Both Carnival Magic and Royal Caribbean’s Mariner of the Seas were delayed sailing Sunday evening by fog, providing an opportunity to take some photos. Full-resolution versions here.

The maritime bloggers at gCaptain continue to provide the best English-language coverage of the disaster I’ve seen. Although news updates are less frequent now, nearly a week after the accident, the search to recover victims and efforts to secure the wreck continue.

One particularly worthwhile update has been this video, which uses AIS data to trace the final maneuvers of the ship before, during and after her fatal collision with the “Le Scole” rock just south of Porto Giglio. The lideo is long, and not especially polished, but pending release of official findings based on the voyage data recorder — the ship’s “black box” — this may be the best summary of the vessel’s maneuvers at the time of the accident.

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Image: Carabinieri scuba divers inspect the Costa Concordia, on January 19, 2012. Italian rescue workers suspended their search of the capsized Italian cruise liner Costa Concordia after the ship moved again on Friday, firefighters’ spokeman Luca Cari said. (Reuters/Centro subacquei dei Carabinieri)

The tragedy in Italy has little direct connection to Texas, but it’s of interest to me due to the cruise ships operating out of Galveston, under three lines — Carnival (parent to Costa), Royal Caribbean and Disney. Rick Spilman at Old Salt Blog and gCaptain have been all over this story, and the latter particularly has some strong commentary. Here’s Rob Almeida, in an Op/Ed at gCaptain:

This wasn’t simply an accident.  This was negligence.

The Costa Concordia didn’t hit rocks.  At 9:30 PM on Friday night, the ship hit the bloody ISLAND as they were literally showboating around in the darkness.  It just so happens the ship’s bilge picked up a big chunk of the island in the process.

On a state-of-the-art, and fully automated cruise ship like this one, you can’t get right up close to an island without shutting off a half dozen alarm systems that tell you that you are entering shallow water.   These alarms would not be disregarded by the ship’s officers, the decision to bypass these safety alarms while in close proximity to land would certainly have been made by the Captain.

Reports indicate that after plodding along for a full hour, with the sea gushing into open holes in the ship’s hull, the captain finally acknowledged that he, and his ship, were totally screwed.  He then turned the ship around, sent his first MAYDAY call, and ran it aground.  Unfortunately however, because of the delay of the MAYDAY call, by the time rescuers arrived, the ship was heeling so drastically that only one side of the ship could be used to offload guests effectively.

It’s a tragic situation, and equally as unbelievable to think that a ship’s captain would have put his own ship in such a precarious position.  It truly calls into question whether or not he had the requisite shiphandling experience to understand the actual risks involved in taking a ship that close to shore.

In a public statement he made over the weekend, he mentions that he was at least 150 meters from shoal water, and about 300 meters from land.  Putting those numbers into context, he had knowingly put his ship within half a ship-length of shoal water, in the dark, and without a pilot on board.  Anyone who’s ever driven a ship understands how foolish that is.

Observes one commenter at gCaptain, “I’m glad they got the captain safely in a jail cell before the second mate could beat him to death with a copy of Bowditch.”

Good news for the fundraising effort to make critical repairs to the iron barque’s hull:

The Galveston Historical Foundation is inching closer to its goal of raising $3 million to restore the tall ship Elissa. . . .

“Elissa has been berthed in the same location for over 30 years and regularly maintained without this ever occurring before the months after Hurricane Ike,” [GHF Director Dwayne] Jones said. “Keeping Elissa sailing is very important to the foundation as she is one of three tall ships in the world that still sails. The foundation has sailed her with its very committed volunteer crew every year since she was restored.”

Jones said the Keep Elissa Sailing campaign has been successful, with progress on most of the funds needed for the hull and deck restoration expected to be reached this year.

Some of that help comes from the sale of Elissa beer, an India pale ale brewed by St. Arnold’s Brewery in Houston. Some of the proceeds of the Elissa beer sales are donated to the historical foundation.

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How To Help

• Those interested in donating to help restore the tall ship Elissa can make a $10 gift by texting “Elissa” to 50555 on their cellphone.

• Galveston Historical Foundation’s website, www.Galvestonhistory.org, has a complete schedule of fundraising events.

Image: Crew members and invited guests are silhouetted aboard the 1877 barque Elissa as they sail in the ship channel March 22, 2010. The Keep Elissa Sailing campaign aims to raise $3 million to pay for repairs to the tall ship. Published January 02, 2012. Photo by Jennifer Reynolds, Galveston County Daily News.

Thursday evening we headed out to a holiday dinner with friends. As we drove along Seawall Boulevard, we noticed the lights of the cruise ship Carnival Triumph, which had sailed from her berth maybe 45 minutes or an hour before. She was already miles offshore, but still clearly visible, her whole side lit up and shining across the water. It proved the be the start of a dramatic evening on the ship. From the Houston Chronicle:

A Coast Guard helicopter rescue crew has evacuated a 73-year-old man from a cruise ship about 100 miles off Galveston, according to this news release.

