Portal:United States Merchant Marine/Selected article
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- 1674 characters - start class article - Images are Free-use. Checked by Haus on 2008-04-09
Military Sealift Command ships are civilian manned, and are referred to be as being in service, rather than in commission. Some, owned by the United States Government, have the prefix USNS, standing for United States Naval Ship, whilst others, on charter or equivalent, are simply the normal merchant MV or SS. Their hull numbers have the prefix T- in addition to the normal hull number that an equivalent commissioned ship in the USN would have.
Four programs comprise Military Sealift Command: Sealift, Naval Fleet Auxiliary Force (NFAF), Special Mission, and Prepositioning. The Sealift program provides the bulk of the MSC's supply-carrying operation and operates tankers for fuel transport and dry-cargo ships that transport equipment, vehicles, helicopters, ammunition, and supplies. The NFAF’s role is to directly replenish ships that are underway at sea, enabling them to deploy for long periods of time without having to come to port. The Special Mission program operates vessels for unique military and federal government tasks, such as submarine support and missile flight data collection and tracking. The Prepositioning program sustains the U.S. military's forward presence strategy by deploying supply ships in key areas of the ocean before it is actually needed./2 -
- 982 characters - FA class article - Images are Free-use. Checked by Haus on 2008-04-09
A painting by Great Lakes marine artist Howard Sprague showing the ship in white livery, as she appeared in 1893
Columbus was built between 1892 and 1893 at Superior, Wisconsin by the American Steel Barge Company. Initially, she ferried passengers to and from the World's Columbian Exposition. Later, she provided general transportation and excursion services to various ports around the lakes.
At 362 feet (110 m), the ship was the longest whaleback ever built, and reportedly also the largest vessel on the Great Lakes when she was launched.[2] Columbus is said to have carried more passengers during her career than any other vessel on the Great Lakes. After a career lasting four decades, she was retired during the Great Depression and scrapped in 1936 by the Manitowoc Shipbuilding Company at Manitowoc, Wisconsin./3 -
- 1350 characters - B class article - Images are Free-use. Checked by Haus on 2008-04-09
Fitzgerald left Superior, Wisconsin on the afternoon of Sunday, November 9, 1975 under Captain Ernest M. McSorley. She was en route to the steel mill on Zug Island, near Detroit, Michigan, with a full cargo of taconite. Crossing Lake Superior at about 13 knots (15 mph/24 km/h), the boat encountered a massive winter storm, reporting winds in excess of 50 knots (58 mph/93 km/h) and waves as high as 35 feet (10 m).
The last communication from the doomed ship came at approximately 19:10 (7:10 PM), when the nearby SS Anderson notified Fitzgerald by radio about a rogue waves large enough to be caught on radar. Captain McSorley on the Fitzgerald reported, "We are holding our own." A few minutes later, she apparently sank. No distress signal was received.
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- 2117 characters - FA class article - Images are Free-use. Checked by Haus on 2008-04-09
As a transport during World War I, Siboney made 17 transatlantic voyages for the Navy carrying troops to and from Europe, and had the shortest average in-port turnaround time of all Navy transports. During her maiden voyage, her steering gear malfunctioned which resulted in a collision between two other troopships in the convoy.
After her World War I service ended, Siboney was returned to the Ward Line and placed in service on New York–Cuba–Spain transatlantic service. In September 1920, the liner ran aground at Vigo, Spain. Despite considerable damage, she was repaired and placed in service again. In late 1921, Siboney switched to New York–Cuba–Mexico routes, which were a popular and inexpensive way for Americans to escape Prohibition. In late 1940, she was chartered to American Export Lines to return Americans fleeing Europe at the outset of World War II, making seven roundtrips from Jersey City, New Jersey, to Lisbon.
During World War II, Siboney was requisitioned by the War Shipping Administration and assigned to the War Department as a U.S. Army transport. She made several transatlantic trips and called at ports in Africa, the Middle East, Canada, the Caribbean, and the United Kingdom. During a 1944 overhaul, the ship was selected for conversion to a hospital ship. Renamed USAHS Charles A. Stafford after a U.S. Army doctor killed in action in Australia, the ship served in both the European and the Pacific Theatres. After the end of her Army service, the ship was laid up in the National Defense Reserve Fleet in February 1948, and sold for scrapping in 1957./5 -
- 2129 characters - FA class article - Images are Free-use. Checked by Haus on 2008-04-09.jpg/300px-USS_Orizaba_(ID-1536).jpg)
Orizaba, originally laid down as Vendado, made 15 transatlantic voyages for the Navy carrying troops to and from Europe in World War I, and had the second shortest average in-port turnaround time of all Navy transports. The ship was turned over to the War Department in 1919 for use as Army transport USAT Orizaba. After her World War I service ended, Orizaba reverted to the Ward Line, her previous owners. The ship was briefly engaged in transatlantic service to Spain and then engaged in New York–Cuba–Mexico service until 1939, when the ship was chartered to United States Lines. While Orizaba was in her Ward Line service, American poet Hart Crane leapt to his death from the rear deck of the liner off Florida in April 1932.
