We look at a number of ship losses this week, including the most famous one.
April 7: Japanese battleship Yamato (Wikipedia, ShipIndex) was sunk in 1945, during Operation Ten-Go, in World War II. Yamato was launched in 1940, and at the time was the most powerfully built battleship ever, along with its sister-ship, Musashi (Wikipedia, ShipIndex). Yamato served as the flagship of Japan’s combined fleet, and in 1942 Admiral Yamamoto directed the Battle of Midway from Yamato’s bridge. Operation Ten-Go was a Japanese plan to attack Allied forces that had invaded Okinawa. Yamato was to be beached near Okinawa to attack Allied forces until it was destroyed. But through codebreaking, the Allies knew of the plans for Operation Ten-Go, and Allied forces attacked Yamato before it could approach Okinawa. Allied forces battered the ship throughout the day, and in the afternoon the ship finally sank after an incredible explosion of Yamato’s magazines, creating a mushroom cloud that was visible 100 miles away. Of 3,332 crewmembers, about 3,055 were lost. Yamato has remained a significant symbolic touchstone in Japanese culture.
April 10: USS Thresher (Wikipedia, Shipindex), a nuclear-powered attack submarine, was lost off the US eastern seaboard in 1963, while doing deep-diving tests. All on board were lost.
April 10: RMS Titanic began its maiden voyage from Southampton, in 1912. The next day, Titanic arrived at Cork, Ireland, then set sail for New York, and movie history.
April 11: SMS Blücher (Wikipedia, ShipIndex), the last German armored cruiser, was launched in 1908. Blücher was lost at the Battle of Dogger Bank, in 1915, during World War I, with the loss of perhaps as many as 1000 sailors.
For more about these ships, check out ShipIndex.org. And let us know if you have events that you think we should include!
Storms play an important part this week, from the nearly-always-stormy Cape Horn, in 1840, to the sinking of a Newfoundlander sealing ship in 1915.
March 30: In 1881, SS Aberdeen (Wikipedia, ShipIndex) sailed on her first voyage, from London to Melbourne, via Cape Town, then to Shanghai, and back to London via the Suez Canal. Aberdeen was special because it was the first ship to be successfully powered by a triple expansion steam engine, a major improvement on the two-cylinder compound engines. In 1906 Aberdeen was sold to the Ottoman government and renamed Halep, then was sunk by a British submarine in World War I, while serving as a Turkish troopship.
March 31: A storm off the coast of Newfoundland in 1914 caused the sinking of the SS Southern Cross (Wikipedia, ShipIndex). Southern Cross was launched in 1896 and served with the Southern Cross Expedition to Antarctica in 1898 to 1900, and was the first expedition to spend the winter on the Antarctic mainland. After that voyage, Southern Cross served in sealing hunts from 1901 until its loss with all hands in 1914.
April 1: The Battle of Okinawa began in 1945, as the end of World War II approached. USS West Virginia (Wikipedia, ShipIndex) had been bombed and seriously damaged during the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Navy mess attendant Doris Miller was on board West Virginia at the time; he was sent to man an anti-aircraft gun despite having no training, and eventually was awarded a Navy Cross for his actions. In 1945, at the start of the Battle of Okinawa, West Virginia sat just off the island for several days, supporting the invasion through ground bombardment and illuminating the invasion space. One kamikaze aircraft managed to evade West Virginia’s defences and crash into the ship, causing the deaths of four sailors.
April 3: Sailing to San Francisco around Cape Horn in 1849, on board Croton (ShipIndex), Hiram Chittenden drew a picture of the landscapes he saw in Le Maire Strait, at the eastern edge of Cape Horn. The San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park has an image of this drawing, plus some description of it, in a blog post from 2012. As a born- and bred-Seattleite, I of course recognize the name of Hiram Chittenden – as you might, if you’ve ever visited the Ballard Locks, more accurately known as the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks, reflecting his important work in Seattle for the Army Corps of Engineers from 1906 to 1908.
