The French Line’s Normandie is one of few contenders for the title Greatest Liner Ever. She was a ship of superlatives: the largest ship in the world for five years, the first liner to exceed 1,000 feet in length; to exceed 80,000 tons; the largest turbo-electric powered liner; and the first to make a 30 knot Atlantic crossing.
Care to step aboard the RMS Titanic? What seemed like an impossibility is slowly becoming a reality. Vintage Digital Revival and Four Funnels Entertainment have recreated the interior of the stricken vessel in immaculate detail. It’s part of their long-gestating ‘Titanic: Honor and Glory’ video game project.
Perhaps the most sorrowful part of the entire Titanic saga is hearing the survivor’s personal stories. It can be heart-wrenching to listen to their recollections. How they ended up on the luxury ocean-liner in the first place and how they dodged death on the night of April 14, 1912. Over 1,500 passengers perished in the ocean and only about 700 passengers, officers and ratings were saved.
HARARE – Within months of Zimbabwe’s independence from Britain, Robert Mugabe sent the army’s North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade into Matabeleland to crush dissidents and former guerrillas loyal to liberation war rival Joshua Nkomo.
The Suez Canal has provided a link as important as the jugular vein to the world of commerce since 1858. Its importance has dramatically diminished since a container carrying vessel buried its bows in the canal’s banks and constipated the seaway’s traffic.
The British Merchant Navy freighter Fiscus, 4,815 tonnes and built by W. H. Seager & Co. loaded a cargo of steel ingots, lumber and a deck cargo of crated aircraft parts in Canada and sailed from Three Rivers to Sydney, Cape Breton in Nova Scotia. There she joined up with the 35 ships making up Convoy SC-7, which left Sydney, Canada on October 5, 1940.
In 1942 marine fireman William Swinchin of Dingle Mount in Liverpool, England engaged in an incredible act of endurance when he survived 75 days alone, adrift on a raft after his vessel was sunk by a U-boat.
Helen Duncan was a Scottish medium who held spiritual séances during World War Two. During one of her November 1941 séances, she spoke to a sailor’s spirit.
More than a century ago, Winchester Cathedral, which is one of the largest cathedrals in Europe and the longest of all Gothic cathedrals, was saved by the heroic work of a diver, who worked tirelessly to reinforce the foundations of this historic structure, and thus preserve one of the largest and most iconic buildings in all of England.
FIRST HAND ACCOUNT: As a serving British seaman in the Merchant Marine, neither I nor my shipmates were flippant of ghosts on ships and ghostly vessels or strange supernatural happenings.
Michael Walsh Stories and Books 
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