In 1918, polar explorer Roald Amundsen set off on a research voyage to reach the North Pole via the Northeast Passage, on a ship he'd commissioned and named Maud. The expedition was one disaster after another, but the un...

Although slavery continued in the United States until the end of the Civil War, the importation of slaves from Africa was banned in 1807. By the 1850s, the practice was dead, but Mobile, Alabama, businessman Timothy Meah...

The ship MV Wilhelm Gustloff was built as a cruise liner in 1937, then repurposed as a hospital ship for the German navy in 1939. In 1945 it was pressed into service for Operation Hannibal, transporting both German milit...

Captain Herman Schuenemann had a three-masted schooner named the Rouse Simmons, but people called him Captain Santa and they called his ship the Christmas Tree Ship. Every year, he would bring in a boatload of Christmas...

In 1857, the U.S. mail ship SS Central America left California for the East Coast. Aboard were 477 passengers, many of them newly rich from the California Gold Rush. They were returning home with their gold, over $2 mill...

Somewhere in the Pacific Ocean 72 years ago, a Japanese torpedo tore through the hull of the USS Indianapolis. The ship sank 18,000 feet to the bottom of the sea, and wasn't seen again -until Friday.The Indianapolis sank...

Daniel Defoe published his book Robinson Crusoe in...  ...obinson Crusoe in 1719, at a time when stories of shipwrecks , pirates, and castaways were hot, and there were...  ...to Defoe.Take Robert Knox, for example. After his shipwreck on Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, he was held captive for...

Do you recall the Staten Island Ferry Disaster of 1963? The news flew under the radar because it happened on the morning of November 22, and the media became overwhelmingly focused on the assassination of John F. Kennedy...

There have been many tales of people stranded by nautical problems, who end up floating at sea or stranded in an uninhabited wilderness. They are the victims of bad weather, mechanical problems, pirates, poor planning, o...

Forty years ago today, on November 10, 1975, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank under the waters of Lake Superior. All 29 of her crew perished the evening. The people of the Great Lakes area will never forget, and are holding...