If asked who the most successful pirate was, most people would say Black Beard. While Black Beard achieved great fame and fortune, Ching Shih is the name of the most successful pirate in history. What is even more incredible is that Ching Shih was a…
Posts tagged as “Capt. Bob Cerullo”
In all my years of boating, I never had too much to do with pontoon boats. There was one vacation several years ago on a lake in Virginia where we rented a pontoon boat. So, when a close friend of mine showed me a pontoon…
Humble men who made their living fishing the waters of a tiny lake in the Albion Hills near Rome had been telling tales of sunken ships lurking at the bottom of the lake for centuries. Lake Nemi is only .6 square miles and has no…
The passengers boarding the SS St Nicholas that warm evening at the Baltimore Wharf were relatively happy considering there was a civil war raging between the North and the South. Amidst the hustle and bustle of boarding some sixty passengers, there emerged an elegantly dressed…
The famed inventor Thomas Alva Edison was hard at work in his Menlo Park laboratory perfecting the incandescent light bulb when he was interrupted by a visitor named Henry Villard. Villard, an old friend of Edison had made a fortune in railroads and had visited…
When the famed Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo Buonarotti brought his statue, known as “Pieta” to the Vatican in 1499, he did it under the cover of the night. The statue was covered with old blankets and carried on a sturdy old wagon. There was no fanfare,…
There is an incredible irony in the fact that long after the golden age of sail when clipper ships raced across the world powered entirely by wind power that once again cargo ships are turning to wind-assisted power. The new sails that are being evaluated…
One of the most important harvests in the Chesapeake Bay right up there with oysters is the blue crab harvest. Watermen depend on it, the blue crab being in the bay is an important part of the ecology and most of all crabs are an…
Loaded with coal and bound for Milwaukee early on the freezing cold morning of May 11th, 1881, the 140-foot schooner Trinidad sank about ten miles off the coast of Algoma Wisconsin. Capt. Jon Higgins and his eight-man crew were able to get into the schooner’s…
Octopus blood is actually blue, essentially because it has a copper-based protein called hemocyain. That blueblood is pumped through the octopus by three hearts. The central heart pumps the blood through the body to provide oxygen to the organs, while the two peripheral hearts pump…