Sea Disasters: Ships That Never Returned

The cask of royal sturgeon detonated Gribshunden and sank a summit Ten meters down in the Baltic, a two-meter sturgeon still sits packed in its cask, provisions reserved by law for one man alone. Three separate chronicles, written in three different languages, all agree the ship above it exploded and burned before sinking — yet the hull pulled from the seabed shows no trace of fire on a single timber. What actually happened in that Swedish harbor in June of 1495? In this episode, we trace the voyage, wreck, and rediscovery of Gribshunden, the flagship of King Hans of Denmark, asking what really destroyed a ship that chroniclers swore had burned but archaeology insists never did. Person: King Hans of Denmark Location: harbor near Ronneby, Sweden, off Stora Ekön Date: June 1495 Case: the sinking of the royal warship Gribshunden Status: wreck rediscovered on the seafloor, extensively excavated since, never raised, cause of loss still unconfirmed - Gribshunden first appears in the record in a letter Hans wrote on May 16, 1486, referring to "in navi nostra Griffone" - Dendrochronology traced the ship's oak to trees felled in the Ardennes forest along the Meuse in the winter of 1482–83 - Three independent chronicles — the Sturekrönikan, Reimar Koch's Lübeck Chronicle, and Caspar Weinreich's Danzig Chronicle — describe an explosion and fire before the sinking - Excavation has recovered fourteen artillery pieces, including the oldest known linstock, found in 2021, bearing charring from use - The hull rests at roughly ten meters depth with a 27-degree list, preserved by Baltic salinity too low for shipworm to survive - The figurehead, recovered in August 2015, depicts a chimeric creature swallowing a man whole - Sten Sture the Elder failed to arrive at the Kalmar summit until August, after the Danish delegation had already departed, and the Kalmar Union was not restored until after the 1497 Battle of Rotebro

The missing buoys that lured the convoy onto the shoals Below Cedar Point, the Potomac offered nothing but black water and hidden shallows — every navigational marker had been pulled from the channel, and somewhere behind a sleepless lieutenant trailed a steamer loaded with one hundred and forty-four barrels of gunpowder. He had not slept in days, Washington had just been cut off from the North, and no one could tell him what waited beneath the surface ahead. Would the man at the helm find safe water, or had someone already made sure he never would? In this episode, we trace the strange life of a Connecticut canal tug from a Paraguayan river skirmish to the buoy-stripped Potomac of 1861, asking how an unremarkable little vessel became one of the quiet, decisive instruments of the Civil War's opening crisis. Person: Lieutenant Thomas Scott Fillebrown Location: the Potomac River, near Cedar Point, Virginia Date: April 19, 1861 Case: the disappearance of the channel buoys below Cedar Point Status: the ship survived the war intact and was later lost to fire in 1868 - The USS Water Witch was struck ten times by Paraguayan artillery at Itapiru on February 1, 1855, killing her helmsman at the wheel. - The tug was built at Philadelphia in 1856 and registered as M. W. Chapin before being taken into naval service around September 1858. - She was renamed Anacostia sometime after her last log entry as M. W. Chapin on May 27, 1859. - Fillebrown's report noted he brought in the steamer Jerome, carrying 144 barrels of gunpowder, plus a cement-laden schooner, and asked for a second officer because he had not slept since the previous Thursday. - Sold at public auction on July 20, 1865, and redocumented as Alexandria on December 26, 1865, the ship burned at City Point, Virginia, on March 22, 1868.