During World War II, the ship was requisitioned by the War Shipping Administration and again assigned to the War Department as USAT Orizaba. After completing one voyage as an Army transport, the ship was transferred to the US Navy, where she was re-commissioned as USS Orizaba (AP-24). The ship made several transatlantic runs, was damaged in an air attack during the Allied invasion of Sicily, and made trips to South America. The transport also served in the Pacific Theatre, making several transpacific voyages, and one to the Aleutians.
In June 1945, Orizaba was transferred to the Brazilian Navy under Lend-Lease where she served as Duque de Caxias (U-11). In August 1945, Duque de Caxis carried parts of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force from Naples back to Rio de Janeiro. The ship was badly damaged by a fire in 1947, but was repaired and remained in service. Permanently transferred to Brazil in 1953, Duque de Caxias was decommissioned in 1959 and scrapped in 1963.
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- 2069 characters - B class article - Images are Free-use. Checked by Haus on 2008-04-09
The SS Ohio was an oil tanker built for the Texas Oil Company (now Texaco); she was the largest oil tanker in the world at the time of construction. Launched on April 20, 1940 at the Sun Shipbuilding Yard in Chester, Pennsylvania, USA, the Ohio was capable of doing over 16 knots (30 km/h) at sea. The tanker would end up bound in the struggle for the re-supply of the island fortress of Malta, during the Second World War.
Its initial years were uneventful, plying between Port Arthur and various American ports; she did, however, set a speed record from Bayonne to Port Arthur covering 1,882 miles (3,029 km) in four days, twelve hours, an average of more than seventeen knots. In early May 1942, a radio message reached Captain Petersen, diverting the ship to Galveston, Texas, and then ordered the tanker to proceed to Britain. Before leaving, the Ohio was fitted with one 5-inch (130 mm) AA-gun in its aft, and a 3-inch (76 mm) AA-gun in the bows. Then she moved to Sinclair Terminal, Houston, Texas, where the ship loaded a full cargo of 103,576 barrels of petrol, finally sailing on May 25. Ohio discharged her cargo at Bowling-on-the-Clyde, and then steamed out into the tideway and anchored, awaiting orders.
After a period of discussion between the War Shipping Administration and their British counterparts, the ship's master was told that further orders would arrive soon afterwards. Two weeks later, a launch carrying Texaco's London agent and an official of the British Ministry of War Shipping came aboard. They informed the Captain that the ship was to be confiscated and handed over to a British crew. Shocked, the American crew had no choice but to pack up and leave as English seamen started to take over the ship.
Later, the tanker played a fundamental role in Operation Pedestal, which is considered to be one of the fiercest[3] and most heavily contested convoys in August 1942. Although Ohio reached Malta successfully, she was so badly damaged that she had to be effectively scuttled in order to offload her cargo, and she never sailed again.
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- 2758 characters - GA class article - Images are Free-use. Checked by Haus on 2008-04-09
Hazelwood was born in Hawkinsville, Georgia, but was raised in Huntington, New York, on the north shore of Long Island. He was the eldest son of, Joseph, a United States Marine Corps torpedo bomber pilot turned airline pilot and Margaret. In 1964, Hazelwood graduated from Huntington High School, where his IQ was tested at 138. As a youth he was an avid sailor and was a member of the Sea Scouts. In May 1968, he received a Bachelor of Science degree in Marine Transportation from the State University of New York Maritime College.He was married in 1969 to Suzanne and has one daughter, Alison, born c.1976.
On June 10, 1968 he was hired as a Third Mate by Humble Oil and Refining Company, which later became Exxon Shipping Company. Hazelwood climbed the ranks of the merchant marine until he obtained a master's license at age 31. By age 32, he was the youngest captain working for Exxon when he took command of Exxon Philadelphia, a California-to-Alaska oil tanker, in 1978. In 1985 he was master of the Exxon Chester when the asphalt carrier ran into a storm during its New York to South Carolina trip. High winds damaged the ship's mast including radar and radio communications antennas. Though the crew was prepared to abandon ship, Hazelwood rallied them and guided the ship to safety. In 1987, he became the alternate master of Exxon Valdez which subsequently received Exxon Fleet safety awards for the year of 1987 and 1988.