Personnel on duty at the Coast Guard’s Houston-Galveston station got a call about 10 p.m. Thursday that the man on board the Carnival Triumph had a blood clot in his foot and needed to be evacuated immediately.

An MH-65 Dolphin rescue helicopter took off about 11:40 p.m. Thursday from the Coast Guard Air Station Houston. The crew hoisted their passenger off the cruise ship and flew him to awaiting emergency responders at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, the release said.

They make it look easy, don’t they?

The recent discovery of monster shrimp in the Gulf of Mexico brings with it serious ecological concerns. But it also reminds us that sightings of sea monsters in the Gulf of Mexico have been common for a long time, even if they are most probably less reliable than the reports of the Asian tiger prawn. From the front page of the New York Times, 1 July 1908:

200-FOOT SEA SERPENT.
Seen at 3 Bells in Gulf of Mexico – Enormous Rattles on Its Tail
Special to the New York Times

GALVESTON, June 30. – What is confidently believed to be a sea serpent has been sighted and narrowly inspected by the officers crew, and fifteen passengers of the steamship Livingstone of the Texas-Mexican Line. All of the witnesses made a sworn affidavit to this effect before United States Consular Agent Charles W. Rickland at Frontera, Mexico.

The statement is signed by Capt. G. A. Olsen and the other officers, George Thomas of Denver, Albert Dean of Memphis, H. B. Stoddard of Bryan, Texas, Mrs. Jessie Thornton of Chicago, and eleven other passengers. In substance it declares that at three bells on the evening of June 24, the Livingstone, bound from Galveston to Frontera, Mexico, making good weather, and about fifty miles north of Frontera, in the Gulf of Mexico, the serpent was sighted off the port bow.

The ship got within sixty feet of the creature, and for fifteen minutes stood while all on board viewed the serpent through the glasses. It was apparently sleeping, and not less than 200 feet long, of about the diameter of a flour barrel in the centre of the body, but was not as round. The head was about six feet long by three feet at the widest part.

The color was dark brown, and neat its tail were rings or circles that appeared larger in circumference than the body at that point. As it swam away the tail was erected, and a rattling noise as loud as that made by a gatling [sic.] gun in action startled the watchers on the Livingstone.

The 1002-ton Norwegian steamer Livingstone appears in a photo recently posted to Shorpy, unloading bananas at an East River pier in Lower Manhattan. The date is given as c. 1906, but may be a little latter. Livingstone was built at Stavanger, Norway, and completed in January of 1906. From 1907 until at least 1912 she was in regular trade around the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean, calling at Galveston, Frontera, Laguna and Tulum, and as far south as Panama. An occasional voyage as far north as New York might have been highly profitable, particularly with a cargo of fresh tropical fruit, as in the Shorpy image.

Livingstone as the Norwegian cargo ship Lyngstad, 1928-34. Via here.

Livingstone was apparently a solidly-built vessel. She went through numerous changes of ownership and name, surviving two world wars. She was finally broken up at La Spezia, Italy in December 1962.

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Image: H.M.S. Daedalus encounters a sea serpent in the Atlantic, 1848.

I’ll be giving a talk, “Patriots for Profit: Civil War Blockade Running Along the Texas Coast,”at the Houston Museum of Natural Science on March 27 at 6:30 p.m. The presentation is part of the programming for the museum’s sesquicentennial exhibit, Discovering the Civil War. The previous week, on March 20, my colleagues Ed Cotham and Amy Borgens will be giving a similar presentation on the recovery of artifacts from U.S.S. Westfield, the Union gunboat destroyed during the Battle of Galveston on January 1, 1863. That talk should be a great one.

On a related note, a reader asks,

Some of the designs strike me as oddly modern, even futuristic, if you look past paddle-wheel propulsion. It seems like middle 19th century hull designers were 100-150 years ahead of contemporary propulsion technology. If this is true, do we have another example of war instigating technological leaps? (Except for the paddle wheels).

That’s a great question, one I should give some more thought to between now and March. Here’s my immediate, undistilled response.

I wouldn’t say that blockade running was a great driver of technological advancement, because it was a narrow, niche use and only for a brief period. What is accurate to say is that the particular needs of blockade running put a premium on certain existing technologies and practices, and pushed these to somewhat exaggerated examples. Some of the lessons learned in blockade running were carried over into later conflicts, as well.

In the case of marine engineering, the peculiarities of blockade running did push both builders and operators to some extremes. You have to look at the latter half of the war (say, from mid-1863 on) to see some patterns. Prior to that, blockade running was not as great a priority as it later became, and operators were using mostly whatever vessels were to hand.

The Clyde steamer Lord of the Isles II, built in 1891, shows the long, low lines that made the type a favorite of blockade runners a generation before.

