Famous Maritime Quotes

The sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff is the deadliest disaster in maritime history, with losses dwarfing the death tolls of the famous ships Titanic and Lusitania. Yet remarkably, most people have never heard of it. On January 30, 1945, four torpedoes waited in the belly of Soviet submarine S-13.

Famously, in 1852, formerly enslaved maritime worker Frederick Douglass asked, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” He honored the Founders as “great men” but asked: “Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?”[3]

Castine is a quiet town with a population of about 1,500 people in Western Hancock County, Maine, named after John Hancock, when Maine was a part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He was the famous statesman, merchant and smuggler who signed the “Declaration of Independence” with a signature large enough so that the English monarch, King George, could read it without glasses. Every child in New England knows that John Hancock was a prominent activist and patriot during the colonial history of the United States and not just the name of a well-known Insurance Company. Just below the earthen remains of Fort George, on both sides of Pleasant Street, lays the campus of Maine Maritime Academy. Prior to World War II, this location was the home of the Eastern State Normal School, whose purpose was to train grade school teachers. Maine Maritime Academy has significantly grown over the years and is now a four-year college that graduates officers and engineers for the United States Merchant Marine, as well as educating students in marine-related industries such as yacht and small craft management. Bachelor Degrees are offered in Engineering, International Business and Logistics, Marine Transportation, and Ocean Studies. Graduate studies are offered in Global Logistics and Maritime Management, as well as in International Logistics Management. Presently there are approximately 1,030 students enrolled at the Academy. Maine Maritime Academy's ranking was 7th in the 2016 edition of Best Northern Regional Colleges by U.S. News and World Report. The school was named the Number One public college in the United States by Money Magazine. Photo Caption: Castine, Maine

The sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff is the deadliest disaster in maritime history, with losses dwarfing the death tolls of the famous ships Titanic and Lusitania. Yet remarkably, most people have never heard of it.

So why write a book about an old ship that only a handful of people have ever heard of and even fewer could care anything about? Unlike most maritime subjects, the William Badger experienced no mutinies or revolts—like the Bounty or the Amistad. Although she indirectly provided inspiration for one of the most famous shipwreck poems in American literature, she herself was never wrecked—like the fictional Hesperus, the Pequod, or the non-fictional Nantucket whaleship Essex.

It was left to Senator Isidor Rayner to conclude the hearings by saying: “As the ship was sinking, the strains of music were wafting over the deck. … It was a rallying cry for the living and the dying - to rally them not for life, but to rally them for their awaiting death. Almost face to face with their Creator, amid the chaos of this supreme and solemn moment, in inspiring notes the unison resounded through the ship. It told the victims of the wreck that there was another world beyond the seas, free from the agony of pain, and, though with somber tones, it cheered them on to their untimely fate. As the sea closed upon the heroic dead, let us feel that the heavens opened to the lives that were prepared to enter. “…If the melody that was rehearsed could only reverberate through this land ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee,’ and its echoes could be heard in these halls of legislation, and at every place where our rulers and representatives pass judgment and enact and administer laws, and at every home and fireside…and if we could be made to feel that there is a divine law of obedience and of adjustment…far above the laws that we formulate in this presence, then, from the gloom of these fearful hours we shall pass into the dawn of a higher service and of a better day, and then…the lives that went down upon this fated night did not go down in vain.

At that point their laughter gave way to a more somber and respectful celebration that what was once lost had been found, though those dead could never be brought back to life.

However, the most emotional objects for him were the shoes, for their tough leather had survived where nothing else had, not even the feet that had been wearing them when they settled on the bottom of the ocean.  He soon realized that every pair of shoes lying side by side represented a life snuffed out and a body long ago taken by the sea.

He later explained that when the ship landed, it hit so hard that it sunk 60 feet down into the ocean’s floor.  As they maneuvered Argo up its side, they saw rows and rows of portholes, looking back at them, Ballard later said, like the eyes of the dead.

