Ships Facts

On December 5, 1872, sailors spotted the Mary Celeste drifting in the Atlantic with nobody aboard. The ship was seaworthy, her cargo of 1,701 barrels of alcohol mostly intact, and a six-month supply of food untouched. The captain, his wife, their 2-year-old daughter, and seven crew had vanished. 153 years later, nobody knows where they went.

Violet Jessop was aboard the RMS Olympic when it collided with a warship in 1911. She was on the Titanic when it sank in 1912. She was on the Britannic when it hit a mine in 1916. She survived all three and died peacefully at 83 on dry land.

San Francisco's Financial District is built on top of more than 40 Gold Rush ships, possibly 70 or more. In 1849, crews abandoned their vessels to chase the gold rush, then built new streets right over the hulls. Workers hit one ship, the Rome, while digging a Muni tunnel in 1994. Every day, trains rumble through its hull.

USS Constitution just led more than 50 tall ships into Boston Harbor. She's 228 years old, and still an active-duty US Navy warship crewed by real sailors. In July 2026, she fired a 21-gun salute off Castle Island. Then she led ships from 21 countries past more than a million spectators. Old Ironsides is still on duty.

USCGC Eagle led America's 250th birthday parade through New York Harbor on July 4, 2026. The three-masted tall ship started life in 1936 as the Horst Wessel, training future officers for Hitler's navy. The US took her in 1946 as compensation after World War II. Nearly every Coast Guard Academy graduate since has trained aboard the same ship.

Duluth's Aerial Lift Bridge doesn't tilt or swing. Its whole 386-foot span shoots 126 feet straight up in a minute, opening 141 feet of clearance for 1,000-foot ships. Built as a transporter ferry in 1905, it became a lift bridge in 1929. Ships blast a long-short-short Captain's Salute; the bridge answers back. It still does this for almost 900 ships a year, carrying 35 million tons of cargo.

A converted oil tanker left Port Newark in 1956 with 58 steel boxes on its deck. The man behind it ran trucks, not ships. Malcom McLean bought a steamship line so cranes could lift his loaded trailers aboard. In 1963 his company gave the box corner patents away, royalty free, so rivals could copy them. Every container lifted onto a ship today still locks into those corners.

Crews in Richmond, California launched a 441-foot cargo ship 4 days and 15 hours after laying its keel. They built the SS Robert E. Peary around the clock in November 1942, during World War II. They lifted in giant sections built ahead of time, about 250,000 parts in all. No ship that size has ever been built faster.

The cruise ship Prinsendam caught fire in the Gulf of Alaska in October 1980 with more than 500 people aboard, many of them elderly. They abandoned ship into lifeboats as a storm built and the swells passed 20 feet. Coast Guard and Air Force helicopter crews hoisted them out in rescue baskets and flew them to an oil tanker. Not one person died.