It was only in the latter part of the war that you start to see vessels designed and built as runners. Most of these purpose-built runners were modeled on the “Clyde steamer,” a vessel type that was honed in a similar sort of trade, carrying passengers and mails coastwise in the UK and across the Irish Sea. Banshee (II) (top), launched at Glasgow in 1864,  is a good example of the type. These vessels tended to be shallow in draft, and very long for their beam — very much like an over-sized canoe. Check out these lines of Will o’ the Wisp — damn thing’s like a blade:

The Clyde steamers were a really outstanding design that (with a variety of internal improvements) survived well into the 20th century. One, P.S. Waverly, launched in 1946 (!), remains operational.

Runners were not built to last; with a casualty rate of roughly 1 in 4 during the latter part of the war, there was not real purpose in “building to last,” or (in operations) not pushing the boats past their limits. They made short runs of (at most) a few days, so economy of operation was not a great imperative. Maintenance was generally minimal, and a surprising number of boats were really run down. Denbigh, the second-most-successful boat of the war, was considered a fast coastal steamer when new in the UK in 1860, averaging 13.7 knots on her builders trial, but age and lack of maintenance had reduced her to about 8.5 knots during the height of her blockade running in 1864. The purpose-built runner Will o’ the Wisp was constructed with such light framing that, after her Atlantic passage, she’d almost rattled herself apart and was leaking so badly that when she arrived at (IIRC) Nassau her master positioned her over a bar so she’d settle a few feet and not sink outright.

Blockade runners learned a lot about camouflage and coloring, by trial-and-error. Most runners, and many Union blockaders, eventually settled on some shade of gray, from mid-grey to off-white, as the best option for blending into the horizon. These same schemes, now generally known as “haze gray,” were later adopted formally by the USN around the time of the Spanish American War, and have pretty much been standard ever since. (Although there are many, many exceptions, such as WWI “dazzle” schemes, which are disruptive schemes rather than camouflage.)

Finally, the U.S. Navy (eventually) developed a fairly good operational understanding of the intricacies of blockading an enemy coast, much as the RN had during the Napoleonic Wars. It was still a very buggy thing, logistically. The blockaders on the Texas coast, and particularly those off Aransas Pass (Corpus Christi) and the mouth of the Rio Grande, were at the end of a very, very long supply line. (A colleague of mine uses a barnyard phrase involving hungry piglets to convey the idea.) Cases of scurvy — a disease well understood at the time and easily prevented through the regular issue of foodstuffs high in vitamin C — were not unknown in the blockading fleet, simply because supplies couldn’t be kept up at sufficient levels.

Anyway, random thoughts.

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Image: ‘PS Banshee‘ by Samuel Walters, Accession number 1968.5.2, National Museums, Liverpool. This ship, the second of two Banshees that ran the blockade, made a famous daylight dash through the Federal blockade into Galveston on the morning of February 24, 1865.

Sorry for the short notice, but Saturday afternoon, October 29, Texas A&M University at Galveston’s Professor Steve Curley will give a presentation and book signing for his new history of the school’s original training ship, Texas Clipper. The volume, written with an afterword by Dale Shively, covers the ship’s remarkable history, first as a World War II attack transport, then her postwar career as one of the American Export Lines’ “Four Aces.”

“Over and over I sensed that this ship had touched lives and left an indelible groove in memories,” Stephen Curley, TAMUG English regents professor, said.

Curley worked eight years to write “The Ship That Would Not Die: USS Queens, SS Excambion and USTS Texas Clipper.”

“For me, the story is mostly the story of people rather than a technical story about a ship and its rivets,” he said. It’s the details that the people who sailed on her told me.”

The ship was transferred to the new Texas Maritime Academy for use as a training ship in the 1960s. My father was an English instructor on Texas Clipper‘s summer training cruise in 1973, visiting the Azores and Mediterranean ports, as well as witnessing a full solar eclipse. It was sad to see her retired some twenty years or so later.

The presentation and book signing will be held at Rosenberg Library, 2310 Sealy St., in Galveston from 2 to 4 p.m. on Saturday.
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Image: Stephen Curley, English regents professor, talks about the Texas Clipper, Texas A&M University at Galveston’s original training ship. Curley will speak about the Texas Clipper and sign copies of “The Ship That Would Not Die” Saturday at the Rosenberg Library. Photo by Kevin M. Cox, Galveston County Daily News.

Galveston Daily News, August 12, 1870:

The Steamer Diana.

The Direct Navigation Company’s new boat, the Diana, arrived yesterday afternoon, direct from Cincinatti, at which city she took in her engines and cargo, consisting principally of furniture. The Diana was built under the immediate supervision of the inveterate Captain Sterrett, and is pronounced perfect in all her parts. She is somewhat smaller than either of her consorts — the [J. H.] Whitelaw and [T. M.] Bagby — but is sufficiently large for the Bayou trade. Her cabins are free from the tinsel and gaudy ornamentation so popular a year or two since, but have all the accessories necessary to secure the comfort and convenience of passengers. Including barges, this makes thirty-one vessels brought to this port by Captain Sterrett. We bid the Diana welcome, and hope she will have a prosperous career.

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Photo: Diana at Galveston, 1870s. Lawrence T. Jones III Texas Photographs, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University.