When Ballard left the Titanic in 1986, it was with a new understanding and appreciation for what the site really was, a mass grave.  As a result, he abandoned his original plans to salvage items from the wreck and instead focused his attention on preserving it intact, supporting the RMS Titanic Maritime Memorial Act passed by the United States Congress on October 21, 1986.

Ballard, however, remains optimistic about the sea’s effect on the ship but pessimistic about what man is doing to it.  And perhaps he has good reason for this because anxious to get what it could while it could, Premier Exhibitions, Inc., a part of  RMST, in 2007 bought the rights of all the personal belongings found on the ship.  In 2011, U.S. District Judge Rebecca Beach Smith ruled that the company had the right to the items, as long as they properly cared for and preserved them.  While this has allowed new Titanic museums and tourists attractions to spring up around the world, it also means that the ship will continue to be plundered.  In the end, it seems that whether nature wipes it out or men plunder it into oblivion, Titanic’s days remain just as numbered as they were on that fateful April day on which she was launched.

With the outbreak of World War I, the Lusitania was officially designated an Armed Merchant Cruiser, but at the same time, the ship continued to ply the waters as a civilian ocean liner, supposedly under the protection of the Cruiser Rules, a set of rules developed during the latter half of the 19th century to cover how civilian vessels would be treated during a time of war.  The rules allowed for navies to capture an enemy’s civilian ships, but if they did so, they had to provide safe passage for the non-military passengers on board. In the same vein, it forbade the targeting of civilian vessels by military ships.

Woodrow Wilson’s administration knew the Germans’ U-boat policy and was already warning Germany not to target civilian ships, and on May 1, the very day that passengers were boarding the Lusitania on its trip back across the Atlantic, the president told Americans that "no warning that an unlawful and inhumane act will be committed" could justify actually conducting the attack.

While strides had definitely been made since the sinking of the Titanic, which took 3 hours to sink after striking an iceberg, the additional lifeboat drills would prove to be insufficient preparation for a torpedoed ship that sank in less than 20 minutes.

Ironically, the fact that the watertight compartments were closed ahead of time meant some crewmen would be trapped in them when the ship was torpedoed and thus had no chance to escape the sinking ship.

To a world that had barely recovered from the shocking loss of the Titanic a few years earlier, the loss of the Lusitania came as a terrible blow.  While the death tolls in each disaster were nearly equal, there were aspects of the Lusitania’s sinking that made it so much more offensive to the human psyche.

From the moment the Lusitania was struck by a torpedo and two explosions ripped through its hull, Germany insisted that the ship was illegally smuggling weapons from America to Britain and thus carrying “contraband of war.

The question of whether the Lusitania was carrying guns or other armaments has been debated since the day the ship went down. The cargo manifest made clear that the ship was carrying rifle cartridges and empty shell casings, something the British not only admitted but conceded had been carried on the Lusitania throughout the war.

Indeed, the British government began warning divers who went to explore the wreck that there were dangerous contents down there: “Successive British governments have always maintained that there was no munitions on board the Lusitania (and that the Germans were therefore in the wrong to claim to the contrary as an excuse for sinking the ship) ... The facts are that there is a large amount of ammunition in the wreck, some of which is highly dangerous. The Treasury have decided that they must inform the salvage company of this fact in the interests of the safety of all concerned.

while the Germans claimed that the secondary explosion was evidence of weaponry being hidden in the ship, explorations of the wreck have more recently led historians to believe that the secondary explosion was actually caused by an exploding boiler, not the detonation of munitions.

With the possible exception of a few soldiers on leave, the ship’s passengers were all civilians, so it may be better to ask whether the Germans were justified in sinking a ship full of civilians simply to keep weapons from falling into their enemies’ hands.

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When the author was on the staff of the Naval War College, he witnessed the same inability of Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force officers to improvise when their plans were derailed in wargames.

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