#shipwrecks

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

so theres a lot of posts going round about the titanic wreck and the missing submarines; all of them that ive seen have made very good points about how shoddy the submersible seemed to be and how the company decided to wait eight hours before reporting it, and how this is a play stupid games, win stupid prizes for the ultra-wealthy who paid like 250grand a ticket for this thing.

but what i havent seen any posts about is how the titanic wreck is a gravesite and this tourism is disturbing the graves of over 1500 people.

sometimes its kinda hard to remember that those on the titanic were real people; it was over a century ago, the story has been romanticised in so many ways (like the movie), theres conspiracies theories galore that cloud everything with misinformation, but at the end of the day, those who died were real people.

do you want their names? heres a list of them; its a long read. and for fun, heres another site where you can see photos of the children and babies who died aboard.

their bodies are long gone and their lives long forgotten. all we have to remember them and honour them is the wreck itself. its all we have of them and it is their gravesite. its their tombstone.

caitlin doughty/ask a morticians video on the great lakes discusses the topic well, and why we should leave these shipwrecks alone because again, they are the gravesites of all the souls who died aboard those ships. we rarely have bodies to recover so we really are left just with the wreck.

and what really upsets me about titanic tourism is how the majority of those who died that night were not the ultra-wealthy rich folks you might picture when you think of ocean liners.

61% of the first class passengers survived

42% of the second class passengers survived

24% of the third class passengers survived

24% of the crew survived **

the majority of those who died that night were regular folk; not to be cliche, but they were just like us. titanics wreck is not only a gravesite for over 1500 people, its also a majority working class gravesite.

and look at us now. look at what were doing. the ultra-wealthy can pay the equivalent of peanuts to them to disturb a mass gravesite of the exact kind of people they exploit today to hold onto all their wealth. 

its easy to point and laugh at these dumb idiots in their playstation controller submarine, seemingly held together with super glue and duct tape, but its also important to remember that what they were doing was simply disturbing a gravesite for fun. though the company does research, these guys werent down there to conduct research, they were there so they could brag about it to their friends. its like “climbing mount everest” while your sherpa does all the work.

if you cant tell, i have a lot of feelings about this. shipwrecks and ocean liners are one of my special interests and im currently building a (beginner’s) model of the titanic, for fucks sake. but i would never go down to see that wreck because its a fucking gravesite and we should not be disturbing their final resting place.

[ltwilliammowett]

Shipwrecks, early 20th century

In 1931 three abandoned vessels were burned to the waterline at Bullhead Point, Lake Michigan. These well-worn remnants of the once thriving limestone fleet were last owned by the Sturgeon Bay Stone Company. The hulls of the vessels Ida Corning, Oak Leaf, and Empire State lie just offshore from the point and remain visible at low water.

[mapsontheweb]

Lake Michigan Shipwrecks

[theartingace]

today's drawtober got WILDLY out of hand while pondering my headworld's mermaids- the most common and well known of the true shapeshifters in the world. They are respected and feared for that power- though they mostly use it to play tricks and con unsuspecting townies out of baubles for funzies 🥰

[macleod]

An estimated 50,000 shipwrecks can be found around the UK’s coastline and have been acting as a hidden refuge for fish, corals and other marine species in areas still open to destructive bottom towed fishing, a new study has shown.

Many of these wrecks have been lying on the seabed for well over a century, and have served as a deterrent to fishers who use bottom towed trawling to secure their catches. As a result, while many areas of the seabed have been damaged significantly in areas of heavy fishing pressure, the seabed in and around shipwrecks remains largely unblemished.

The new research found that the average density of marine life in areas still open to trawling was 240% greater within wreck sites than in sites actively being used for bottom towed fishing. In parts of the seabed within a 50m radius of the wrecks, the difference was even greater with the density of marine life 340% greater than in the control sites.

Source: University of Plymouth via EurekAlert, Nov. 23rd, 2023

[treasure-of-the-ancients]

887 karat emerald recovered from the Atocha shipwreck, which was a Spanish treasure ship that sunk off the coast of Florida in 1622.

[therealvinelle]

Do you think Heidi and the Volturi would look at the Titanic sinking and go "Hrm, a cruise ship disaster, that's a good way to get a lot of humans and make them disappear"?

Like maybe not regularly but if they had an emergency "we need 1500 people as fast as possible because I guess we're throwing a big feast idk"?

Oh god no.