Exxon Valdez departed the port of Valdez, Alaska at 9:12 p.m. March 23, 1989 with 53 million gallons of crude oil bound for California. A harbor pilot guided the ship through the Valdez Narrows before departing the ship and returning control to Hazelwood, the ship's master. The ship maneuvered out of the shipping lane to avoid icebergs. Following the maneuver and sometime after 11 p.m., Hazelwood departed the wheel house and was in his stateroom at the time of the accident. He left Third Mate Gregory Cousins in charge of the wheel house and Able Seaman Robert Kagan at the helm with instructions to return to the shipping lane at a prearranged point. Exxon Valdez failed to return to the shipping lanes and struck Bligh Reef at around 12:04 a.m. March 24, 1989. The accident resulted in the discharge of around 11 million gallons of oil, 20% of the cargo, into Prince William Sound.
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- 2010 characters - B class article - Images are Free-use. Checked by Haus on 2008-04-09
Curran was born on Manhattan's Lower East Side. His father died when he was two years old, and his mother boarded with another family. He attended parochial school, but when he was 14 he was expelled during the seventh grade for truancy.
He worked as a caddy and factory worker before finding employment in 1922 in the United States Merchant Marine. On ships, he worked as an able seaman and boatswain. Between ships, he washed dishes in restaurants and slept on a Battery Park bench at night. It was during this time that he received his lifelong nickname "Big Joe."
Curran joined the International Seamen's Union (or ISU; the remnants of which would become the Seafarers International Union), but was not active in the union at first. In 1936, he led a strike aboard the ocean liner S.S. California, then docked in San Pedro, California. Curran and the crew of the Panama Pacific Line's California went on strike at sailing time and refused to cast off the lines unless wages were increased and overtime paid.
In May 1937, Curran was a founding member of the National Maritime Union. It held its first convention in July, and 30,000 seamen switched their membership from the ISU to the NMU. Curran was elected president of the new organization. During the next 36 years, Joseph Curran worked to make American merchant seamen the best-paid maritime workers in the world. NMU established a 40-hour work week, overtime, paid vacations, pension and health benefits, tuition reimbursement, and standards for shipboard food and living quarters. Curran even built a union-run school to retrain union members, and won large employer donations through collective bargaining to build the school.
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- 3067 characters - B class article - Images are Free-use. Checked by Haus on 2008-04-09
Joshua Slocum (February 20, 1844 – on or shortly after 14 November 1909) was a Canadian-American seaman and adventurer, a noted writer, and the first man to sail single-handedly around the world. In 1900 he told the story of this in Sailing Alone Around the World. He disappeared in November 1909 while aboard his boat, the Spray, originally sloop-rigged, but re-rigged as a yawl in the midst of his circumnavigation, while Slocum was traversing the Strait of Magellan.
Joshua Slocum was born on 20 February 1844 in Mount Hanley Annapolis County, Nova Scotia (officially recorded as Wilmot Station), a community on the North Mountain within sight of the Bay of Fundy. The fifth of eleven children of John Slocum and Sarah Jane (Southern) Slocum, Joshua descended, on his father's side, from a Quaker who left the United States shortly after 1780 because of his opposition to the American War for Independence.
As a boy, he made several attempts to run away from home, finally succeeding, at age fourteen, by hiring on as a cabin boy and cook on a fishing schooner, but he soon returned home. In 1860, after the birth of the eleventh Slocum child and the subsequent death of his kindly mother, Joshua, then sixteen, left home for good. He and a friend signed on at Halifax as ordinary seamen on a merchant ship bound for Dublin, Ireland.
From Dublin, he crossed to Liverpool to become an ordinary seaman on the British merchant ship, Tangier (also recorded as Tanjore), bound for China. During two years as a seaman, he rounded Cape Horn twice, landed at Batavia (now Jakarta) in the Dutch East Indies, and visited the Moluccas, Manila, Hong Kong, Saigon, Singapore, and San Francisco. While at sea, he studied for the Board of Trade examination, and, at the age of eighteen, he received his certificate as a fully-qualified Second Mate. Slocum quickly rose through the ranks to become a Chief Mate on British ships transporting coal and grain between the British Isles and San Francisco.
In 1865, he settled in San Francisco, became an American citizen, and, after a period of salmon fishing and fur trading in the Oregon Territory of the northwest, he returned to the sea to pilot a schooner in the coastwise trade between San Francisco and Seattle. His first blue-water command, in 1869, was the barque Washington, which he took across the Pacific, from San Francisco to Australia, and home via Alaska.
He sailed for thirteen years out of the port of San Francisco, —— to China, Australia, the Spice Islands, and to Japan —— transporting mixed cargoes. Between 1869 and 1889, he was the master of eight vessels, the first four of which (the Washington, the Constitution, the Benjamin Aymar and the Amethyst) he commanded in the employ of others. Later, there would be four others that he himself owned, in whole or in part.
In November 1909 Slocum set sail for a winter trip to the West Indies, and was never heard from again. In July, 1910 his wife informed the newspapers that she believed he was lost at sea. In 1924 Joshua Slocum was declared legally dead.
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