SCUTTLEBUTT
Q SCUTTLEBUTT
GOSSIP DREDGED FROM THE WATER COOLER OF THE MARINE INDUSTRY
Conscientious gardener
It’s now 200 years since the death of one of the marine history’s most famous, arguably infamous, characters – Captain William Bligh. He was buried in December 1817 in a quiet churchyard in south London, which now lies within the grounds of the Garden Museum. Bligh and the sailors who remained
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loyal to him were set adrift in the South Pacific Ocean in a longboat. Naval historians regard what happened next as one of the most remarkable feats in the history of maritime navigation. They rowed 4,000 miles before reaching Timor, with the loss of only one man. Bligh then got his crew safely back to England. It was recently reported that a mysterious man arrived at Bligh’s grave every Monday to explain to visitors that Bligh has long been falsely maligned. “He argued that Bligh never swore or
used corporal punishment,” says the museum’s director, Chris Woodward. “One day I had to ask him to keep it down. He disappeared and has never returned. We’ve never discovered who he was.” Historians now consider Bligh to have
been a good seaman, who happened to have a very bad temper. “But here, we think of Bligh as a conscientious gardener, who devoted himself to tending the breadfruit trees on Tahiti so they would survive the long voyage he was charged to make with them to the Caribbean,” adds Woodward.
Bateau gateau
A giant cake modelled on Britain’s largest warship was presented to the Queen at the commissioning ceremony for
the Royal Navy’s new aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth in Portsmouth. The eight-foot long creation took
more than 100 hours to bake and complete, using up 7kg of flour and around 160 eggs. Eight people were needed to lift it. As with the real ship, the cake was assembled in Scotland and then moved to Portsmouth. “It took ten hours to transport it down
to Portsmouth,” says the cake’s designer Greg Macvean. “We had to stop every hour to check nothing had snapped or broken off. We transport a lot of large novelty cakes to Portsmouth and sometimes that can happen, but thankfully the cake arrived intact.” According to RN warrant officer
William Shepherd the cake was delicious. “It was outstanding – and a real work
of art,” he said. “I’ve been in the Royal Navy for nearly 30 years and without question this is the best cake I’ve ever seen and tasted. It’s definitely representa- tive of the ship and all of its elements.”
Smoke rings
Scientists have discovered ‘smoke-rings’ in the ocean which ‘suck-up’ small marine creatures and carry them at high speed over huge distances. They are made up of pairs of linked eddies spinning in opposite directions and were discovered through satellite analysis of sea levels and sea surface temperatures. “Ocean eddies usually head west, but
by pairing up they can move to the east and travel ten times as fast as a normal eddy,” explains sea level expert, professor Chris Hughes of the University of Liverpool. “It means they are able to
carry water in unusual directions across the ocean. We have looked at many areas of other oceans but we’ve only managed to observe them in the oceans around Australia and in the South Atlantic.”
AROUND THE WEB
Danish scientists have discov- ered a living shark that could be up to 512 years old. The team used radiocarbon dating to analyze tissue from the eyes of 28 Greenland sharks, and the oldest specimen was found to be 392 years old. However, radiocarbon dating is only about 95% accurate, which means the shark’s age could be anywhere between 272 and 512 years. Read more here:
http://bit.ly/2AJ0KVr
In the last few months of 2017, at least a dozen suspected North Korean boats were found drifting off the coast of Japan, along with the bodies of 27 people. While some speculated that the boats’ crews were spies, experts now think differently. It’s believed that there are food shortages among North Korea’s army and that soldiers are being dispatched across long distances to catch fish. Find out more about the ghost ships here:
http://bit.ly/2o9bTsF
New research has found that lightning strikes occur nearly twice as often above the world’s busiest shipping lanes as they do over less-trafficked areas of ocean. Scientists think that particles in ship exhaust make cloud droplets smaller, thereby lifting them higher into the atmosphere. This creates a larger number of ice particles and results in more lightning. Read more about the phenomenon here:
http://bit.ly/2f7M6dF
The £3.1bn HMS Queen Elizabeth has sprung a leak. Some stories in the UK’s national media report that the massive aircraft carrier was taking on as much as 200 litres of seawater per day because of an issue with one of its propeller shaft seals. The vessel is scheduled for repair in Portsmouth and will be ready to sail again early in 2018, according to the Royal Navy. Read more about the flaw here:
http://bbc.in/2BwIATZ
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