A Brief History The 22nd of November is indelibly etched in the public’s mind with the death of a revered hero! (And John F. Kennedy also died on November 22nd.) Yes, pirate aficionados everywhere mourn the 1718 loss of one of the most colorful pirates of all time, Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard. Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find him born in England around 1680, and at some unknown point, becoming a sailor and finding himself in the West Indies. Back in the bad old pirate days, pirates often took on an alias to avoid prosecution (the penalty of…
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A Brief History On November 21, 1916, the new and improved version of the Titanic became the largest ship sunk during World War I! Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find the third of the Olympic class ocean liners having been built after the Olympic and Titanic and actually being a bit bigger, incorporating new design features to prevent a disaster like the 1912 loss of Titanic. Entering service in December of 1915, she was almost 900 feet long and displacing 53,000 tons, the Britannic was fitted as a hospital ship for wartime service and was carrying 1066 souls on the…
A Brief History On Wednesday, November 20, 2013, the cable network, FX, aired the second episode of American Horror Story: Coven to feature Danny Huston as The Axeman of New Orleans, the nickname given to a never identified serial killer responsible for at least eight unsolved murders! Digging Deeper As already covered in an earlier article on our site, an previous incarnation of American Horror Story featured two characters based on mysterious historical figures. One later episode introduced yet another: the Axeman of New Orleans. The Axeman of New Orleans has never been identified or as far as we know even…
A Brief History In August of 1819, the Nantucket whaling ship, Essex, set sail on a two and a half year whaling voyage that on November 20, 1820 turned into eternity! Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find the Essex became a real life Pequod and it found the real life Moby Dick! The Essex was 87 feet long, displaced 238 tons and was equipped with 4 whale boats, 28 foot boats that pursued whales and from which the harpoons were thrown. (A spare boat was kept beneath the deck.) A whale would be killed and towed back to the ship…
A Brief History On November 19, 1941, HMAS Sydney and HSK Kormoran sank each other off the coast of Western Australia, with the loss of 645 Australians and about 77 German seamen. The battle was Australia’s all time largest loss of life in its entire naval history and the largest Allied warship lost with all hands in World War II. For conspiracy theorists, what really happened has remained a controversy for over sixty years! Digging Deeper When we think of World War II’s naval battles, we tend to envision German submarines in the Atlantic or the epic battles pitting Japanese…