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On May 6, 2023, hours before his coronation, King Charles III sent a joking message to former shipmates of HMS Bronington, the vessel he once commanded: splice the main brace. This episode traces how that order began as one of the most dangerous jobs on a square rigged warship. The main brace, the longest line in the running rigging, controlled the angle of the yards, and enemy gunners aimed high to shoot it away and leave a ship unable to turn. A knot or short splice would jam in the wooden blocks, so the boatswain chose his most skilled able seamen to weave a long splice in heavy tarred hemp while under fire. They were rewarded with extra rum, and the boatswain took a sip from each man's ration.

Over time the phrase became a fleet wide order for an extra eighth of a pint of rum to mark victories, royal births, and weddings, tracked in ship's books where G meant grog, T meant temperance with three pence a day instead, and UA meant underage. Officers lost their daily rum in 1881, so for decades the order was the only time they could legally be issued it aboard ship. The daily tot ended on Black Tot Day in 1970, and today only the King, a member of the Royal Family, or the Admiralty Board can give the order in Britain.

• The U.S. Navy used the order in 1845 as a tamer substitute for rowdy crossing the line ceremonies.
• The skipper of the submarine USS Barb marked five sinkings in 1944 with cake and shots of rotgut whiskey, then smuggled 24 cases of beer aboard for the next patrol.
• King George VI ordered it in 1949 for HMS Amethyst after the Yangtze Incident.
• The order for Prince William's birth on June 21, 1982 came one week after the Falklands War ended.
• In 1932 the Prince of Wales paired it with the signal mend and make clothes, meaning a half day holiday, for the Mediterranean Fleet.

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Robert Ballard was born in 1942 in landlocked Wichita, Kansas, grew up in Southern California where his father became chief engineer for the Minuteman missile program at North American Aviation, and was hooked on the ocean by the 1954 film of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. After degrees in chemistry and geology at UC Santa Barbara and geophysics in Hawaii, he moved from the Army to the U.S. Navy in 1967 as an oceanographer and liaison to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. In 1977, on a geology expedition to the Galapagos Rift that carried no biologists, the submersible Alvin found hydrothermal vents surrounded by giant tube worms, blind white crabs, and clams living on chemosynthesis. In 1979, on the East Pacific Rise, his team measured black smoker water at about 662 degrees Fahrenheit.

To fund a Titanic search, Ballard pitched his towed camera sled Argo to the Navy in 1982. The Navy agreed on one condition: he first had to secretly inspect the wrecks of the nuclear submarines USS Thresher and USS Scorpion, with the Titanic hunt serving as cover. Studying how imploding submarines scatter a comet tail of debris taught him to search for the trail rather than the hull, and with about 12 days left he found the Titanic on September 1, 1985. He treated it as a mass grave. Later he reached the Bismarck at 15,000 feet, studied the Lusitania, found John F. Kennedy's PT 109, and explored the oxygen free depths of the Black Sea.

• His mother told him history would remember him for finding a rusty old boat rather than for the vent ecosystems.
• He concluded the Bismarck was scuttled, a view James Cameron's later expedition disputed.
• Three weeks after finding the Bismarck, his 21 year old son Todd, who had helped in the search, died in a car accident.
• He attributed the Lusitania's second explosion to coal dust igniting in the empty bunkers, reading the direction the hull plates were bent.
• The Byzantine wreck Sinop D, dated between 410 and 520 AD, sits 320 meters deep with its 11 meter mast still standing.

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In 1994 the Soviet Union handed its official whaling records to the international community, reporting 2,710 humpback whales killed over several decades. Secret state shadow ledgers told the truth: more than 48,000. This episode traces how whaling grew from subsistence hunts dating to at least 3000 BC, with 5,000 year old baleen whale harpoons found in coastal Brazil and Korean petroglyphs that may reach back to 6000 BC, into the fuel of the Industrial Revolution. The Basques commercialized the hunt around 1026 AD and dominated it for five centuries, and sperm whale oil later lit city street lamps and lubricated textile mill machinery because it kept its viscosity in extreme temperatures. By the late 1930s, steam ships with explosive harpoons and factory ships with stern slipways were killing more than 50,000 whales a year.

