More Tales, Marvellous Tales, of Ships and Stars Quiz

Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts

1. She sailed from Nantucket under Captain Ahab, first mate Starbuck. Ahab was obsessed with hunting a great white sperm whale which had taken his leg in a previous encounter. His obsession was to cost him his ship, his life, and the lives of all but one of his crew. What was the ship's name?

Answer: Pequod

From Herman Melville's famous novel "Moby Dick", of course, and possibly named after a Native American tribe, the Pequoits. It may be that Melville took his inspiration for "Moby Dick" from the real-life story of "Mocha Dick", an albino sperm whale, which also attacked ships.

He certainly met William Henry Chase, the son of Owen Chase, the first mate of the ill-starred Nantucket whaler, Essex, and heard from him the story of how she was attacked and sunk by a whale, with the loss of all but a handful of her crew.

2. Captain McWhirr was her master, steaming with a "cargo" of 200 Chinese coolies to repatriate them to their home port of Fu-Chau after they had laboured abroad for seven years for the Bun Hin Company. In the Formosa Channel, she was beset by a tropical storm which almost sank her. What was the ship's name in this most famous of storm stories?

Answer: Nan-Shan

Joseph Conrad's outstanding novel, "Typhoon", tells how this stolid, unimaginative man first sailed his ship into the path of a typhoon in the face of the advice of his officers and his books on navigation("It's only to let you see, Mr. Jukes, that you don't find everything in books."), then managed, despite the odds, to survive it.

3. Designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, she was the largest vessel afloat when she was launched in 1843 and was the first ocean-going iron-hulled vessel with a screw propeller. What is her name?

Answer: SS Great Britain

Great Eastern and Great Western were two other innovative designs by Brunel. Great Northern was a US Pacific liner.

The SS Great Britain worked mainly on the Australian and North Atlantic routes, transporting British emigrants. Obsolescent by 1882, her engines were removed and she worked as a collier, taking coal to San Francisco until she was damaged by fire in 1886. On putting into the Falkland Isles for assistance, she was deemed to be beyond economic repair and was converted to a hulk for storing grain and wool until 1937, when she was towed to Sparrow Cove near Port Stanley in East Falkland and beached. She lay there until 1970, when she was recovered and brought back on a pontoon to her home port of Bristol, to the very dock in which she was built. Since then, she has undergone much restoration and is now a major tourist attraction.

4. Harvey Cheyne was the 15-year-old, thoroughly spoiled and self-indulgent son of a mining and timber magnate. When he fell overboard from the liner taking him to Europe to finish his education, he was rescued by a Grand Banks fishing schooner. Disbelieving his boasts and unimpressed by his threats, the schooner's owner and skipper knocked some sense into Harvey: after three months of hard, dangerous work on the Banks, Harvey was a reformed character. What was the name of the schooner?

Answer: We're Here

From the rite-of-passage novel "Captains Courageous" by Rudyard Kipling, where the tough discipline imposed by the phlegmatic Captain Disko Troop and the kindness, courage and camaraderie of his fellow crewmen combine to make a decent man of Harvey. A great read.

The other three options were also Grand Banks schooners in the same story.

5. This tough little ship was originally built as a Whitby collier, the Earl Of Pembroke, but was purchased by the Royal Navy in 1768 and refitted as a scientific survey ship. Many senior Navy officers questioned the Admiralty's choice of captain for her, one James Cook, a completely unknown Lieutenant. By what name was the little collier known when she sailed for the Pacific on 26 August 1768 under the White Ensign of the Royal Navy?

Answer: Endeavour

Endeavour's objective was to observe the transit of the planet Venus across the Sun, and to explore the South Lands, now known as New Zealand and Australia. The Admiralty's choice of captain was more than vindicated, for Cook proved himself to be one of the finest navigators and cartographers in history. During this three-year voyage and two further voyages, Cook mapped the Pacific, circumnavigated Antarctica and claimed vast areas of territory for King George III.

As for the Endeavour, she was sold off after Cook's first voyage (his two subsequent round-the-world voyages were on HMS Resolution, another converted Whitby collier). Some people believe that Endeavour now lies on the bottom of Newport Harbour, Rhode Island, US, although this hasn't yet been conclusively proven.

A replica of the Endeavour was built in Fremantle, Australia. She sailed to Europe in 2003, and, fittingly, visited the little fishing town of Whitby, where her illustrious forbear had been built some 240 years earlier.

6. In December 1986, Captain First Rank Marko Ramius and his crew embarked on the maiden voyage of the latest Soviet nuclear missile submarine. Ramius contravened his orders and sailed for the Eastern seaboard of the US. Using the submarine's ultra-stealthy capabilities, she simply disappeared, bringing the two most powerful navies in history into confrontation in the Atlantic. What was the name of the submarine?

Answer: Red October

From Tom Clancy's 1984 techno-thriller, "The Hunt For Red October", subsequently made into a very successful film. I'm not going to give the plot away - watch it for yourselves!

Probably the only Soviet submarine commander in history with a Scottish accent ...

7. In 1787, a Royal Navy ship under Lieutenant William Bligh, was commissioned to sail to Tahiti and to take on board a cargo of breadfruit plants. These were to be shipped to the West Indies and cultivated to provide cheap and nourishing food for slaves. After she sailed from Tahiti, the crew became disaffected by the captain's harsh discipline, and mutinied. What was the name of the ship?

Answer: HMS Bounty

An easy one this. After overpowering Bligh and those 18 members of the crew still loyal to him, the mutineers cast them adrift in an open 23-foot boat, leaving them to the mercy of the sea. After a journey of some 3,600 nautical miles, probably the greatest open-boat voyage ever made, they landed on the Dutch territory of Timor, where they purchased a small schooner and made their way back to England.

