Here’s an interesting Queen Mary postcard. It’s actually a 1980 signal verification report from the ship’s amateur radio station, W6RO. The “WB2IBE” the card is addressed to happens to be me, back when I lived in New York. My current callsign is W6JE.
Associated Radio Amateurs of Long Beach still maintains a ham station inside Queen Mary’s old wireless room. I’d love to be able to operate the station for a few hours, since my family emigrated to America on QM. I’m unable, however, to meet the four-hours-per-month time commitment the organization requires (I live 400 miles away from Queen Mary, so it would be a monumental commute).
Still, I like that idea that Queen Mary continues to reach out to people around the world, even while permanently moored in Long Beach.
Cowardly captains are to be found throughout maritime history, sadly.
In April 1900, the captain of George Croise, a French steamer, entered the annals of dishonor by abandoning his ship with passengers still on board. Below is an article clip from the Lewsiton Maine Daily Sun of 16 April 1900, describing the incident.
Nearly one hundred and twelve years later, the story sounds eerily familiar.
On 20 January 1870, the Inman liner City of Boston vanished at sea with 191 people.
Note the term “vanished.” Before radio, ships often disappeared without a trace—the vessels simply never turned up in port (in this case, Liverpool).
People speculated for years about City of Boston’s fate. Some said the ship sank in a violent gale. Others thought she hit an iceberg.
In 1875, after a ship carrying a hidden bomb exploded in Bremerhaven (killing 80 people), there was speculation that the same “dynamite fiend” (Alexander Keith, Jr.) who planted that explosive blew up City of Boston. But despite some tanatlyzing leads and concidences, a firm link between the two explosions was never established.
When an airline suspects that a faulty component may have been responsible for a crash, it will typically ground its entire fleet of affected planes until the part has been isolated and repaired.
In the case of Costa Concordia, the “faulty component” appears to have been an incompetent, careless captain and and least some of the vessel’s crew.
Therefore, as a critical safety measure, should Costa Crusises suspend operations until it can guarantee that no similar staffing problem exists on its other ships?
Would you feel safe on a Costa vessel today? I know I wouldn’t.
The past few days have left me feeling, shocked, saddened and weary. A short film clip keeps playing through my mind. The scene features the great British actor Kenneth More, portraying Titanic Second Officer Charles Lightoller in A Night to Remember. He’s sitting in one of Titanic’s lifeboats, reflecting on the immense disaster that has just unfolded around him. His few lines have haunted me over the decades and particularly during the past few days. I want to share the clip with you.
The Oceanliners.org channel on YouTube has collected over 11,000 views. That’s impressive, given the fact that I’ve done virtually nothing to promote the videos.
I’m now thinking about creating some new videos. One idea is to do a feature about people traveling from Europe to America on Queen Mary 2 and to see how they differ from their predecessors on Queen Mary. It would be interesting to interview people who have sailed both liners and to compare and contrast their experiences. I’ve done a lot of this kind of work as a technology journalist.
Any help on getting this project off the ground would be appreciated.