April 4: In 1865, President Lincoln visited Richmond, Virginia, aboard a converted sidewheel steamship, USS Malvern (Wikipedia, ShipIndex), after Richmond was taken by Union troops. Malvern served as a Confederate blockade runner under the name William G. Hewes, then Ella and Annie. As Ella and Annie, the ship was captured by USS Niphon in 1863, was renamed Malvern, and added to the Union Navy. After the end of the Civil War, Malvern ended up back with its original owner, and original name, William G. Hewes.
For more about these ships, check out ShipIndex.org. And let us know if you have events that you think we should include!
A friend of ShipIndex.org contacted us to see if we know on anyone who might be interested in acquiring several excellent ship models, made by a professional modeler but for his own enjoyment. These models have been appraised and are in attractive display cases. They’re also in Tennessee, and transporting a ship model is no easy task, so keep that in mind.
Here’s an example of some of this artist’s models on display in a public library:
If you’d like to learn more, don’t hesitate to contact us at comments@shipindex.org, and we’ll connect you with the current owner of these models.
I updated the Merchant Vessels of the United States file again this week. This is a file provided by the US Coast Guard describing some 387,000 vessels registered in the United States which have a valid Certificate of Documentation, from the National Vessel Documentation Center, based in Falling Waters, WV. The file lists all boats that receive federal documentation – usually those that will travel between states or outside of the United States, or are about 20+ feet or longer. This is different from state titling, which usually happens for smaller boats with a motor. Of course, the smaller non-powered ones, like rowboats and canoes, usually don’t require any titling or documentation at all.
Anyway, MVUS includes all US-flagged commercial vessels, and a lot of large personal vessels, as well. It’s the best file for finding the most popular vessel names in the US, which is of course a popular topic at a guide to vessel names!
Most commercial vessels have unique names that are just a combination of letters and numbers, like “Art 360”, “Art 361”, “Art 362”, “Art 363”, or “T13909”, “T13911”, “T13912”, etc. Most of these are barges, and to be honest, they’re not that interesting. Of the 209,037 unique ship names (ending with “Zzzz!”) and 386,377 unique vessels in MVUS, 175,049 appear only once. Some of those are quite interesting, and we will investigate a few in the future. For now, here’s how the instance of ship names breaks out:
# of instances
# of names
# of vessels
% of vessels
1
175,051
175,051
45.3%
2
15,626
31,252
8.1%
3
5,724
17,172
4.4%
4-10
8,951
51,470
13.3%
11-99
3,536
87,766
22.7%
100+
149
23,800
6.1%
Over 31,000 ships have a single matching partner with the same name somewhere in the country, and nearly 150 have at least 100 different ships with the same name.
Note: this analysis is pretty basic; I didn’t combine vessel names that are very similar, but not the same, like “Ain’t Mis Behavin”, “Ain’t Misbehavin”, “Ain’t Misbehavin’”, and “Ain’t Miss Behavin” – I’m not sure which name I’d combine these under, for instance! Actually, I did correct one or two. There was one listed as “0hana” and I felt pretty sure they meant “Ohana”, and it was a mistake in the Coast Guard’s National Vessel Documentation Center. I could be wrong, though. (I did note the former name in my correction, so if I was wrong, a person can still find that ship name.)
Some people name their vessel “USS Enterprise” or “USS Git-It-Done” or “HMS Michele”. I kept those initial parts in here because, unlike with the actual naval ships, it is a part of the name, for better or (most definitely) for worse. One feature of ShipIndex.org is that when you do search for, say, “HMS Indefatigable” (definitely one of the best ship names ever), the database assumes that you want to search for “Indefatigable”, as that will return the best results. It still gives you the option of searching with the “HMS”, however – which will be useful for those searching for “USS Michele”.
A lot of owners put “The” at the start of their ship name. There are a dozen ships named “The 19th Hole”, along with 27 named “19th Hole”. Ugh. On the one hand, I very much dislike putting “The” at the front of a ship name! On the other hand, my brother and a friend built a rowboat for our dad, and I carved a nameboard for it, and that boat had the name “The Prelude”, with the article. (See a picture of it, below.) But, see, our dad had written a book about William Wordsworth and his poems, one of which was named “The Prelude”, and we also thought this might be a precursor to a larger boat.
