“The authority of the captain is traditionally treated as absolute, and mariners are accustomed to deferring to the captain’s decisions.” — National Transportation Safety Board, Marine Accident Report NTSB/MAR-17/01 There’s a particular kind of dread that belongs to the person two levels down who sees the number the boss hasn’t looked at. You have the standing to say something. Once, certainly. Maybe twice, if you frame it carefully and pick your moment. What happens on the t

We've already told you how Bran mac Febail came to build his boat — the music no one else could hear, the silver branch that appeared in his hand while he slept, the woman who walked uninvited into his hall and sang fifty verses about an island across the sea before vanishing with the branch she'd come for. That's where the story starts. It is not, however, where it ends, and the parts in between are worth knowing on their own terms — not as backstory to a famous ending, but

In May of 1639, a small group of settlers led by William Coddington and Nicholas Easton walked the southern shore of Aquidneck Island and made a choice that would decide everything that came after it, though none of them could have known it yet. They were choosing a home, and by the ordinary measure of the time — soil, pasture, timber — they chose badly. What Aquidneck's southern tip offered instead was a harbor: deep, sheltered, ice-free through the winter, the kind of ancho

On the afternoon of June 19, 2022, roughly 325 miles from Bermuda, a wave came over the rail of the sloop Morgan of Marietta and took her captain with it. Colin Golder was 74, an experienced offshore racer competing in the Newport Bermuda Race, sailing with a crew who — every one of them — had their harnesses clipped and their PFDs on. Golder did not. His crew got a Lifesling around him within minutes, but he lost consciousness before they could bring him back aboard, and did

Maritime History & Culture Somewhere off the west coast of Ireland, more than a thousand years before anyone wrote the word "tourism," a nobleman named Bran mac Febail heard music he couldn't place. It followed him home, lulled him to sleep, and when he woke there was a branch of silver in his hand, in white bloom, though no tree like it grew anywhere he knew. That night a woman none of his household recognized walked into the hall and sang fifty verses about an island across

What New Research Reveals About Cape Cod's White Sharks Cape Cod's white shark population is one of modern marine conservation's clearest success stories — the return of an apex predator after decades of near-absence, driven largely by the recovery of the gray seals it feeds on. That recovery, and how scientists first measured it, is the subject of Part One of this series, “The Sharks Are Back.” But recovery isn't the end of the story. Each summer, researchers from the Massac

Inside the Recovery of White Sharks in New England Waters On a warm August morning, the beaches of Cape Cod fill with swimmers, surfers, anglers, and families eager to enjoy one of New England's great summer traditions. Lifeguards scan the surf, children chase waves across broad sandbars, and seals bob just beyond the breakers. Increasingly, however, another visitor is sharing those waters. The white shark. Forty years ago, spotting a white shark off Cape Cod was an extraordi

No one had seen the steamer go down. No one ever would. Somewhere out in the dark off the New England coast, in the small hours between Saturday night and Sunday morning, the side-wheel steamer Portland and every soul aboard her had simply ceased to exist. The beach was the only witness, and the beach could testify only that it had happened — not how, not precisely when, and not, as it would turn out for the better part of a century, where.

In 1916, after Shackleton's *Endurance* was crushed in the Weddell Sea ice, twenty-eight men reached the dead end of Elephant Island — too remote for rescue to find. Help would have to be fetched. So six of them set out in the *James Caird*, a twenty-two-foot lifeboat with two feet of freeboard, to cross some eight hundred miles of the Scotia Sea to the whaling stations of South Georgia.