it had a single hull, since a double hull cost more steel and cargo space. On March 24, 1989, under Captain Joseph Hazelwood and carrying about 53 million gallons of crude from Valdez toward Long Beach, it left the shipping lane to avoid ice from the Columbia Glacier, turned back too late with its radar reportedly broken or off, and grounded on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound. Estimates of the spill range from 10.8 to 31.7 million gallons, still the second largest in US history, and much of the cargo stayed inside the intact tanks.

By June 1989 the ship was back in San Diego, where about 1,600 tons of steel were replaced for $30 million, but the single hull stayed. A jury in 1994 awarded $287 million in compensatory and $5 billion in punitive damages to 38,000 litigants, cut to $2.5 billion on appeal and capped by the Supreme Court in June 2008 at $507.5 million, with a further $480 million in interest ordered in 2009. The ship was renamed Exxon Mediterranean, SeaRiver Mediterranean, SR Mediterranean, and Mediterranean. In 2008 it was sold to a COSCO subsidiary in Hong Kong, reflagged in Panama as the Dongfeng Ocean, and converted from a tanker to an ore carrier, then badly damaged in a November 2010 collision with a cargo ship in the South China Sea.

• The Oil Pollution Act of 1990 barred any vessel that spilled over a million gallons in Prince William Sound after March 22, 1989, exiling this ship while its twin Exxon Long Beach kept sailing.
• It later flew the Marshall Islands flag of convenience, and EU rules closed European ports to single-hull tankers.
• In March 2012 Global Marketing Systems bought it for scrap for about $16 million.
• Renamed Oriental Nicety, it faced activist claims that scrapping it at Alang breached the Basel Convention.
• India's Supreme Court cleared the breaking on July 30, 2012, and it was beached at Alang on August 2.

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Before dawn on July 11, 1881, aboard HMS Inconstant off Australia, 16-year-old midshipman Prince George, the future King George V, and 13 others saw a ship crossing their bow glowing with a strange red light, masts and sails sharp against the dark. A man sent forward to the forecastle found nothing, and later that morning the sailor who first reported it fell from the mast and died. The legend behind that sighting grew out of the Dutch East India Company, the VOC, whose top-heavy, pear-shaped fluyts carried spices around the Cape of Good Hope, the Cape of Storms, where the warm Agulhas Current meets Antarctic winds. The earliest print reference, from John MacDonald in 1790, describes only a rumored vision of a Dutch ship lost in a storm after failing to get a pilot.

George Barrington's 1795 version had the phantom charging at a sister ship under full sail before vanishing into a cloud. John Leyden and Sir Walter Scott added curses, from stolen pirate wealth and pestilence to penance for carrying enslaved people, and an 1821 story in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine named the captain Hendrik van der Decken, who swore to round the Cape even if he sailed until Judgment Day. He drew on Bernard Fokke, a real captain whose fast runs to Java had people suspecting a pact with the devil. The likely science is a fata morgana, a superior mirage in which a temperature inversion bends light from a ship beyond the horizon, lifting, stretching, or flipping its image, with red light surviving atmospheric scattering.

• Danish tolls based on deck area pushed Dutch builders toward narrow-decked, top-heavy fluyts.
• Richard Wagner's 1843 opera let the captain land every seven years to seek a woman's true love.
• James Mason played the cursed captain opposite Ava Gardner in the 1951 film Pandora and the Flying Dutchman.
• Davy Jones's Flying Dutchman in Pirates of the Caribbean follows the same rule, landing once every 10 years.
• The name now labels an Efteling roller coaster, a racing sailboat class, KLM jets, and athletes like Honus Wagner and Max Verstappen.

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A tidal bore is a wave that runs up a river against its current, and the largest, on China's Qiantang River, can reach 9 meters and travel 40 kilometers per hour. The word comes through Old English from the Old Norse bara, meaning wave or swell. Unlike seismic tsunamis, bores are driven by the moon and sun, and they need two ingredients: a macrotidal range of more than about 6 meters and a funnel-shaped estuary where a broad bay narrows into a shallow river. Riverbed friction slows the bottom of the incoming flood tide, squeezing six hours of rising water into one sudden surge, a hydraulic jump that appears either as a steep breaking bore or a smooth undular bore trailed by secondary waves called whelps. Its low rumble comes from trapped air bubbles oscillating under pressure, plus scoured sediment, and carries miles inland.

Bores wreck scientific gear. On the River Dee in Wales an acoustic Doppler current profiler had to be dug out with shovels after one tide, and on Australia's Daly River three minutes of macroturbulence toppled aluminum frames built for strong currents. They kill people too, on the Qiantang despite warning signs and on Nova Scotia's Shubenacadie River, where visitors walk drained mudflats. Yet the churning oxygenates stagnant estuaries, feeding fish and shrimp on Indonesia's Rokan River. Human engineering has erased bores: dams and irrigation nearly ended the Colorado River's bore that once reached 47 miles inland, 1960s dredging eliminated the Seine's La Barre, and Brazil's Araguari bore was considered lost by 2015.

• A 1960s causeway between Moncton and Riverview shrank the Petitcodiac's bore, once North America's highest, to a ripple.
• Its gates opened permanently on April 14, 2010, and the river scoured out its silt and rebuilt the bore.
• In 2013 surfers rode a single Petitcodiac bore wave for 29 kilometers, a North American record.
• The Amazon's Pororoca reaches 4 meters, and Indonesia's Seven Ghosts bore on the Kampar River is feared for sinking boats.
• Diana Wynne Jones made a tidal bore the villain of her Dalemark Quartet.