An acceptable use of an article in a ship’s name, according to me.
Anyway, which are the most popular vessel names in the US, in 2025? Here’s a list of the top 50 vessel names in MVUS, with the number of boats with that name, as of February 2025:
Ship Name
Number of instances
Serenity
538
Freedom
519
Andiamo
390
Liberty
370
Osprey
329
Second Wind
305
Pura Vida
274
Grace
271
Ohana
264
Island Time
262
Why Knot
253
Happy Ours
250
Relentless
250
Serendipity
241
Seas the Day
240
Escape
239
Legacy
236
Island Girl
232
Odyssey
231
Destiny
227
Blue Moon
222
Knot on Call
222
Carpe Diem
221
Orion
221
Calypso
219
Aurora
213
Spirit
209
Endless Summer
205
Patriot
205
Gratitude
201
Voyager
195
Phoenix
194
At Last
191
Tranquility
188
Morning Star
187
Dream Catcher
183
Pegasus
182
Halcyon
180
Valhalla
178
Southern Cross
177
Bella Vita
176
Liquid Asset
176
Zephyr
176
Harmony
174
Escapade
172
About Time
171
Encore
171
Journey
170
Cool Change
169
Dragonfly
168
In a week or two I’ll write a post that looks at the changes in the most popular vessel names, over the past five years. I hope you found this as interesting as I did!
Did you, like me, receive a curious set of porcelain knick-knacks that your mom picked up at a charity shop because they had pictures of ships on them? No? OK, well, maybe your mom is different from mine.
But I did get the following three items from my mom, and as you can see by the stickers on the bottom, she found the set for £2, presumably at a charity shop in London or in Wiltshire. Knowing my love of ships, she took them to Seattle, gave them to me as a small Christmas gift, and then I brought them home with me to the Finger Lakes region of New York. Now that they’re here, what could I discover about them?
First, the ship(s). As you can see, the images are of several different ships. The taller piece (perhaps for holdings cigarettes?) has a different image on each side. One image matches the image on the ridged piece, labelled on the bottom as “ARACAN 1854” and displaying a three-masted bark. The back side of the taller piece has a somewhat shorter vessel, with full topsails rather than split topsails. The other piece has an image of a four-masted bark, with no name on the back. Also, all three pieces have the name “Thos. & Jno. Brocklebank Ltd”, a 19th and 20th century shipping line that was acquired by the Anchor Line in 1912, according to Wikipedia.
In the image below, of the two sides of the taller piece, the image on the left, with the flags blowing aft, has got split topsails, and matches the image of the Aracan from the ridged piece. The image on the right shows much larger single topsails on each mast, on what appears to be a different vessel. I guess I don’t know what ship it represents!
To learn more about the one named ship, I went to ShipIndex.org, as one does, and searched for “Aracan”. In the subscription database I found 32 citations from six resources. Some citations have very little information about the specific vessel, like the top two, while others, like the bottom two, have at least a bit more:
The entries from the various shipping registries, as in the bottom viewable entry, are more useful, and from them I can see that Aracan was a bark, and was built in Sundsvall, Sweden, in 1876. The ship’s captain at this time was Capt H.F. Hedberg.
Other entries, though, such as this one from 1875, before the ship was launched, show a different ship — one that was built in 1854, in Whitehaven, England, and registered in Liverpool.
So I can see now that there are at least two ships named Aracan, built nearly 20 years apart.
Given our ability to differentiate between ships of the same name, this is a great opportunity to do just that. I use Wikidata Q-identifiers because I believe they are the best, most shared, most common, and most open, tool for implementing and using Linked Data. So I search Wikipedia for an entry about ships named Aracan, and I find nothing there. That’s not a complete surprise, but it’s a bit disappointing. I check Wikidata for any records of ships named Aracan there, and again come up short:
I can create Wikidata entries for the two Aracans that I now know about, but I really don’t have a lot of information about them. In the grand scheme of things, that really is the correct thing to do – it contributes to the greater good and makes it easier for others to learn more about these specific ships. But I don’t have much detail to add about either ship, and I have a checkered history in creating and editing records in Wikidata and Wikipedia, so I shy away from it, at times. I could perhaps use the image of the 1854 Aracan from this porcelain, but a quick search online indicates that the pieces probably date from the late 1950s so I don’t feel that I can say with certainty (which Wikidata expects) that the image is copyright-free. Perhaps, in the future, I’ll create records for these ships. ShipIndex, though, has the ability to quickly create our own identifiers, which we can use until we find that Wikidata Q-identifiers exist. So, for now, that’s what I’ll do.