The aft generator cracked and burned, leaving 4,500 afloat Six in the morning, sixty miles off the California coast, and a ship the size of a small city sits dead in the water on a flat, calm Pacific — no storm, no collision, engines silent. Within hours, U.S. Navy helicopters are lowering ration packs by rope to thousands of passengers below, and a nuclear aircraft carrier is delivering breakfast to a stranded cruise liner. How did a single cracked generator take down every electrical system on a ship engineered with built-in redundancy? In this episode, we trace the Carnival Splendor from her construction as an Italian Costa-class vessel to the November 2010 fire that left nearly 4,500 people adrift off California, asking how a ship designed to survive exactly this kind of failure ended up completely dark. Person: Gerry Cahill, Carnival's president Location: Pacific Ocean, sixty miles off the California coast Date: November 8, 2010 Case: a crankcase failure in the number five diesel generator that sparked a fire in the aft engine room Status: towed to San Diego over two and a half days, no injuries, full refunds issued, ship returned to service in March 2011 - The Carnival Splendor measured 113,323 gross tons and carried nearly 4,500 passengers and crew on the voyage - The fire began with a crankcase split in the number five of six Wärtsilä diesel generators, split between forward and aft engine rooms - USS Ronald Reagan, a Nimitz-class carrier, and the Coast Guard Cutter Morgenthau both responded, with tugboats from San Diego completing the roughly 150-mile tow - The joint Coast Guard–Panamanian Maritime Authority investigation report, released in July 2013, found both redundant cable pathways ran through the same overhead corridor in the aft engine room - The ship transited the expanded Panama Canal in 2018 and now sails out of Sydney

The Two-Inch Beam That Stranded a Confederate Ship In August of 2007, four divers working the dark water of North Carolina's Pasquotank River pulled a silver-plated spoon from the silt, engraved with a crew member's name. It had waited there since a February morning in 1862, when a Confederate commander ran his ship for the safety of a canal lock with a Union fleet closing behind him. What single measurement decided whether that ship would reach shelter or burn at the water's edge? In this episode, we trace CSS Appomattox from her 1850 launch as a Baltimore-to-Philadelphia passenger steamer through her wartime conversions, her role in the fall of Roanoke Island, and her final run up the Pasquotank during the Battle of Elizabeth City, asking how the fixed dimensions of a twelve-year-old commercial hull came to decide the outcome of a naval engagement. Person: Commander Charles Carroll Simms Location: Pasquotank River, northeastern North Carolina Date: February 10, 1862 Case: css appomattox, formerly the passenger steamer empire Status: burned by her own crew after her beam proved two inches too wide for the dismal swamp canal lock - Built as Empire by William Cramp at Kensington, Philadelphia, laid down March 1850, launched June 22, completed October 1850, with engines by Reaney, Neafie and Company - Measured 86 feet in length, 20 feet in beam, drew 7 feet 6 inches, and registered 120 tons burthen - Armed at the time of the battle with only a single 32-pounder bow gun and a stern howitzer, after four promised rifled guns never arrived - Scouted Ambrose Burnside's invasion force on February 6, 1862 — 60 transports, 12,000 troops, and 20 warships — before Roanoke Island fell on February 7–8 - The wreck was located after more than a decade of searching, with the identifying spoon recovered in August 2007 and the discovery announced publicly on November 10, 2009

The wheelchair they tossed into the sea killed a man aboard the Achille Lauro Four men lift a wheelchair from the deck of a cruise ship and carry it to the rail. The man inside is still alive. The ship beneath them has already survived bombings, collisions, fires, and a bankruptcy across nearly four decades — so what turned a routine Mediterranean crossing into the scene of a killing that reached the Supreme Court and became an opera? In this episode, we trace the ship's origin, design, voyages and misfortunes from a keel laid in 1939 to the sinking of the Achille Lauro in 1994, following the thread that links a Dutch peacetime liner named for a war casualty to a killing at sea. What sequence of changes and incidents carried that hull from a Vlissingen shipyard to the Indian Ocean wreck? Person: Leon Klinghoffer Location: eastern Mediterranean, aboard the Achille Lauro Date: 7 October 1985 Case: the wheelchair thrown overboard with Leon Klinghoffer still in it Status: hijackers convicted in Italy; ship sank off Somalia in 1994; wreck never found - Four men lifted a wheelchair and threw it into the sea on 7 October 1985 while Leon Klinghoffer was still alive