There has been a seething hatred between the Irish people and the British government for more years than anyone can remember. Undoubtedly, a major cause is what happened to the Irish people during the potato famine in the late 1840s and how the English bureaucrats allo...

Mohammed bin Salman is the controversial heir apparent to the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He is credited with a lot of things from remaking the Saudi Government to ordering the assassination of a critical journalist, Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul. The prince has a reputatio...

The first time I ever saw the sailing vessel Flying Cloud it was anchored in a place called Dead Horse Bay just opposite Floyd Bennett airfield in Brooklyn, New York.
Her mast has been unstepped and she was painted Navy gray. For a great sailing yacht, she looked forlo...

One of the great paradoxes of maritime history is that the invention of the steamboat by Robert Fulton actually played a significant role in the development of horse- powered ferries in nineteenth century America. Few people recall that Robert Fulton had been commissio...

When the subject of maritime disasters at sea arises, the first name that almost always comes to mind is Titanic. With a loss of 1,500 souls, some of them very famous like John Jacob Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim, the story has been retold in several dramatic films. Wi...

There are probably not enough superlatives in my vocabulary to adequately describe the new Carnival Cruise Line ship now under construction. The fact she will carry 6,630 passengers and an Italian crew of 1,745 indicate that everything about this 1,130 foot floating re...

There was a time when at any harbor the only sounds you really heard where the chirp of seagulls and the tap of lines beaten by the wind against masts. The occasional foghorn and clanging bell buoy added to maritime music. Then along came the gasoline engine with new s...

The name of the super-yacht is HOKULANI, which means “heavenly star" from the Hawaiian word hōkū  or "star" and lani for "heaven, sky, royal, majesty". She is just a little over 150 feet in length,  28 feet beam, draft is 6.23 feet and she displaces 380 tons. This eleg...

I recently did a story for a local magazine about an old overshot water wheel mill on Cow Creek in Gloucester Virginia. In the process of researching that mill, I found the Popular Grove Plantation Tide Mill in Haywood, Virginia. Both were grist mills that ground corn...