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.

NUMA lost a cherished friend and contributor on January 17th when David Ellsworth Boyd passed at the age of 92. Ells, as he was known to his pals, was a legend in the diving community, having explored and written about dozens of shipwrecks over his busy lifetime.

The USS America is typical of passenger ships of the times that were converted into troop ships during WW II. They returned to their original role as passenger ships when the war ended.