Ships carry more than cargo. They carry the reputations of the people who built them, the nerve of the people who sailed them, and sometimes a mystery that outlasts everyone aboard. These stories run from a pharaoh's cedar boat buried beside the Great Pyramid to a wreck found at the bottom of the Weddell Sea in 2022.
Every tile in a Great Ships game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Famous Ships
nine stories
1How a frigate got an iron nickname
On the tile: Old Ironsides1812Legend
The story goes that during an afternoon duel with HMS Guerriere on 19 August 1812, an American sailor watched British shot fall away from the hull and shouted that her sides were made of iron. What is certain is the building: white oak planking over live oak frames, strong enough to take the punishment. The name stuck. Launched in 1797 from a Boston shipyard, USS Constitution is still the oldest commissioned warship afloat in the world.
Victory is the oldest commissioned warship in the world and still serves as flagship of the First Sea Lord, yet she has not been in the water since 1922, when she was placed in a dry dock at Portsmouth. She was built during the Seven Years' War and completed in 1765, and roughly 6,000 trees went into her. At Trafalgar she carried a crew of 821 men. Fifty-one were killed in the battle and eleven more died of their wounds.
The clipper preserved at Greenwich carries a witch on her bow, and the name on her stern belongs to the witch's clothing. Both come from Robert Burns's poem Tam o' Shanter, in which a farmer stumbles on a coven at Alloway Kirk. One of them, Nannie, is dressed only in a cutty sark, an old Scots word for a short nightdress. She chases Tam and tears the tail off his horse, which is why the figurehead is holding one.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Great Eastern was the largest ship afloat, and her size eventually found her a job no one had designed her for. Converted to lay cables, she set out in 1865 to connect Europe and North America by telegraph, and the cable snapped and was lost on the ocean floor more than halfway across. She sailed again on 13 July 1866 and reached Heart's Content, Newfoundland, on 27 July. This time the cable held.
Launched at Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, on 26 March 1921, Bluenose was a working fishing schooner that raced on the side, and she won her first International Fishermen's Race that October. Captain Angus Walters and his crew became famous for it. She kept an unbeaten record as queen of the North Atlantic fishing fleet and was winning again in 1938 off Boston and Gloucester. Canadians still carry her on the dime. The ship herself was sold away and wrecked off Haiti in 1946.
Built in 1841, the Charles W. Morgan is the world's only remaining wooden whaler, the last of an American fleet that once numbered more than 2,700 vessels. Her hunting career ended in 1921 after 37 voyages, most of them three years or longer. In 2014 she went to sea again, and that July her destination said everything about what had changed: Stellwagen Bank, a national marine sanctuary off Massachusetts and one of the best whale-watching grounds in the world.
She went up on the stocks at Ramsey on the Isle of Man in 1863, built of iron at a time when iron ships were still something of an experiment and most vessels were wood. Her name then was Euterpe, for the Greek muse of music and poetry. Her first two voyages brought a collision, a mutiny and a cyclone. Then came a quarter century of carrying emigrants to New Zealand, and 21 trips around the world. She is the oldest active sailing ship afloat.
Fridtjof Nansen's answer to pack ice was not to resist it. Fram was given a rounded hull so that closing ice would lift her instead of crushing her, on the principle of squeezing a round nut between your fingers and watching it pop up. Colin Archer built her at Larvik, and she was launched on 26 October 1892. She drifted across the Arctic Ocean from 1893 to 1896, and she later carried Roald Amundsen to Antarctica. Between those two voyages, her museum says, she sailed both farther north and farther south than any other ship.
9The cruiser that brought home the Unknown Soldier
On the tile: USS Olympia1921
Olympia went into service in February 1895 and is the oldest steel warship afloat in the world. The Battle of Manila Bay in 1898 began with the order she is remembered for. Commodore George Dewey later wrote that he told her captain, "You may fire when you are ready, Gridley," and that he said it not in the tone of a military order but as part of a conversation. Her most famous duty afterward was quieter and heavier: in 1921 she carried the Unknown Soldier home from Le Havre in France, and she was decommissioned the next year.
Five ships and about 270 men left Spain in 1519 under Ferdinand Magellan. Magellan was killed on Mactan Island in the Philippines in April 1521, well before the voyage was done. The crew elected a Spanish officer, Juan Sebastian Elcano, to command the one ship still fit to go on, and he brought Victoria home to Spain on 6 September 1522 with her hold full of cloves. Of the 270 who sailed, eighteen came back.
HMS Beagle started life as a ten-gun brig sloop and was later allocated as a surveying vessel. Her most famous passenger drew no pay at all: Charles Darwin was accepted on board as a gentlemanly companion for Captain Robert FitzRoy. The second voyage ran from 1831 to 1836 and took her around the world, and Darwin came home with nearly 500 bird skins, along with nests, eggs and further birds preserved in spirit. The Beagle herself was sold in 1870 and broken up.
