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On July 10, 1985, French agents sank the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior at Marsden Wharf in Auckland, New Zealand, in an operation code named Operation Satanique. France had tested nuclear weapons at Mururoa Atoll in French Polynesia since 1966, South Pacific nations had signed the Treaty of Rarotonga declaring a nuclear free zone, and Greenpeace, fresh from relocating about 300 Marshall Islanders from contaminated Rongelap Atoll, planned to lead a flotilla to Mururoa and land protesters. The DGSE's Action Division sent agent Christine Cabon to volunteer in the Greenpeace office under a false name, a crew on the chartered yacht Ouvea to smuggle in limpet mines, and two officers, Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart, posing as Swiss honeymooners to deliver them to divers.

The first mine exploded at 11:38 pm and the second at 11:45 pm, drowning photographer Fernando Pereira, who had gone below for his cameras. A neighborhood watch noted the plate of the couple's rented camper van, and police caught them. The yacht crew was released on Norfolk Island before evidence was ready, scuttled the Ouvea, and was picked up by the French submarine Rubis. France denied involvement until Prime Minister Laurent Fabius admitted the truth, and President Francois Mitterrand was later confirmed to have ordered the attack.

• New Zealand deliberately called the bombing a criminal breach of international law rather than terrorism.
• Prieur and Mafart pleaded guilty to manslaughter and received 10 year sentences.
• France threatened to block New Zealand's farm exports to the European Economic Community, forcing a 1986 UN deal that moved the agents to Hao Atoll.
• France brought both agents home within two years, later paid New Zealand another $3.5 million, and paid Greenpeace over $8 million.
• In 2015 the diver Jean-Luc Kister apologized and called the mission a big, big failure.

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The RMS Queen Mary began in December 1930 as Hull 534 at the John Brown and Company shipyard in Clydebank, Scotland, and the Great Depression halted work in December 1931, leaving rooks nesting in the rusting frame for over two years. A British government loan revived her on condition that bitter rivals Cunard and White Star merge, and by 1934 they were Cunard White Star. Cunard meant to name her Victoria, but when executives asked King George V to name the ship after Britain's greatest queen, he assumed they meant his wife, Queen Mary. She entered service in 1936 at a cost of 3.5 million pounds, with a traditional vertical bow and 56 kinds of veneer that made her more popular than the sleek French Normandie.

In World War II she became the Grey Ghost, stripped of six miles of carpet and packed with bunks, and in July 1943 carried 16,683 troops, still a record. Hitler offered a million Reichsmarks and the oak leaves to the Knight's Cross to the U-boat captain who sank her, and Winston Churchill crossed aboard as Colonel Warden. Jets arrived in 1958 and took the mail contracts, and Cunard retired her in 1967. Long Beach, California bought her for $3.45 million, removed her engines, and pumped 8,000 tons of harbor mud into her fuel tanks to keep her upright.

• Her interior included a Jewish prayer room, a deliberate rejection of Nazi Germany's antisemitism.
• In October 1942 she sliced the escort cruiser HMS Curacoa in half, killing 338 men, and under standing orders never stopped.
• In December 1942 a rogue wave estimated at 92 feet rolled her 52 degrees, near her critical angle of about 55.
• Artist Doris Zinkeisen restored her war-damaged Verandah Grill mural and hid a tiny mouse in it to mock Cunard's rodent-free claim.
• Later owners included Jacques Cousteau and the Walt Disney Company, and amateur radio operators still broadcast from her as W6RO.

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On January 17, 1955, the USS Nautilus (SSN-571) backed away from its pier on the Thames River in Groton, Connecticut, with Hyman G. Rickover, the father of the nuclear Navy, aboard and press boats swarming. A terrifying noise from the starboard reduction gear turned out to be a loose locking pin on a retaining nut, and minutes later a signalman blinked the message: underway on nuclear power. Authorized by Congress in 1951, the submarine borrowed its streamlined hull from the German Type 21 U-boat and ran on the S2W pressurized water reactor from Westinghouse and the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory, first proven in a landlocked prototype in Idaho. Because the reactor needs no oxygen, the boat no longer had to surface or snorkel, making World War II radar and patrol aircraft tactics obsolete.

In May 1955 it ran 1,300 miles fully submerged from New London to San Juan, Puerto Rico in under 90 hours, and by February 1957 it had logged 60,000 nautical miles, matching the fictional Nautilus of Jules Verne. After Sputnik, President Eisenhower ordered Operation Sunshine: a first attempt in June 1958 was blocked by deep drift ice in the Chukchi Sea, but on August 3, 1958, under Commander William R. Anderson, Nautilus became the first vessel to reach the North Pole. Its flaw was noise, as hull and sail vibration deafened its own sonar above four knots, lessons that shaped every quieter submarine that followed.