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Messages in bottles began as science, not romance. Around 310 BC Theophrastus, a protege of Aristotle, released sealed bottles to test whether the Mediterranean was fed by water flowing in from the Atlantic, and in the mid 1700s Benjamin Franklin and others used drift bottles to locate the Gulf Stream. In the early 20th century British marine biologist George Parker Bidder III built seabed drifters: glass bottles trailing copper wire that hovered just above the North Sea floor once the wire touched bottom. Beachcombers who mailed back the multilingual cards for a few shillings helped him show that deep currents there ran east to west and that bottom-feeding fish swam against them. Scientists weighted bottles with dry sand so they floated upright and tracked water rather than wind, and today researchers use wooden blocks to mimic plastic waste.

Recovery odds are grim. Studies typically get back 1 to 10 percent, and Curtis Ebbesmeyer's rule of thumb gives a bottle released over 100 miles out less than a 10 percent chance of being found. Yet a 1929 German bottle called the Flying Dutchman was relaunched by each finder and traveled 16,000 miles, and in 2018 a couple in Western Australia found a German Naval Observatory bottle from the ship Paula that had drifted or lain buried for 131 years. Bottles also carried desperate messages, from the 1875 mutiny on the Lennie in the Bay of Biscay, where a trapped steward and cabin boy released 24 bottles and were rescued, to the crew of Zeppelin L 19, who wrote final letters in February 1916 after a British trawler refused to pick them up.

• Castaways on St. Kilda in 1876, including journalist John Sands, floated letters in cocoa tins buoyed by inflated sheep's bladders, and one reached Orkney in nine days.
• Private Thomas Hughes's 1914 letter to his wife was dredged up in 1999 and delivered to his 86-year-old daughter in New Zealand.
• Frank Hayostek's 1945 aspirin bottle reached Irish milkmaid Breda O'Sullivan and sparked a media romance that fizzled.
• A grieving French mother felt violated when a letter she set adrift in 2002 became the subject of a book.
• Woods Hole scientist Dean F. Bumpus said drift bottles give only a birth notice and an obituary, with no biography.

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The Santa Maria was no custom flagship. Built in Pontevedra, Galicia, and launched as La Gallega, she was a secondhand commercial carrack, or nao, that Christopher Columbus leased from Juan de la Cosa, who sailed as her master. With three masts, high castles fore and aft, a main deck of about 62 feet, and a displacement of roughly 150 tons, she was square-rigged and slow beside the 50-ton caravels Nina and Pinta, but she could carry months of provisions. No blueprints survive, so archaeologists estimate her size from ballast piles on wrecks such as the Molasses Reef wreck in the Bahamas. The voyage was financed mainly by Genoese bankers in Seville, not Queen Isabella's jewels, and only four of her roughly 40 crew were convicts: Bartolome de Torres, who killed a town crier, and three friends who broke him out of jail.

Expecting the courts of Asia described by Marco Polo, Columbus brought interpreter Luis de Torres, who spoke Arabic and Aramaic, a goldsmith to assay metals, a painter, and a royal steward. On the calm night of December 24, 1492 off modern Haiti, the steersman handed the tiller to a cabin boy and fell asleep, and the deep-drafted ship ran onto a sandbank and broke up on Christmas Day. Her timbers and nails built the fort of La Navidad near modern Limonade, and one anchor survives in the National Museum in Port-au-Prince. In May 2014 Barry Clifford claimed to have found the wreck, but UNESCO showed that site's copper sheathing dated it to the 1700s.

• A Spanish replica built for the 400th anniversary in 1892 sailed to the Chicago World's Fair.
• A 1986 replica built in Vancouver was trucked over the Rockies to a lagoon in the West Edmonton Mall.
• Columbus, Ohio's $1.2 million white cedar replica was cut into 10 pieces and dumped in a storage lot after 2014.
• The Mexican replica Marigalante sank in the Bay of Banderas in October 2025 when an electric bilge pump failed.
• Shipworms were fought in Columbus's day with toxic pitch and pine tar, not copper.

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Bernard Moitessier was born in 1925 in French Indochina and learned seafaring as a crew member on traditional trade junks. In 1952 he bought a rotting junk in Indonesia to sail single-handed to France, stopped a leak in the Indian Ocean by diving under the hull with a greased, tarred canvas patch, and after 85 days wrecked on Diego Garcia because his dead reckoning missed a three-knot current. He spent three years in Mauritius running a charcoal and guano business to build a new boat, then wrecked again between Trinidad and St. Lucia after falling asleep. Back in France he wrote a book, used the proceeds to build the 39-foot steel ketch Joshua, named for Joshua Slocum, and sailed with his wife Francoise to Tahiti. Needing to return for her children, they went east around Cape Horn and in 1966 set a record for the longest nonstop yacht passage: over 14,000 miles in 126 days.

That record made him a favorite for the 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, the first single-handed nonstop sail around the world, though he disliked its press and commercial side and left Plymouth months after other starters. While passing film canisters to a freighter, suction pulled Joshua into its stern and bent the bowsprit, which he straightened with winches and steel cables. Becalmed in the doldrums, he fought depression with yoga headstands on deck. After rounding Cape Horn and poised to post the fastest time, he fired a message onto a passing ship with a slingshot, quit the race to protect his soul, and sailed on to Tahiti, logging over 37,000 miles nonstop. Robin Knox-Johnston won the race.

• He wrote The Long Way about the voyage while living on an atoll and growing fruit and vegetables.
• In 1982, on a charter with actor Klaus Kinski off Mexico, a freak onshore storm beached Joshua and filled her with sand.
• He sold the wreck to locals for twenty dollars, and Joshua was later restored for a maritime museum in France.
• He protested nuclear testing in the South Pacific and waterfront overdevelopment in Tahiti.
• Visitors to his grave in Brittany leave slingshots instead of flowers.