The mutineers under Fletcher Christian sailed the Bounty back to Tahiti, where some of them disembarked. Others picked up the women to whom they had become attached during the Bounty's stay and fled to Pitcairn Island. The ship was burned, and the descendents of the Bounty crew are there to this day. Those 14 mutineers who elected to stay in Tahiti were captured by HMS Pandora to be taken back to England to stand trial for mutiny. Of those who made it back to England, three were hanged.

Bligh went on to have a successful career in the Royal Navy (despite having a second and a third mutiny!), eventually becoming Governor of New South Wales, Australia.

HMS Pandora under Captain Edwards was the ship which was despatched to pick up the mutineers from Tahiti. The other two options were also famous ships of the Royal Navy.

8. She was originally built in 1922 as a 14,000-ton passenger liner. At the outbreak of WWII, she was converted to an Armed Merchant Cruiser for convoy escort duties by having elderly 6" guns and an outdated fire-control system fitted. Crewed by 254 seaman and officers under Captain Fogarty Fegen, she engaged the heavily-armed German pocket-battleship, Admiral Scheer, and was sunk within 25 minutes. What was the name of the ship?

Answer: HMS Jervis Bay

The Jervis Bay was the sole armed escort for the Atlantic convoy HX84, consisting of some 39 merchant ships bringing war materiel and supplies from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Britain. The convoy was discovered in the North Atlantic by the Admiral Scheer on 5th Nov 1940. The order for the convoy to disperse was given, but Fegen, realising that the merchant ships would have no chance against the 11" main armament of the Scheer, dropped smoke floats to screen their escape and engaged the vastly superior ship with his outdated and outclassed 6" guns, knowing as he did so that he was signing the death-warrants of himself, his ship and his crew. Within three salvoes, the Scheer had the range of the Jervis Bay and proceeded to take her apart with heavy shellfire. Despite the carnage and the damage, Jervis Bay fought on until at last a shell mortally wounded her and she went to the bottom.

Scheer pursued the rest of the convoy but only managed to sink a further five ships before darkness closed in. Jervis Bay's short but gallant action had meant that most of the convoy escaped into the coming night. Captain Fegen and 188 of his crew were killed.

The survivors were picked up by the neutral Swedish ship, Stureholm, at great risk to herself. Fegen was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross, the highest British gallantry award.

The other three ships were also Armed Merchant Cruisers, sunk in the course of their duties as convoy escort vessels.

9. In 1941, a merchant ship, the SS Politician, was wrecked on the south-east tip of the Isle of Eriskay in the Outer Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland. To the huge delight of the locals, she was found to be carrying a cargo of 50,000 cases of Scotch whisky, which they at once began to "rescue" and stash around the island, to the fury of the local customs officer. In 1949, a film comedy was made of the incident. What was its name?

Answer: All of these

Based on the 1947 Compton MacKenzie novel, "Whisky Galore", the film was released in UK as "Whisky Galore", in France as "Whisky A-Go-Go", and in the US as "Tight Little Island". It has been described as the best unsponsored advertisement ever made, and sent sales of Scotch soaring in France and the US.

There was also, however, a darker side to the tale - the SS Politician was also carrying a large amount of currency, which began turning up in places as far afield as Liverpool and Jamaica. Much of it was recovered but some 76,400 ten-shilling notes are still unaccounted for.

But the story was still not quite over. In 1987 Donald MacPhee, from the nearby island of South Uist, found eight bottles of whisky in the wreck. He sold them at Christie's auction house in London and made �4,000. As a result of this, some 500 people invested �403,000 for a bottle-salvage operation in 1990. Divers moved many hundreds tons of sand by airlift and lifted scores of steel plates but uncovered only 24 bottles.

10. The Atlantic convoys were Britain's lifeline during the dark days of WWII, bringing much needed war supplies and food from Canada and the US. Single merchant ships were very vulnerable to attack, so the ships travelled in convoy. A number of Royal Navy ships were attached to each convoy for protection, mainly from U-Boats. In the course of its convoy protection duty, Lieutenant-Commander Ericson, the captain of this fictional little "Flower"-class corvette, was confronted with the appalling decision of whether or not to release his depth-charges to attack a German U-boat, knowing that the water was full of struggling British survivors from a torpedoed merchant ship. What was the name of Ericson's ship?

Answer: HMS Compass Rose

From the one of the most outstanding books to come out of WWII, "The Cruel Sea", by Nicholas Monsarrat was later made into an equally outstanding film. These robust little ships were based on a design for a whaler, and served the Royal Navy and the Royal Canadian Navy with distinction in WWII. Because of their short length and shallow draught, their motion was described as "lively" with at least one former crewman remarking wryly that they would "roll on wet grass" The "Flower"-class corvettes carried a crew of around 100 men.

The other options:

HMCS Spikenard (Canada) was torpedoed and sunk on convoy protection duty south of Iceland by U-136. There were 8 survivors.

HMS Asphodel was torpedoed and sunk on convoy protection duty in mid-Atlantic by U-575. There were 5 survivors.

HMS Campanula survived the war and was scrapped in 1947. Nicholas Monsarrat served on her as navigation officer.

I hope that this quiz has stretched you, and given you pause for thought. All of the questions were researched through Google - space here is limited, so the information that I have given has been much abridged: I hope that you will be inspired to find out more about these tales of great engineering, great determination, great literature, and great courage.

Source: Author frankmcvey

This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor bloomsby before going online.
Any errors found in FunTrivia content are routinely corrected through our feedback system.

Again, we look at famous ships in history, legend and fiction. You have to decide which is which!

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