Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchThe Sultana Explosion and Steamboats: Fitch, Fulton, and Grasshoppering
Episode 12662
The worst maritime disaster in US history was not the Titanic but the Sultana, a wooden steamboat whose boilers exploded on the Mississippi at two in…
1 day, 9 hours ago
East Indiamen: Fake Gun Ports, Bought Commands, and the Pulo Aura Bluff
Episode 12661
From its royal monopoly in 1600 until 1834, the British East India Company controlled trade between England, the Cape of Good Hope, India, and China,…
1 day, 9 hours ago
Nantucket's Whale Oil Boom: Two Beaver Hats, a Sandbar, and a Seawall
Episode 12660
Nantucket began as geological debris: a pile of sand and gravel bulldozed south by the Laurentide Ice Sheet, left as a moraine and outwash plain, and…
1 day, 9 hours ago
Vasco da Gama: The Volta do Mar, the Miri Massacre, and a Viceroy's Death
Episode 12659
In May 1498 an exhausted Vasco da Gama knelt in a temple in Calicut, modern Kozhikode, and prayed before a statue he took for the Virgin Mary. It was…
1 day, 9 hours ago
Trim: Matthew Flinders's Ship Cat, Wreck Reef, and Vanishing on Mauritius
Episode 12658
Trim was born in 1799 aboard HMS Reliance on its voyage from the Cape of Good Hope to Botany Bay. As a kitten he fell overboard, swam back to the hul…
1 day, 9 hours ago
Great Barrier Reef: Coral Spawning, Crown-of-Thorns, and Bleaching
Episode 12657
The Great Barrier Reef stretches over 2,300 kilometers off northeast Australia and covers about 344,400 square kilometers in more than 2,900 reefs an…
1 day, 9 hours ago
Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki: A Balsa Raft Voyage Built on a Wrong Theory
Episode 12656
Norwegian ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl believed Polynesia was settled not from Asia but by fair skinned Tiki people who drifted from pre Columbian Per…
1 day, 9 hours ago
The Doldrums: How the ITCZ Stalls Sailors, Spawns Hurricanes, Shifts Rain
Episode 12655
Coleridge's painted ship upon a painted ocean made the doldrums a byword for stagnation, but the region is the Intertropical Convergence Zone, a band…
1 day, 9 hours ago
Orcas: Resident vs Transient Ecotypes, Grandmother Matriarchs, Moby Doll
Episode 12654
Basque sailors called them asesina ballenas, whale killers, and translation flipped the name to killer whale, though the orca is the largest dolphin.…
1 day, 9 hours ago
SS Californian: Captain Stanley Lord, Eight Rockets, and the Titanic
Episode 12653
Built by Caledon in Dundee and completed in 1902, the Leyland Line cotton carrier SS Californian was the largest ship yet built in the city, and movi…
1 day, 9 hours ago