In 1856 the clipper Neptune's Car sailed for San Francisco with Captain Joshua Patten and his wife Mary aboard. Mary was nineteen and expecting their first child. When her husband was brought down by tuberculosis and pneumonia, she took over the navigation. The first mate, confined to the brig, sent her a letter offering to act as captain and tried to raise the crew against her; they refused. She later said she spent fifty days in the same clothes, never undressing, and brought the ship into port herself.
At noon on 24 April 1895 a former sailing-ship captain named Joshua Slocum cast off his dock lines in East Boston in a 37-foot sloop called Spray and set out to sail around the world by himself. Seamen and landsmen alike thought the plan foolish, or dangerous, or both, since ocean cruising in small yachts as we know it did not exist yet. He came into Newport, Rhode Island, at one in the morning on 27 June 1898, the first solo voyage around the world behind him.
Nautilus left Seattle on 9 June 1958 for a secret operation with a cheerful code name, Sunshine: a fully submerged crossing of the North Pole. Ice in the shallow Chukchi Sea turned her back, and she waited at Pearl Harbor. The second try began on 23 July. She submerged in the Barrow Sea Valley on 1 August, passed under the geographic Pole on 3 August, and ran 1,830 miles beneath the ice before surfacing northeast of Greenland. Her commanding officer was Commander William R. Anderson.
On 1 May 1976 a double-hulled voyaging canoe left Honolua Bay on Maui for Tahiti carrying no compass, no charts and no instruments of any kind. The navigator was Mau Piailug of Satawal in Micronesia, who guided her entirely by traditional wayfinding: reading the stars, winds, waves, clouds and the living ocean. Hōkūleʻa made landfall at Mataiva on 1 June and reached Papeʻete on 4 June, more than thirty days at sea. The round trip came to fifty-two days of sailing.
John Harrison's prize-winning sea watch, H4, was one of a kind, and one watch cannot guide a fleet. The Board of Longitude commissioned Larcum Kendall to copy it, and paid him 450 pounds for the work. The copy, called K1, was ordered in 1766, finished in 1769 and sent to sea in 1772 with James Cook on his second voyage to the South Seas. It performed so well that Cook came to rely on his "trusty friend the watch" and "never failing guide."
When Endurance was lost, Shackleton's crew salvaged three lifeboats and named them Stancomb Wills, Dudley Docker and James Caird, after the expedition's sponsors. One of those sponsors was Janet Stancomb-Wills, a benefactor later made a dame. From Elephant Island the James Caird carried six men toward South Georgia in April 1916. Frank Worsley navigated on brief sightings of the sun between waves. Shackleton, Worsley and Tom Crean then crossed the island's mountains with three days of food and screws pushed through their boot soles for grip.
The first clipper home from China with the new season's tea took a premium on her cargo, so the run from Fuzhou was a race worth sailing. In 1866 Ariel and Taeping came up the English Channel in sight of each other, both logging fourteen knots. At eight on the morning of 6 September, watchers ashore saw Ariel signal her number, and Taeping appeared less than ten minutes later, after ninety-nine days at sea. The two captains agreed to split the prize.
Nobody had rowed a trireme in two thousand years, and academic opinion was almost unanimous that oars arranged on three levels were impractical. John Morrison founded a trust in 1982 to settle the question, worked out a design with the naval architect John Coates, and in 1987 the Hellenic Navy built and launched a full-scale reconstruction, Olympias, powered by 170 oars over three levels. Six sea trials between 1987 and 1994 showed she could be rowed efficiently and fast.
To close the sea road to Roskilde, Danes towed three worn-out ships to the narrowest point of the fjord, filled them with stones and sank them in the channel. Twenty years later they reinforced the barrier with two more. About a thousand years after that, archaeologists ringed the site with a dam and on 6 July 1962 started the pumps, lowering the water a little at a time so the timbers would not dry and split as they emerged.
Ships sink because water that gets in can go anywhere. Boatbuilders in Fujian, in southern China, answered that by dividing the hull into sealed compartments, so that a holed cabin floods and the vessel stays up. The junks are built mainly of camphor, pine and fir. The craft is now rare enough that UNESCO put watertight-bulkhead technology on its list of intangible heritage in urgent need of safeguarding in 2010.
Henry VII ordered a dry dock built at Portsmouth in 1495, and a ship was docked in it the following year. The yard has been working ever since, and its timeline reads like a list of everything that can go wrong at a naval base. In 1623 the harbor was judged unsuitable for shipping because of a suspected infestation of Teredo navalis, the shipworm. Lightning burned the rope house in 1760, and a second great fire took the wooden buildings in 1770.
Prince Albert launched the ss Great Britain at Bristol on 19 July 1843, the largest and most innovative ship of her day, with an iron hull and a screw propeller. On her fifth voyage, in 1846, she ran aground in Dundrum Bay. She ended as a storage hulk in the Falkland Islands and was settled on the seabed at Sparrow Cove in 1937. In April 1970 she was refloated and towed back to the Bristol dock she was built in, 127 years after her launch.