• With magnetic compasses useless above 85 degrees north, the crew relied on an N6A1 inertial navigation system adapted from the Navajo missile.
• Ice in the Bering Strait hung as much as 60 feet below the surface, and Anderson planned to torpedo a hole through it in an emergency.
• The crew spent 96 hours under the ice, covering nearly 1,600 miles, and earned the first peacetime Presidential Unit Citation.
• Nautilus joined the Cuban Missile Crisis blockade in 1962 and collided with the carrier USS Essex in 1966.
• Decommissioned in 1980, it became a National Historic Landmark in 1982 and a museum in Groton drawing about 250,000 visitors a year.

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The bowline appears on the 26th century BC solar ship of the pharaoh Khufu, and more than 4,500 years later the Federal Aviation Administration recommends it for tying down light aircraft while UK firefighters must pass a test tying it. Its job is to make a fixed loop that will not shrink, and the rabbit out of the hole mnemonic describes a structure identical to the sheet bend. Under load the knot pinches its own tail, yet it unties easily afterward, a trade for which it gives up about a third of the rope's breaking strength. The name comes from the bowline, a line on square rigged ships that held the edge of a sail toward the bow to keep the ship from being taken aback, and John Smith first named the knot in his 1627 book A Sea Grammar, claiming the sail would split before it slipped.

Smith was right for his era, because hairy hemp and manila gripped like Velcro. Slick modern nylon and Dyneema expose a flaw: with no load there is no pinch, so cyclic loading from a bouncing climber or a boat on waves lets the tail creep out millimeter by millimeter, and pulling the loop sideways can capsize the knot. Climbers now back it up with a stopper knot or switch to variations such as the Yosemite bowline, while rescuers still value that the basic knot can be tied around your own waist with one hand.

• Saying a ship sailed on a taut bowline meant it was sailing close hauled to the wind.
• The one-handed lightning method uses the rope's tension against your body to snap the knot into place.
• The Yosemite bowline threads the tail back through the round turn to lock it against the standing line.
• The water bowline adds a clove hitch so wet, swollen rope does not weld the knot shut.
• Joining a bowline's two free ends produces a 6-2 knot in mathematical knot theory, with six crossings.

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In 1894, eight-year-old William Francis Gibbs watched the liner SS St. Louis launch at a Philadelphia shipyard and decided he would build the greatest American ship in history. He made his name redesigning the Leviathan, a German ship seized as a World War I prize, and cemented it with his first original design, the SS Malolo, which was rammed amidships by a freighter in fog during sea trials yet stayed afloat because its watertight compartments reached far higher than the Titanic's. His firm designed over 70 percent of the American ships deployed in World War II, and the Cold War paid for his dream: a liner costing over $70 million, heavily subsidized by the Department of Defense, that could become a troop ship carrying a 14,400 man division 10,000 miles without refueling.

The SS United States crossed the Atlantic in July 1952 in 3 days, 10 hours and 40 minutes, taking the Blue Riband from the Queen Mary by more than 10 hours, while Gibbs had the captain hold speed around 32 knots to hide a secret top speed of 38.32 knots. By 1957 aircraft carried more transatlantic passengers than liners, and the military decided flying troops was safer than packing a division onto one target. United States Lines abruptly pulled the ship from service at Newport News, Virginia in 1969. After decades stripped of asbestos and interiors at a Philadelphia pier, a 2024 rent dispute led to her sale to Okaloosa County, Florida, which plans to sink her in the Gulf of Mexico as the world's largest artificial reef.

• Gibbs banned wood aboard, allowing only a butcher's block for the chefs and a grand piano.
• Theodore Steinway won approval for the treated mahogany piano by drenching it in gasoline and setting it on fire.
• The aluminum funnels and superstructure, then the world's largest aluminum project, were insulated from the steel hull with tapes, zinc barriers, and special rivets to stop galvanic corrosion.
• Pairing two four-bladed and two five-bladed propellers broke up the vibration and cavitation that shake fast ships apart.
• Marilyn Monroe, Cary Grant, and Walt Disney sailed aboard, and no commercial liner has ever broken her transatlantic record.