I’ll then associate the citations that are clearly about either the 1854 or the 1876 vessels, with those new identifiers, and now the page looks a bit different, with a record of two different ships sharing the same name, and with citations about each one combined together.
If or when Q-identifiers are created for these ships, and if or when images are added to those entries, these ‘cards’ for the two different ships with the same name will add and incorporate those images into this page.
You may not have received a holiday gift with a ship on it, but if you did, see if you can find it it ShipIndex.org!
The Portsmouth (UK) News has a brief article titled “14 odd names for Royal Navy ships” which discusses exactly that. The topic was raised on the Maritime History discussion list (MARHST-L), with a few others mentioned – most of which appeared in the comments on the article’s page.
A colleague on Twitter, @ICComLib, pointed me to a recent report from the Congressional Research Service about the naming of US Naval ships. This is actually a pretty interesting issue, and can get quite controversial quite quickly.
Ever since the founding of the US Navy, there have been conflicts about how names are assigned. Aircraft carriers are now nearly always named after former US Presidents. So was it a slight to Jimmy Carter to have his name assigned to a submarine, rather than an aircraft carrier?
Not really, since Carter was a USNA graduate, joined the submarine service where he sailed on and commanded submarines, and worked directly under Admiral Rickover to develop the new nuclear Navy.
On the other hand, the Seawolf class of attack submarines are named Seawolf (SSN-21), Connecticut (SSN-22), and Jimmy Carter (SSN-23); as the report states, “which were named for a fish, a state, and a President, respectively, reflecting no apparent class naming rule” (pg 4). There’s not a lot of continuity there.
From the launch of the brig Jefferson in April 1814, to the naming of the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson in 1970, apparently only one Naval ship had been named after a living person – in that case, John Holland, creator of the Navy’s first submarine (USS Holland (SS1)), which they bought from him, and then named after him, in 1900. Since 1970, however, this has happened every couple of years; three ships in 2012 alone were named after living people (John Glenn (MLP-2), Gabrielle Giffords (LCS-10), and Thomas Hudner (DDG-116)).
One interesting point in the report is that, while one might say that there is no regularity to how ships are named in the US Navy, at the same time the right of the Secretary of the Navy to make exceptions in naming conventions is one of the oldest ship-naming traditions.
Another highlight is the role that Congress plays in suggesting or influencing vessel names and clarifications: one interesting example was that of a message to the Navy from Maine’s two Senators in 2013, seeking clarification of the forthcoming amphibious dock ship, to be named USS Portland. Senators Collins and King were concerned because the Navy had indicated that the ship was being named after Portland, Oregon, and not Portland, Maine. As the Senators pointed out, not only were previous Portlands named after Portland, Maine (for instance, USS Portland (CA-33)), or both cities (LSD-37), but Portland, Oregon, itself, was named after Portland, Maine.
This report is a followup to a report submitted to Congress from the Navy three years ago (though this report was written by staff at Congressional Research Service, not the Navy’s Naval History and Heritage Command, which put together the previous report). It seems clear that the Navy will continue to create guidelines for how ships should be named, and also continue to ignore them, when they see fit to do so.
The ShipIndex team is traveling through Europe for a few weeks. I had initially planned to post one little maritime thing each day, but that has, alas fallen by the wayside. It’s certainly not for a lack of maritime-related items I’ve seen, but more a lack of time sitting at the computer, rather than exploring exploring exploring.
So, now that I’m on a two-hour train ride in France, perhaps I can write some entries of particular maritime relevance.