The first rule to making 1500 people disappear is you don't make 1500 people disappear. You physically can't, at no point in history have 1500 people been able to disappear without people noticing. The reason we know so many painstaking details about the RMS Titanic, who was where when and exactly how the ship was built, is that a massive investigation was launched into how the ship sank. You'll remember the Malaysian Airline disaster a few years back, and you remember it because of the amount of attention and resources that were poured into uncovering what had happened.

In times past you might have been able to make away with a ship more easily and have it be noticed later, because the absence of wireless communication systems meant a ship not making it to port could simply mean they were delayed. Even then, though, people would notice and it would attract a lot of attention. The SS Waratah, which departed for Cape Town from Durban in July of 1909 and was expected to reach her destination on the 29th of July, had people looking for her on August 1st even if she wasn't reported officially missing until much later. An inquiry was launched the next year, with an emphasis on "Why haven't we found anything?". This was a 211 passenger casualty: imagine the inquiry, the search effort, for a 1500 passenger ship.

Even with the RMS Titanic many of the dead had worn life vests, several hundred people were recovered in the months after the disaster. There were bodies sighted around the place the SS Waratah had last been seen, though none were recovered. Point being, what's lost at sea is not always lost at sea. Heidi would have to create a record of her 1500 people having been aboard the ship she intends to sink, without them actually being on board or else she has to somehow ensure none of them will float to the surface after the fact.

You'll notice the ships on this wiki site generally have a few things in common: they had a lot of passengers and they were not expected to be lost. A fishing boat might be lost without attracting much surprise, this was something people knew to expect. During wartime, doubly so.

A ship containing any number of passengers, though, that wasn't expected to be lost, that will have people talking about it, investigating, trying to find out what happened even if we go back a few centuries. In the modern age, the search would be on every headline.

The Volturi would not be able to keep the secret for any amount of time if they attempted anything like this.

[ballpitbee]

Throw back to my Shipwreck and Traindead OCs- the undead of my 'Vehifolk' species :P

[where-our-stories-start]

inspired by this post

[hussyknee]

I don't get the "disrespectful viewing of a mass grave" aspect of the Oceangate criticism. The Titanic sank over a hundred years ago and has since become a touchstone of art and popular culture. It isn't tied to an oppressed minority (disabled or queer people) or ethnic/racial community as part of a heritage of violence. Plenty of people pay to see shipwrecks and the sites of historical tragedies that have been turned into museums and monuments. Yes it's a stupid amount of money, but I don't really get what's particularly ghoulish about wanting to see a famous shipwreck. Am I missing something?/gen

[aretis]

Shipwreck,Zakynthos. Greece🇬🇷

[ltwilliammowett]

Davy Jones's Locker, by William Lionel Wyllie (1851–1931)

[mapsontheweb]

Lake Superior Shipwrecks: known wrecks since 1800 A.D.

[statelibraryqueensland]

It is always interesting to reflect on the way humans respond to tragedies, of all their shapes and sizes, and few such tragedies have had such global, lasting influence as the Titanic. These clippings, preserved in the Rawson Family Archive (HERE), demonstrate the impact of the tragedy on an international scale. The articles detail the events as they were revealed by survivors, the scale of the event, the heroism and sacrifice of those on board, and the ways in which Queensland locals publicly mourned this event.

[originalleftist]

Pirate Trivia Time:

Here are some of my favourite bits of pirate trivia:

Ann Bonny's name has been spelled "Anne" with an e for 300 years due to a error in the trial record.

The sole surviving physical description of Ann Bonny and Mary Read by an eyewitness is basically "I knew they were women because they had big breasts".

Blackbeard once ransomed the city of Charleston for syphilis medication.

There is no known record of Blackbeard killing anyone before his final battle.

The word "buccaneer" has the same origins as the word "barbecue" (the boucan, a means of preparing meat).

A buccaneer, William Dampier, introduced the word "avocado" (among others) to the English language (he was also the first person to circumnavigate the world three times).

Wrecks of at least two pirate ships have been discovered: "Black Sam" Bellamy's Whydah Galley, and Blackbeard's Queen Anne's Revenge.

Arguably the most successful pirate of all time was a Chinese woman, Ching Shih, aka Zheng Yi Sao.

Bartholomew Roberts had perhaps the most cinematic pirate death- trading broadsides with a man of war in the middle of a tropical storm.

Yes, Stede Bonnet actually had a library on his sloop, the Revenge.