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DSV Alvin, the deep research submersible built by the General Mills Electronics Group, was commissioned on June 5, 1964, owned by the U.S. Navy, operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and named for Allyn Vine. Unlike fuel-buoyed bathyscaphes, it used syntactic foam, hollow glass microspheres in epoxy, to stay maneuverable at 17 tons, carrying a pilot and two observers in a two-inch titanium sphere sealed by a 19-inch plug hatch that water pressure holds shut. Four 208-pound steel weights take it down and are dropped for the return. In 1966 it logged 34 dives and more than 220 hours finding a hydrogen bomb lost off Palomares, Spain, which slipped from about 2,500 to 2,800 feet before a Navy robot raised it. In 1967, on dive 202, a swordfish drove its sword through Alvin's fiberglass skin and was cooked for dinner.

On October 26, 1968, two lifting cables on the pontoon tender Lulu snapped and Alvin sank with its hatch open. All three crew escaped, and the sub lay about 4,900 feet down, 88 miles south of Nantucket, for 10 months. USS Mizar photographed it in June 1969, and after Hurricane Camille forced a retreat, the Aluminaut attached lines on August 27 and Alvin was towed to Woods Hole 40 feet underwater. A new titanium hull in 1973 led to Project FAMOUS on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in 1974, vent discoveries on the Galápagos Spreading Center in 1977, and 380 degree Celsius black smokers on the East Pacific Rise in 1979, where chemosynthetic life thrived without sunlight.

• In 1986 it carried Robert Ballard to the Titanic with the small robot Jason Jr.
• It also gathered data at the wreck of the nuclear submarine USS Scorpion.
• A larger five-viewport sphere was forged at Ladish Forge in Cudahy, Wisconsin, starting in 2008.
• In 2014 it dove at the Deepwater Horizon oil spill site in the Gulf of Mexico.
• After a 2020 to 2022 overhaul it was certified to 6,500 meters, opening 98 percent of the seafloor.

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The word junk came from the Javanese and Malay jong, a Southeast Asian trading ship, through the Portuguese junco, and Europeans applied it to the quite different Chinese ships called chuan. Where Austronesian jong were built with lashed lugs, no iron, and twin side rudders, chuan used iron nails and clamps and, since the first century CE, a single central stern rudder. Evolving from bamboo rafts rather than dugout logs, junks had flat bottoms with lowerable daggerboards and leeboards instead of a keel, and transverse walls copying the nodes of bamboo divided the hull into watertight compartments, documented by the 12th century and urged on American packet ships by Benjamin Franklin in 1787. Seams were packed with oiled fiber and sealed with a putty of lime, hemp, and tung oil that Marco Polo described.

The battened lug sail, probably Southeast Asian and shown in a carving at the Bayon temple in Angkor Thom, was adopted around the 12th century: tears stop at a batten, and the sail drops like a Venetian blind. After overland routes were cut around 989 CE, the Song court encouraged overseas trade, and Guangzhou customs officer Zhou Qufei wrote in 1178 of ships like houses carrying a year of grain, live pigs, and fermenting wine. Ibn Battuta, visiting in 1347, described four-deck junks with 600 sailors and 400 soldiers. Between 1405 and 1433 Zheng He led seven fleets across the Indian Ocean, but the Ming haijin sea ban then burned the fleets and dismantled the shipyards.

• In severe weather, up to 20 crew could be needed on the rudder.
• Chinese mariners relied on dead reckoning and monsoon knowledge, keeping the water bowl compass as a backup.
• Scholars estimate the treasure ships at 200 to 250 feet, not the 450 feet claimed in a 1597 novel, still dwarfing the roughly 60 foot Santa Maria.
• The junk Keying sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to the United States and England in the 1840s.
• In 1955 six young men from Taiwan sailed the century-old Free China 6,000 miles to San Francisco Bay.

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In the early 19th century most lighthouses were stone towers with coal fires or weak oil lamps, and Thomas Rogers's thick glass mirrors of the 1780s lost much of their light to bubbles and impurities. Napoleon created the French Commission of Lighthouses in 1811, and in 1819 it brought in Augustin-Jean Fresnel, an engineer with the Corps of Bridges and Roads who had just won a French Academy of Sciences prize for work on diffraction. He proposed a stepped lens that kept only the refracting surfaces of a convex lens, collapsed into concentric prisms, and was told the Comte de Buffon had suggested stepped lenses in 1748, though Buffon imagined a single heavy burning glass. With a 500 franc budget, glassmaker François Soleil, and François Arago's multi-wick lamp, he delivered a 97-prism prototype in March 1820, its prisms held with isinglass, a glue made from sturgeon swim bladders.