About a week ago (ten days? four days? Who knows when you’re traveling) my wife and I took my son (11 years old) and nephew (12) to the Royal Museums at Greenwich, home of the National Maritime Museum, the Royal Observatory, the Cutty Sark, and the Queen’s House.
As an aside, we started the day with a visit to the Sky Garden, the viewing platform at the top of the Fenchurch Street building known as the “walkie-talkie building”. This a new place to visit in London, and it’s not super-easy to do, because you need to make reservations in advance if you want to go up there for free. I think you can also go up if you agree to buy some food at the cafe, and I was surprised to see that the prices are quite reasonable, so that could also be a good option. The views from here are great – and maritime, too, if you consider the views of the Thames, and of HMS Belfast, and Tower Bridge, and more on the river.
I love what the folks at Cutty Sark have done with the ship in its recent renovation. I have read long-time ship enthusiasts express dismay at the work, but I honestly don’t know why. The glass around the ship shows where the waterline was – something that isn’t easily done when a ship is permanently out of water. The new event space under the ship, at the bottom of the drydock, is really impressive. The ability to see what the ship is like from underneath is just great. You get an idea of the size of the thing, and you can see what sort of work went into creating this ship long ago. And the idea of creating such a remarkable and unique event space is also great – any historic ship needs some way of generating revenue for any of the work it plans to do, so I see nothing wrong with this. Especially when it is such an amazing layout.
We then went on to the 4pm performance of “Against Captain’s Orders”, a production by Punchdrunk Entertainment for the National Maritime Museum. I don’t know anything about who put this together, but they did a great, great thing. I’m also not going to tell you much of anything about the content of the production itself, since that would ruin the “Adventure”.
It’s a very active performance; you spend time running from room to room. You have to have a child (6-12 years old) to attend – so it was a good thing I had my son and nephew with me. I made it clear to them that they were simply my ticket to see the show, but they did enjoy it a great deal. It can be a bit scary for the youngest kids, though we saw one of the ‘curators’ give a young girl a small electric candle, and we wondered if they’d done that because they thought she might be a bit scared. The performance really does adapt to the audience.
The performance uses important pieces from the museum’s collections to encourage kids to think about the stories behind them, and how they might create their own Adventures (I’ll say we were on board HMS Adventure during the experience) from items of historic significance and historic value.
I honestly think every museum curator, especially at living history museums, should find a child to take to this show, before it closes. I think they’d all come away with crazy new ideas about how to engage kids with the unique or special items they have in their own collection. Even more so, theater groups should see what Punchdrunk is doing, and figure out how they could propose or create such productions for museums or other cultural institutions in their community. The level of detail that appeared here was pretty unreal; we didn’t have anywhere close to enough time to absorb all of it, or pick up all the in-jokes on the walls.
The entire show was about 45-50 minutes long; the only change I would have liked to see would have been some better conclusion, where we could applaud or somehow recognize the two ‘curators’ (really actors) – they sort of left and we didn’t realize that they weren’t coming back. So I’d say to them here, if I could reach them, that the performance really was great, and they did a fantastic job of making it so.
All in all, it was a great experience and I hope its model can be used in many other locations in the future.
Two hundred years ago today, a note appeared in the National Intelligencer, a newspaper in Washington, DC, calling on the government to preserve USS Constitution, even then known as “Old Ironsides”.
A transcription of the piece appears below:
May 23, 1815, edition of National Intelligencer, on preserving USS Constitution
Our National Ship, the Constitution, is once more arrived.
Let us keep “Old Iron Sides” at home. She has, literally, become a Nation’s Ship, and should be preserved. Not as a “sheer bulk, in ordinary” (for she is no ordinary vessel); but, in honorable pomp, as a glorious Monument of her own, and our other Naval Victories.
She has “done her duty“; and we can therefore afford to preserve her from future dangers.
Let a dry dock, such as are used in Holland, and other parts of Europe, be contracted for her reception, at the Metropolis of the United States. Let a suitable and appropriate building be erected over her, to secure her from the weather; and other measures used to preserve her from decay: that our children, and children’s children, may view this stately monument of our National Triumphs.