The International Whaling Commission formed in 1946 to manage whale stocks for the industry, voted a moratorium in 1982 that took effect in 1986, and extended it indefinitely. The loopholes remain: lethal scientific whaling, Japan leaving the IWC in 2018, Norway's formal objection, Iceland's private fleet, and a South Korean bycatch rule under which one drowned minke whale can sell for up to $150,000. The episode ends with whale biology: methylmercury in whale meat, nutrient pumping that feeds phytoplankton, whale falls on the deep sea floor, and an estimated 9.1 million tons of carbon no longer stored in marine mammal bodies because of historical whaling.

• Inuit hunters tied inflated seal bladders to harpoons so a diving whale would drag a buoy and exhaust its oxygen.
• Soviet factory ship crews could earn bonuses of 25 to 60 percent of base pay and returned to brass bands and parades.
• The UN once gave the Indonesian village of Lamalera a motorized whaling ship, and villagers went back to rowboats after catching five sperm whales they could not preserve.
• Health authorities in the Faroe Islands, Japan, and St. Vincent have advised eating whale meat no more than once every three weeks.
• Osedax, the zombie worm, secretes acid to dissolve whale bones and reach the lipids inside.

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The speed readout on a jetliner's seatback screen uses a unit born from sailors throwing a weighted wooden chip over the stern. The chip log floated upright to anchor itself in the water while the ship pulled away, and a sailor counted knots tied every 47 feet 3 inches in the line as it ran out over a 28 second sandglass. That count works out to within about 0.02 percent of today's international knot, defined as one nautical mile per hour, or exactly 1.852 kilometers per hour. Accurate speed fed dead reckoning, the only way to fix position when storms hid the stars.

The knot survived metrication because one nautical mile equals one minute of latitude. On Mercator charts, where the horizontal scale can double between Florida and Greenland, navigators walk dividers to the latitude margin instead of trusting a scale bar. Currents, tides, and winds are all measured in knots, which makes ground speed and velocity made good simple arithmetic. Aviation adopted the unit more slowly: U.S. regulations moved to nautical miles and knots only in 1969, and ICAO's 1979 permission for knots was labeled temporary and never given an end date.

• The ISO and IEEE abbreviate the knot as kn, while aviation's ICAO prefers kt.
• Saying knots per hour technically describes acceleration, and seafaring readers complained to the Kipling Journal about Rudyard Kipling's knots an hour.
• British Admiralty charts print a latitude scale down the middle of the page.
• At 36,000 feet a plane with a 500 knot true airspeed may show only 300 knots indicated.
• Pilots rely on indicated airspeed because the wings, like the pitot tube, respond to the air actually flowing past them.

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In August 2014, 500,000 people in Toledo, Ohio were told their tap water was toxic and could not be drunk or even boiled for safety, all because of a harmful algal bloom. Scientists are phasing out the term red tide because blooms can be green, brown, or yellow, can be invisible, and have nothing to do with tides. The main culprits are freshwater cyanobacteria, which are bacteria rather than algae, and marine diatoms and dinoflagellates. Many rest as armored cysts in bottom mud, then migrate to the surface when temperature, salinity, and nutrients line up. Blooms are ancient, and Cabeza de Vaca described them in the Gulf of Mexico in the 1500s, but fertilizer runoff, untreated sewage, thermal pollution, and warming have made them more frequent and severe since the 1980s.

The toxins are specific: diatoms make domoic acid that attacks the nervous system, cyanobacteria make liver damaging microcystins, and Karenia brevis makes brevetoxins that crashing waves turn into an airborne mist on Florida beaches. Shellfish concentrate these toxins and pass them up to otters, ducks, dolphins, and people. When a bloom dies, bacteria feeding on it strip oxygen from the water, creating dead zones, and the CDC's One Health system now links human, animal, and water data.

• The Pacific Blob of 2015 closed the West Coast shellfish fishery, costing Washington $40 million.
• A 2016 bloom in Chile killed 23 million farmed salmon.
• In spring 2004, 107 bottlenose dolphins died on the Florida Panhandle after eating contaminated fish.
• The United States has more than 166 coastal dead zones, which may also release methane.
• Fossil whales clustered at Chile's Cerro Ballena are linked to an ancient toxic bloom.

