Tag: Ships and the sea
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Ships before steam: the trade-wind highways of the age of sail, drawn from real logbooks
6,524 passages from British, Dutch, Spanish and French ships’ logbooks, 1750 to 1850. Drawn as lines, they show ships running out with the trade winds, looping home past the Azores and racing east through the roaring forties to Java.
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Lost at sea: is the Bermuda Triangle worse than its traffic?
I placed 472 famous disappearances on the map and tested every sea against its shipping. The Bermuda Triangle has 8 against 2.8 expected, but its neighbours run just as high, and most of its famous cases happened outside it.
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Pirate hotspots, then and now
I mapped 7,511 pirate attacks from 1993 to 2020 and followed the hotspots as they moved, from the Strait of Malacca to Somalia and the Gulf of Guinea. In 2025 the busiest pirate waters were the Singapore Strait, and in 2026 Somali hijackers are back.
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Shipwrecks of the world, and how many over time
Wikipedia lists 243,071 shipwrecks since 1700. I counted them year by year: three of the five worst years are war years, with 1944 the worst. The huge 1800s plateau owes a lot to British newspapers.
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Transported: every convict ship to Australia, mapped
Britain shipped about 162,000 convicts to Australia. I mapped all 745 voyages in Wikipedia’s ship lists: the busiest port was Cork, the busiest year 1833, and the Second Fleet lost a quarter of its convicts at sea.
