h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Pierce, thank you for your interesting reply, I have the book on order!

Reading the reviews it reminded me of Jan de Hartog's 'The Captain' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Captain_(novel)

paulh
I remember reading a book (non-fiction novel?) many years ago. The main problem was not so much secrecy, she had already delivered the atomic bombs, but a policy to keep the enemy from breaking our code.

There was a policy to not report the arrival of any capitol ships. The port captain knew when the Indianapolis was supposed to arrive, but he decided that the ban also applied to not reporting her non-arrival.

about 2/3rds of those who survived the sinking perished while waiting for rescue, most the victims of shark attacks.

Because the sinking came so close to the end of the war the captain of the Japanese submarine was flown in to testify at the captain's court marshal. Yes he was one of the few survivors.

F S

It would be bad luck to read it *before* I swim tomorrow.

Watching a documentary right now about the loss of the Danish training ship "København" and its crew of 75 at yuletide in 1928.
45 members of the crew were young cadets. Mere boys actually.
In contrast "København" was the tallest sailing ship of its day and to this very day its disappearance has become one of the greatest maritime mysteries of the modern era - as well as being one of the biggest tragedies in Danish naval history

If its disappearance is that mysterious, I suspect alien abduction....

You are not the first to utter this theory, paulh

Experts believe that either a very fast and surprising change of wind or a super wave - or both - caught the ship in an awkward position. Maybe because someone had fallen overboard

Rogue waves can capsize a ship under certain conditions. A 90-foot wave almost did that to the Queen Mary one time. There's an excellent discussion of this In the book "The perfect Storm."

There's also a hypothesis regarding carbon dioxide or methane seeps creating large patches of bubbles under a ship and causing a sudden loss of buoyancy. I'm not sure how plausible this is.

It's actually very plausible. There are also vortexes [vortici?] in the latitudes near Greenland which bring Gulf Stream heated water down to the ocean bottom to be returned to Antarctica for another trip north.

Methane hydrate looks like water, feels like water, in and of itself is odorless, though its flavor will usually make people spit.

I've seen it in a free standing, open and natural pool.

Its very low density, compared with water, balsa wood, especially if its wet all over, will sink in it.

On the same principle that you can 'float' a steel sewing needle on the surface tension of plain water, you can float a burning match on the surface tension of methane hydrate, and it will not go out.

There are, many places in the world, sea floor deposits of the stuff in a waxy, solid form, kept solid by a combination of low temperature and high pressure.

If the temperature rises over a certain critical level, depending on depth, the methane hydrate can liquify and rise to the surface and can contribute to the sinking of ships.

It does take a pretty substantial deposit for that to happen, but many are known that are of sufficient size.

A few weeks ago I heard of an account of an underage soldier from Thurrock in Essex in the first world war, who was one of the 250,000 from the UK enlisted. http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/zcvdhyc

I had read about the methane deposits, but I didnt know that they were methane hydrate.

Personally I would suspect a sudden strong wind catching her unaware. I read speculations many years ago that a large sailing ship with a small or inexperienced crew could be caught by a wind so strong that if forced her sail well beyond her hull speed (for a displacement hull 1.33 times the sq root of waterline length - in feet). The bow wave could grow so high it washes over the deck, filling the holds.

Just something I read from usually reliable sources, back in the days of print media.



F S

It sounds dreadful.

It was. Family, friends and the rest of Denmark waited for months before the ship and all aboard were officially registered as lost.

Naturally some people would never accept this and hoped beyond hope for someone or at least something to show up. But nobody and nothing ever did.

For some time it was believed that survivors had reached the small island of Tristan da Cunha - the most remote of all remote islands - but when a ship was sent to check nothing was found. Not a trace

Of course there are still a lot of speculations. This is one of the more plausible:

http://www.seabreezes.co.im/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1184:the-key-to-the-kobenhavn-mystery&catid=37:events&Itemid=59

...could not find any decent paying cargo in Argentina and so was to make the voyage to Australia in ballast...

That's significant, could have impacted the vessel's stability.

I'm not sure this information is correct. Other sources claim there was cargo onboard. Maybe not much, though. Transporting cargo meant a welcome supply to the economy but the main reason for sailing was educating, not transport. Bereaved relatives at one point claimed the cargo might not had been secured well enough, which in turn might have forced the ship to capsizing and going under in storm. København's owner H.N. Andersen flatly denied any such claim.

I big to the friends and relatives of anyone who is lost at sea.
My great-grandfather was lot at sea. As far as anyone can tell, his ship might have caught fire off the coast of Brazil in the late 1880s. My grandfather was two at the time, the youngest of three children. His mother left their native Nova Scotia and brought them to central Massachusetts where her husband's uncle was living.

Many ships have gone missing over the millennia. A Roman ship dating from Caesar Augustus's time was discovered off the coast of Brazil a few decades ago. Another was found off the coast of Central America. It is estimated that for every such shipwreck, there may be 100 others that have not been found. That makes up to 200 Roman vessels lost along the coasts of the Americas.