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The black gondola that stands for timeless Venice is largely a 19th century redesign shaped by tourists. Built for a lagoon of shallow mudflats and deep channels, it has a flat, keelless bottom that can slip sideways, and a single unfastened oar that is rowed, not poled. The hull is deliberately lopsided, wider on the left, to counter one rower on the right, and the walnut forcola works like a gearbox, letting the gondolier push, turn, brake, or reverse depending on the notch. In the 16th century some 10,000 brightly decorated gondolas crowded the canals until sumptuary laws ordered them all painted black.

Older gondolas had lower prows, often two rowers, and a felze, a small cabin whose louvered shutters gave us Venetian blinds. Visitors complained the cabin blocked their view, so it disappeared, and builder Tramontin created the sweeping banana shape in the 19th century before the city froze the design in the 20th. Even the ferro's supposed symbolism of the districts and the Grand Canal was attached later to a counterweight. Today only about 400 licenses exist, and the job has slowly opened up, with Giorgia Boscolo licensed in 2010 and Alex Hai becoming Italy's first openly transgender gondolier in 2017.

• A modern gondola costs around 38,000 euros, weighs 350 kilograms, and takes about two months to build.
• Its 280 handmade pieces use eight woods, including mahogany, cherry, elm, oak, and walnut.
• Trainees log 400 hours over at least six months and are examined on history, landmarks, languages, and handling.
• A licensed gondolier can earn up to about $150,000 a year under a strict dress code.
• Mark Twain, Gilbert and Sullivan, and a U.S. Gondola Nationals in Providence helped spread the boat worldwide.

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On March 18, 1967 the supertanker Torrey Canyon, bound from Kuwait to Milford Haven, slammed into Pollard's Rock on the Seven Stones Reef off Cornwall. Built in the U.S. in 1959 and cut in half in Japan to double its capacity to 120,000 tons without bigger engines or rudder, it was owned by a Union Oil subsidiary, chartered by BP, and flagged in Liberia. Racing to make high tide without full charts of the Scilly Isles, the crew could not turn in time because the steering selector sat in an unmarked maintenance mode that disconnected the wheel from the rudder. Salvage failed, and a member of the Dutch salvage team was killed.

Prime Minister Harold Wilson approved bombing the wreck: jets dropped 161 thousand pound bombs, kerosene, and napalm, but a quarter of the first 42 bombs missed and tides snuffed the fires. Some 10,000 tons of toxic solvent emulsifiers, sold to the public as detergents, were sprayed and even bulldozed into beaches like Sennen Cove. About 25 to 36 million gallons of oil fouled 120 miles of Cornwall and 50 miles of France and killed around 15,000 seabirds. Old maritime law capped liability at the ship's surviving value, one $50 lifeboat, so Britain arrested the sister ship Lake Palourde in Singapore to force the owners to settle.

• Lawyer Anthony O'Connor boarded the Lake Palourde posing as a whiskey salesman and nailed the writ to the mast.
• The disaster led to the 1969 Civil Liability Convention and the 1973 MARPOL treaty.
• Royal Navy steering overrides are still known as the Torrey Canyon switch.
• Studies of the survivors improved understanding of immersion hypothermia and rescue winching.
• Oily sludge dumped in a quarry on Guernsey's Chouet headland remains there today.

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The RMS Titanic's hold carried a jeweled Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and a painting later valued by its owner at $100,000, yet the ship had no searchlight because British merchant rules banned them. It grew from a 1907 meeting between White Star chairman J. Bruce Ismay and financier J.P. Morgan, who were losing ground to Cunard's subsidized Lusitania and Mauretania. White Star chose size and luxury over speed and gave Harland and Wolff a cost plus 5 percent contract. Passengers got a swimming pool, Turkish baths, a squash court, and the Cafe Parisien, all smoothed by a hybrid of reciprocating engines and a Parsons turbine, while 176 firemen shoveled over 600 tons of coal a day in heat above 110 degrees.

