BLACKOAK: The Plate and the Fog — What Drake's Sailor Saw in the California Fog That No Official Record ContainsThe Golden Hind was riding too deep.When Francis Drake captured the Cacafuego in March of 1579 and transferred somewhere in the range of 80 tons of silver bars into a hull designed for 150 tons of…
In December of 1872, a British brigantine called the Dei Gratia spotted a vessel drifting erratically through the Atlantic, roughly 600 miles west of Portugal. The sails were set. The cargo was intact. The food was on the table. The last log entry was dated eleven days earlier.The ship was the Mary Celeste.Every soul aboard…
She was built to carry slaves. She became the richest pirate ship of her age. And on the night of April 26, 1717, she struck a sandbar off Cape Cod and took one hundred and forty men to the bottom of the Atlantic in the space of a few hours.Of those men, only two survived.…
The wind that sank the Vasa was ordinary. A harbor gust. The kind that exists in every harbor on August afternoons as a fact of weather rather than an event. The ship was in the water for less than half an hour. She traveled 1,300 meters. Then she was gone.What the crowds who gathered to…
Five gunshot wounds. More than twenty blade cuts. And still he raised the sword again.On the morning of November 22, 1718, Lieutenant Robert Maynard rowed through the darkness of Ocracoke Inlet with muffled oars and found Edward Teach — Blackbeard — exactly where the informants said he would be. What followed was one of the…
He sailed under the blessing of the English crown. He returned to find no harbor waiting.In 1696, Captain William Kidd left New York harbor as a legally commissioned privateer — authorized by noblemen, funded by Parliament's inner circle, and tasked with hunting pirates in the Indian Ocean. What followed was one of history's most calculated…
In 1511, the most valuable cargo ever assembled by the Portuguese Empire was loaded onto a single aging ship in the harbor of fallen Malacca. Gold bars. Diamonds. Rubies. Jeweled relics from a sultan's treasury. Centuries of accumulated wealth from the greatest trading port in the world — all of it packed into the hold…