Charles Parsons invented the steam turbine in 1884, then built a boat to argue for it. Trials in April 1897 clocked his small experimental craft Turbinia at 32.76 knots, the fastest vessel in the world, and that June she ran between the lines of anchored warships at Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee review at Spithead. She was the first turbine-driven ship, and the demonstration brought Royal Navy orders for two turbine destroyers, Viper and Cobra.
Overloading and neglect made some nineteenth-century merchant ships so dangerous that they were known as coffin ships. Samuel Plimsoll campaigned for a line painted on the hull to show how deep a vessel could safely sit, and the Merchant Shipping Act of 1876 made load lines compulsory. The act had a hole in it, though: it left the owner to decide where his own line went. Fixing the position by law took another round of legislation.
Liberty ships were the cargo workhorses of the war, and the yards building them began competing on speed. An Oregon yard finished the Joseph N. Teal ten days after her keel was laid, and President Franklin Roosevelt quietly attended the christening. That record fell in November 1942, when the SS Robert E. Peary was assembled at a Kaiser yard in Richmond, California, in four days, 15 hours and 29 minutes. By 1943 Kaiser workers were averaging a Liberty ship in 42 days.
On 26 April 1956 a converted wartime oil tanker left Port Newark, New Jersey, with 58 metal boxes lashed to her deck. The boxes were 35 feet long, the length of a truck trailer, because the man behind them, Malcolm McLean, had made his money in trucking and saw no reason to unpack a trailer at the dock. Ideal X sailed for Houston, where trucks were waiting. Containerized shipping starts with that trip.
On 19 July 1545 some 200 French ships came into the Solent to invade England, and Henry VIII watched from Southsea Castle as his favorite warship heeled over and sank in front of him. Salvage was attempted at once and failed. In the 1830s a diver named John Deane worked the wreck site. On 11 October 1982 the hull was lifted from the seabed in a steel cradle, then sprayed with water for years so the timbers would not dry and crack.
Vasa was the pride of the Swedish navy when she sailed on 10 August 1628. A first gust heeled her over and she slowly recovered. A second pushed her far enough for water to pour through the open gunports, and within minutes she was on the bottom in 32 meters of water, with about thirty lives lost. Then the Baltic did her a strange favor: its brackish, low-oxygen water has no shipworm. Sweden raised her in 1961, and the museum says 98 percent of the ship is still there.
On 5 December 1872 the brig Dei Gratia found the Mary Celeste adrift about 400 miles east of the Azores. Charts had been thrown about below, the crew's belongings were still in their quarters, one of the two pumps was in pieces, and 1,701 barrels of industrial alcohol sat largely untouched. There was food and water for six months and no one to use it. The only lifeboat was gone. Arthur Conan Doyle's sensational story of 1884 set the theorizing loose, and it has never stopped.
Shackleton's ship was crushed by ice and sank in the Weddell Sea in 1915, and nobody saw her again for more than a century. In March 2022 the Endurance22 expedition, organized by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, announced that they had found her at 3,008 meters, inside the search box drawn before they left Cape Town and about four miles from her recorded position. She is in brilliant condition, with her name still arced across the stern.
John Franklin's expedition sailed in 1845 to force a Northwest Passage. A note left by his officers records that Erebus and Terror were abandoned in the ice on 22 April 1848. Searchers hunted for them for more than a century. In 2014 Parks Canada found Erebus, working with Inuit communities whose accounts shaped where to look. Terror was found in 2016 in Terror Bay, far from the planned search area, after a crewman from Gjoa Haven recalled a piece of wood standing up through the ice there.
In the spring of 1900 a crew of Greek sponge divers on their way to Tunisia took shelter from a storm near the island of Antikythera and went down to look for sponges while they waited. What they found was a cargo ship from the first century BC, loaded with bronze and marble. Among the corroded lumps was a geared instrument that could track the sun, moon and planets and predict eclipses years ahead.
Robert Ballard wanted to find the Titanic. The United States Navy wanted something else, and it paid for his expedition on condition that he first survey two lost nuclear submarines, Thresher and Scorpion, without drawing Soviet attention. The search for the liner made a useful cover; the press, Ballard said later, was "totally oblivious to what I was doing." When the submarine work was finished he had twelve days left. He found the wreck in 1985, more than 12,000 feet down.
The ore carrier Edmund Fitzgerald left Superior, Wisconsin, on 9 November 1975 with a cargo of taconite bound for a mill near Detroit. She was lost the next day on Lake Superior with her entire crew of twenty-nine, about seventeen miles north-northwest of Whitefish Point, Michigan, and its light station. Gordon Lightfoot's ballad of 1976 carried her name far beyond the Great Lakes, and a memorial ceremony is still held every November.
Samuel Bellamy captured the Whydah, a London-built galley that had carried enslaved people, and filled her with the proceeds of months of piracy. She struck a sandbar off Wellfleet on Cape Cod in a storm on 26 April 1717 and went down within sight of land. Barry Clifford brought up coins and artifacts of the right period for years without proving anything, until divers raised a bell and cleaning revealed the words "The Whydah Gally 1716."