In 1822 a rotating array of eight panels atop the unfinished Arc de Triomphe was seen from 20 miles away by Louis XVIII and the commission, and in July 1823 Fresnel installed a lens in the Cordouan lighthouse at the mouth of the Gironde. In the same years he was showing that light travels as transverse waves, overturning Newton's particle theory. After developing tuberculosis, he left the École Polytechnique and his theoretical research in 1824 to finish the lighthouse program, and his 1825 lighthouse map planned 51 lights. He died on July 14, 1827, at 39, and his brother Léonor carried on the rollout.

• His lenses came in six orders, from first-order giants over eight feet tall to sixth-order harbor lights.
• Rotating lenses gave each lighthouse a flash signature sailors could time to fix their position.
• His fully catadioptric design used total internal reflection in glass to replace metal mirrors.
• Alan and Thomas Stevenson brought his lenses to Britain, and many in the American South were buried or smashed in the Civil War.
• Fresnel lenses now work in theater spotlights, carrier landing systems, solar concentrators, and VR headsets.

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The Drake Passage is the roughly 500 mile gap between Cape Horn and Antarctica's South Shetland Islands, including Livingston and Snow Islands, linking the southwest Atlantic through the Scotia Sea to the southeast Pacific. Spanish sources call it the Mar de Hoces after Francisco de Hoces, who was blown south from the Strait of Magellan around 1525 before he and his crew vanished. In 1578 a tempest scattered Francis Drake's fleet as it entered the Pacific: the Marigold was lost, another ship fled home, and the Golden Hind was driven south into open water. Willem Schouten sailed through on purpose in 1616, yet for centuries many sailors preferred the narrow Strait of Magellan or the Beagle Channel.

Somewhere between 49 and 17 million years ago Antarctica tore away from South America, opening a path for the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which cut the continent off from warm water and likely drove ice sheet growth and Eocene cooling. Pushed by the Roaring Forties and Furious Fifties, the current moves 100 to 150 sverdrups, and tracking shows about 23 sverdrups carried north to the equator, against about 33 for the Gulf Stream. Models that close the passage shut down the North Atlantic deep water cell. Over the Shackleton Fracture Zone, lee waves break and mix deep water about 20 times more strongly than in the Pacific sector, dissipating around 20 percent of the wind energy put into the Southern Ocean.

• One sverdrup is one million cubic meters of water moving per second.
• Mixing in most of the open ocean is about ten times too weak to sustain the global circulation.
• The current pinches off cold-core cyclonic rings that wander away from the main flow.
• Upwelled nutrients feed wandering, black-browed, and light-mantled albatrosses, giant petrels, and hourglass dolphins.
• Cuvier's and Arnoux's beaked whales hunt in the turbulent water above the fracture zone.

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Wild pearl oysters could live as deep as 125 feet, and a diver might bring up more than a ton of shells to find three or four quality pearls. Free divers faced sharks, eye damage, and shallow water blackout on the ascent, so divers in the Middle East and Asia coated themselves in grease, plugged their ears with greased cotton, pinched their noses with tortoiseshell clips, and rode heavy stones straight to the bottom. In the Persian Gulf and Eastern Arabia, pearling was the core of the economy before the 1950s oil boom, selling into Paris and Bombay. Boats carried haulers, shell openers, cooks, bookkeepers, religious scholars, and singers whose songs set the pace of the work, while divers sank into debt from advances taken during a cycle that could last a year.

In the 16th century Spanish colonizers turned the oyster beds off Margarita Island and Cubagua in Venezuela, and off Colombia and Panama, into forced labor camps under the rescate system, first with indigenous people and then with enslaved Africans. On Cubagua divers were branded with a C and chained at night, and many settlements were abandoned by 1540 after the beds were stripped bare. In late 19th century Western Australia and the Torres Strait, Aboriginal Australians, Torres Strait Islanders, and imported Asian workers dove ever deeper for mother of pearl to make buttons until cheap plastics crashed the market around World War I.

• Spanish masters believed unchaste divers would lose the ability to sink.
• Divers in Panama surfaced with oysters stuffed in their armpits and mouths to meet quotas.
• Suetonius suggests Julius Caesar invaded Britain in 55 BC partly for Scottish freshwater pearls.
• The Kellie Pearl, found in an Aberdeenshire river in 1621, is set in the Crown of Scotland.
• Scotland banned pearl fishing in 1998, long after Kokichi Mikimoto's cultured pearls had replaced wild harvesting.