Its 20 lifeboats held 1,178 people against a capacity of 3,327, yet that exceeded the Board of Trade rule, which topped out at 14 boats for any ship over 10,000 tons. Wireless operator Jack Phillips brushed off an ice warning from the Californian that lacked the MSG prefix. Afterward Senator William Alden Smith rushed subpoenas in New York and Lord Mersey's British inquiry ruled that keeping full speed near ice would be negligent in the future. The 1914 SOLAS convention required lifeboats for all aboard, drills, and a round the clock radio watch.

• Harland and Wolff designed davits able to hold up to 48 lifeboats.
• A long E deck passageway nicknamed Scotland Road served as the main route for crew and third class passengers.
• The cable ship Mackay-Bennett, short of embalming fluid, buried many third class and crew victims at sea.
• The International Ice Patrol has recorded no iceberg collision deaths in its patrolled area since its founding.
• Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel located the wreck in 1985.

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Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914 aimed to cross Antarctica on foot, and its ship began life in Norway as the Polaris, a polar tourist yacht with ten cabins and a darkroom that went unsold after its Belgian and Norwegian backers fell out. Shackleton bought it cheaply and renamed it Endurance after his family motto. Its keel was over 85 inches of stacked oak and its bow over 50 inches thick, but its straight sides could not ride up out of squeezing ice. Leaving South Georgia in December 1914, it was trapped in the Weddell Sea in January 1915, about 200 miles from Vahsel Bay, after a six day gale packed the ice. A day spent cutting a 150 yard trench failed, and Shackleton shut down the boilers.

For nine months the ship drifted as pressure ridges bent its oak beams, and on October 27, 1915 the crew abandoned it at 15 below zero. Shackleton kept routines, music, and morale going on the floes, then led the men by boat to Elephant Island in April 1916. He and five others sailed the 20 foot James Caird more than 800 miles to South Georgia in 16 days on Frank Worsley's navigation, then crossed the island's glaciers in 36 hours. On his fourth attempt, aboard the Chilean tug Yelcho under Luis Pardo, he reached Elephant Island 128 days after leaving, and all 22 men there were alive.

• The famous hazardous journey recruitment ad has never been found in any newspaper.
• Crews thawed frozen pump pipes with boiling water and blowtorches as the hull flooded.
• The James Caird crew chipped ice off the boat to keep it from capsizing.
• Shackleton made sure the logbooks and glass negatives were saved to help pay his debts.
• In March 2022 the Endurance22 expedition found the wreck upright at about 3,000 meters, its name still visible.

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Saturation divers live under pressure for weeks, commuting to the seafloor in a sealed bell and spending more than a week decompressing when the job ends. The method rests on a 1942 insight by U.S. Navy medical officer Albert R. Behnke: after roughly 72 hours the body's tissues hold all the inert gas they can, so decompression time stops growing. The first intentional saturation exposure came in 1938, when Edgar End and Max Nohl spent 27 hours at a simulated 101 feet in a Milwaukee hospital chamber. George F. Bond's Genesis project and Jacques Cousteau's Conshelf habitats followed, and the North Sea oil boom made the technique commercial.

Going deeper meant fighting the body. Below about 500 feet helium causes high pressure nervous syndrome, with tremors, jerks, and microsleeps, so researchers added narcotic hydrogen. Peter B. Bennett's Atlantis III at Duke simulated 2,250 feet in 1981, and in 1992 COMEX diver Theo Mavrostomos reached a simulated 701 meters on hydreliox. Dense gas makes breathing hard work, and cold helium drains heat from the lungs, so divers wear hot water suits while chambers run at 85 to 93 degrees Fahrenheit. Decompression proceeds at three to six feet per hour, and in a disaster divers cannot leave the chamber.

• Compression arthralgia brings aching joint pain on the way down.
• Humid, oxygen rich chambers breed ear infections and fungal skin problems.
• Divers need 44 to 52 kilocalories per kilogram of body mass each day.
• Excursion limits restrict how far above or below storage depth a diver may swim without risking the bends.
• In 2015 there were only 336 registered saturation divers in the United States.