Turning Turtle: Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea
When you think of life at sea, what comes to mind? Excitement? Danger? Pirates? Johnny Depp? This quiz has a bit of all of the above, with the exception of Mr. Depp. Test your knowledge of renowned maritime disasters and confrontations.
1. On December 5th 1872, the Mary Celeste was found sailing empty of all crew, but with all valuables—including her cargo of raw alcohol—still aboard. The yawl (a small boat) was missing, and two cuts were made to the bow of the ship. Which of the following theories was proposed by one of the captain's relatives?
a. Warm weather made the alcoholic cargo release gas, causing cargo barrels to explode and the crew to abandon ship.
The captain's cousin, Oliver Cobb, and the vessel owner, J.H. Winchester, felt that the cargo caused minor explosions in the hold. Following the explosions, the ship would have been abandoned in extreme haste, as such explosions were known to splinter and sink vessels.
The official opinion on the Mary Celeste was that the crew sampled the alcohol, killed the captain and his family, damaged the bow of the brig to make the vessel appear unseaworthy, and waited for another captain to "save" them from their vessel. Others held that the ship was becalmed. As it slowly drifted toward shore, Briggs and his men set out in the yawl, to avoid being onboard if the ship wrecked. However, they did not tie the yawl to the Mary Celeste; and when the wind started again, the ship abandoned them. Many other theories exist, and this remains one of history's mysteries. (Incidentally, there were no African Americans among the crew—though Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a fictionalized account in which African American crewman mutinied.)
2. In November 1819, a vessel was struck and wrecked by a sperm whale the crew had seen before, at previous whaling sites. What is the name of the ship?
b. The Essex
Having survived the wreck, 20 crewmembers set out from the Essex in small rowboats with minimal supplies. Over the course of three months, they floated about the South Seas, suffering from the heat, dehydration, and starvation. The evacuees eventually resorted to cannibalism when their food stores were depleted. Eight men survived, including the captain, James Pollard, Jr., and Owen Chase, author of the best-known firsthand account of the disaster. The story of the Essex inspired Herman Melville to write his famous novel Moby-Dick.
3. The 1904 loss of the New York excursion steamer the General Slocum resulted in over 400 dead. Which factor did not contribute to the loss of life?
b. Inaccurate nautical charts
On June 15, 1904, the General Slocum departed on the annual Sunday School excursion of St. Mark's German Lutheran Church. However, unbeknownst to passengers and crew, a fire had broken out in a storage room. Many passengers died of burns, and others drowned, unable to swim. The steamer's defective life preservers added to the death toll. The preservers' insides, made of finely-ground cork, quickly became waterlogged when the preservers' rotten covers fell away. One survivor told of a woman with three children. The mother and two girls could swim, but one daughter could not. The daughter was put in a life preserver and tossed overboard, where she immediately sank.
The General Slocum disaster was recognized internationally because of the loss of so many women and children.
4. In December 1717, Blackbeard captured the sloop Margaret. What did the pirates take from the ship?
c. Cutlasses, hogs, books, and navigational tools
Captain Henry Bostock reported his losses as cutlasses, hogs, books, and navigational instruments—not the traditional image of pirate booty. However, the hogs would provide fresh meat; the books provided entertainment on board a ship where the crew often had little to do (pirate crews could be roughly 80 men strong, as compared to the 12-man crew of a merchant vessel); and accurate navigation was crucial at sea. When we think of pirates and maps, we imagine mythical treasure maps, but maps were vital to any ship—the more the better, as they were often inaccurate by as much as 600 nautical miles. Also, pirates were essentially democratic, so crews determined destinations by common vote. As a result, pirate ships often took odd, zigzagging routes, rather than tried-and-true sea paths, making maps still more valuable.
If you are curious about the Mary Celeste, one interesting online resource is "Sinbad's Genie and the Mary Celeste", a weather-related theory for the ship's lack of crew, written by a meteorologist.
For more information on the General Slocum disaster, try the National Archives and Records Administration's online exhibit Slocum Disasters, June 15, 1904. The page offers an image of the steamer, a contemporary newspaper page on the disaster, and the vessel's enrollment certificate.
North Carolina Digital History provides a brief biography of notorious pirate Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard. To learn more about the wreck of his ship and about a pirate's material possessions, head to the Queen Anne's Revenge Shipwreck Project, which offers artifact images and an archaeological site map.
