The Brigantine Sterling was the little ship that could and did. Yet the reward for safely sailing thousands of miles over many months to safely bring its crew and cargo to their destination was to be cast aside like a red Solo cup after a college keg party.
Designed as a slave ship, the Whydah Gally was built to be bad. Then forcefully repurposed as a pirate vessel, it became arguably even worse. Yet in its mercifully short time at sea, seeds of democracy were sown among its crew.
One of a trio of ships ordered by the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, the Steam Ship Algoma was distinguished from its sisters by its short and tragic life, ending in the largest loss of life in all Great Lakes maritime disasters.
Bad luck must have been built into the very keel of the Mary Celeste. Dying captains, collisions and sinkings are just a start on its litany of maritime miseries, capped by being found a-sail fully provisioned in the mid-Atlantic with nary a soul on board. Not even the captain’s cat.
The Inuit hunter gatherers who eked out living in Canada’s arctic north shared stories about occasional encounters with “Kob-lu-na”, their name for European explorers who ventured into their brutally harsh homelands.
Life for European commoners was tough early in the nineteenth century. The Holy Roman Empire had just collapsed and political entities jockeyed to fill the power void.