The decks of this noble Ship have witnessed peculiarly striking instances of superiority and success over her enemies — When in battle, the skill and courage of her officers and crew, have invariably brought her victory: and when pursued by a superior force (frequently happening) the superior seamanship of her different commanders has completely baffled the efforts of her foes, and preserved her for new and splendid triumphs!
“She has done her duty”; she had done ENOUGH!
Let us preserve her as a precious model, as an example for future imitations of her illustrious performances!
——————————
Just five days ago, on May 18, Constitution once again went into dry dock, as the author of this piece called for 200 years ago, to be further conserved and restored, so she will continue to be around for our children’s children, and more.
This time-lapse video shows the ship’s movement into position:
And the Navy’s website about USS Constitution has much more about the ship’s history, and how she was, in fact, saved, many times, in the past two hundred years.
So many ships have so many great stories. I’d like to start highlighting a few of them. Here’s a start:
Toward the end of World War I, the US government needed all the shipping tonnage it could obtain, to move resources to Europe. It looked to the Great Lakes for freighters available there, and among the ones it found there, the last it took was the largest of all, the Charles R. Van Hise. The Van Hise was built in 1900, and was 458 feet long, and 50 feet wide. To get any of these ships from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic meant taking them around Niagara Falls, from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario. The way to do that is through the Welland Canal . At the start of the First World War, the Canal had 26 locks, each 270 feet long and 45 feet wide. Most ships that were taken by the US Shipping Board were too long to travel through these locks, so they were cut in half amidships, each end had a bulkhead added to the cut side, and each half was towed through the locks separately. They were then put back together once they’d arrived in Lake Ontario, before heading up the St Lawrence Seaway and on to the Atlantic.
The Van Hise, however, was not only too long, but also too wide: the locks were 45 feet wide but the Van Hise measured in at 50 feet. In a remarkable feat of engineering that has not been repeated, the ship was first cut in half admiships, like previous ships had been. Then she was rotated on her side, using some internal tanks and added pontoons. Since she wasn’t particularly deep, she could be turned on her side, and with her port side now acting as her keel, she was narrow enough to fit through the locks.
This excellent story (via Google Books) in the March 1919 issue of Popular Science describes how the process was done. The forward section passed through the first lock, as a test, in early December 1918, and the aft section, which was at this point waiting in Buffalo, was to follow in the spring of 1919. Each piece would then be towed through the other locks of the Welland Canal, to get to Lake Ontario. But hostilities had ended, and the need for the ship was negated. So the bow was towed back through the southern-most lock, back to Lake Erie, and the two halves were rejoined at Ashtabula, were the ship was also extended in size.
Van Hise went back to work, and then went through a variety of name changes – A. E. R. Schneider, S. B. Way, J. M. Oag, and finally, in 1936, Captain C. D. Secord. More work continued to change her profile, but she kept working the lakes, up until 1967. In 1968, she was sold to a Montreal scrapping firm who resold her, and in August 1968 she was towed to Spain to be broken up.
So how did she get through the Welland Canal to head out on her final voyage? Canal construction, running from 1913 to 1932, had reduced the number of locks from 26 to eight, and significantly increased them all in size, to 766 feet long and 80 feet wide – plenty wide enough for the Van Hise’s trip to the breaking yard, nearly 70 years after she’d been launched.
Sources: The story of this remarkable ship first appeared on the MARHST-L discussion list in January 2015. Posters included links to the Popular Science article (linked above), and this extended history of the ship’s life, on the Maritime History of the Great Lakes site. This page from the Great Lakes Maritime Database came via ShipIndex.org, and has this image of a dozen or so men standing on the Van Hise’s starboard-side-acting-as-deck. Other links from within ShipIndex.org led me to an entry at Bowling Green’s Great Lakes Vessel Online Index, as well as manuscript records for Captain C.D. Secord at Milwaukee County Library System, an image hosted by York University.
(For information on how I tracked down those manuscript records — which is not a simple process — read my entries on making the most of WorldCat record, here.)
Van Hise went back to work, and then went through a variety of name changes – 
Other links from within ShipIndex.org led me to an entry at Bowling Green’s Great Lakes Vessel Online Index, as well as