- Roy Adkins, Nelson's Trafalgar: The Battle that Changed the World (New York: Penguin Books, 2004).
- Owen Chase, Shipwreck of the Whaleship Essex (New York: Lyons Press, 1999).
- David Cordingly, Under the Black Flag: The Romance and Reality of Life Among the Pirates (New York: Random House, 1995).
- John Wesley Hanson, ed., New York's Excursion Boat Horror (No publisher listed, 1904).
- J.G. Lockhart, The Mary Celeste and Other Strange Tales of the Sea (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1952).
a pushcart ice cream vendor in New York, in 1896, who also, perhaps, invented the ice cream sandwich by putting a slice of ice cream between waffle squares cut from a sheet. Other sources say the ice cream cone has its origins in the mists of history, but was first described in Mrs. Marshall's Cookery Book, whose author, Agnes Marshall, published it in London in 1888. Still others discern a woman licking an ice cream cone in an 1807 picturing fashionable customers eating at the Frascati café in Paris, although this is uncertain because cone-shaped ice cream bowls were not unknown at the time.
Sylvester Graham (1794-1851) was the most renowned food reformer of the 19th century. He wrote The Philosophy of Sacred History Considered in Relation to Human Aliment and the Wines of Scripture. Graham was known by the nickname of "Doctor Sawdust" because of his promotion of the virtues of bread made with whole-wheat ("Graham") flour. His followers set up "Graham hotels," like small, provisional utopias, where guests following Graham's dietary regimen could board with like-minded progressive reformers.
Business partners Henry D. Seymour and William Heston of Ravenna, Ohio, registered the Quaker Man as a trademark in 1877 (the first trademark registered for a breakfast cereal). They made Quaker Oats, steel-cut oats packaged in 2-pound paper boxes with cooking directions on the outside, an innovation for the time. The name "Quaker Oats" would seem to tie the product to the owners' religious views, but Seymour said he chose it simply because he found an encyclopedia article on Quakers and decided that the qualities described there—integrity, honesty, and purity—were ones he wanted to link to his company's product. Heston credited himself with the name, saying that while walking on the streets of Cincinnati, he had seen a picture of Quaker William Penn, whose clothes and character inspired him to choose the name. Nevertheless, either way, it couldn't have hurt to conjure the figure of a religious Nonconformist, waving a scroll inscribed "Pure," on the package of a breakfast cereal. Potential customers would have associated it with the other Progressive health food items, especially wholegrain breakfast foods, that were being urged by food reformers descended from Protestant Nonconformists and Inner Light advocates.
Ellen Gould White (1827-1915), the Seventh-Day Adventist prophetess, had a vision in 1863 in which the relation of physical health to spiritual health, the body to the spirit, was revealed to her. She set up the Western Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek, as well as other sanitariums. She published the pamphlet, Health, or How to Live. Don't trust the appetite, she said, which has become perverted, or the dietary customs of society. She counseled eating grains, nuts, fruit, and whole-grain flour.
In 1898, they founded the Sanitas Food Company, to sell health food via mail order. In 1906, Will established the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flakes Company. When J. H. sold to W. K. his interest in the corn flakes company, J. H. used the proceeds in 1911 to create the influential Race Betterment Foundation, in order to prepare the way for a super race of "new men," and to set up a "eugenic registry" that evaluated couples for breeding based on their genetic pedigrees in order to stop the propagation of "defectives." 
Danforth then contacted "Dr. Everett Ralston," whose real name was Albert Webster Edgerly (aka Edmund Shaftsbury or Shaftesbury) (1852-1926), a debarred lawyer, con man, cult leader, self-appointed health expert, and elocution teacher, who had founded perhaps the world's first multilevel marketing scheme. This was the Ralston Health Club, a Washington, D.C.-based, national membership health products club, with 800,000 members in 1898.The Club required its members to pay large amounts for a series of books that told the secret of how to live for 200 years by collecting and preserving in the body the occult force of "Glame" and learning to speak his invented "Adam-Man tongue." Danforth secured "Dr. Ralston's" endorsement of Purina Wheat, and added his name to Danforth's company—Ralston-Purina. Danforth's cereal became Ralston Health Club Breakfast Food, then Ralston Purina Wheat, then Instant Ralston. 