Inspirational Maritime Quotes

10. maritime mail service When you're keen on sending a message in a bottle but dubious about the delivery mechanism, consider the following factors from science-minded seafarers: choose a dark bottle, roll the message inward to avoid the ink fading in the sun, drop the bottle in a place with a steady current, and wait a loooooong time. (As of this book's publication, the world's oldest message in a bottle was discovered 132 years after it was sent.) Is this the wrong time to mention that the greatest predictor of survival is hope?

In a rustic old hall in Detroit they prayed In the Maritime Sailors' Cathedral. The church bell chimed 'til it rang twenty-nine times, For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald" Amendment to the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

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.

This is something that Europe’s chief border guard refuses to grasp. Fabrice Leggeri is the head of Frontex, the agency that patrols the borders of the European Union. Frontex sends agents to some of the land borders, and patrol boats to the maritime ones. A square-jawed former head of the French frontier police, Leggeri is ideal for the job. When the EU decided not to replace Mare Nostrum in October 2014, it claimed that Leggeri’s teams were more than able to pick up the slack in the southern Mediterranean, thanks to a Frontex operation there known by its codename of ‘Triton’. This was an inspired piece of window dressing. Unlike Mare Nostrum, Triton’s mandate was not to search for and rescue people. Its role was merely to patrol the continent’s nautical borders – in waters far to the north of where Italian ships used to station themselves during Mare Nostrum. It had fewer ships at its disposal, and a budget that was just a third of its predecessor’s. The assumption was that a smaller-scale border-patrol mission would indirectly save more lives.

But the Atlantic Ocean is surely a living thing-furiously and demonstrably so. It is an ocean that moves, impressively and ceaselessly. It generates all kinds of noise- it is forever roaring, thundering, boiling, crashing, swelling, lapping. It is easy to imagine it trying to draw breath- perhaps not so noticeably out in mid-ocean, but where it encounters land, its waters sifting up and down a gravel beach, it mimics nearly perfectly the steady inspirations and exhalations of a living creature. It crawls with symbiotic existences, too: unimaginable quantities of monsters churn within its depths in a kind of maritime harmony, giving to the waters a felling of vibration, a kind of suboceanic pulse. And it has a psychology. It has moods: sometimes dour and sullen, on rare occasions cunning and playful; always it is pondering and powerful.

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.