Cartography of wet misadventures

Life has these coincidences.

The other day I was looking at the wreckage of my brother-in-law's ship —the hull and little else— that are melancholy whitening in the sun in a shipyard in El Ferrol like the skeleton of a silver whale, and now the remarkable

(geoPlaneta)

a book with maps about stories of shipwrecks, disappearances and other marine dramas.

La Perla Negra,

which is what we called Javi's sailboat on his recreational outings (the official name is

), went to give last April against the cunning reef of Salmedina, in front of Chiclana and was shipwrecked.

The battered ship, rescued as much as possible, went to the Blascar shipyards in Ferrol and is still waiting there for the day of her (her) trial.

Taking advantage of a visit to the city I tried to see it, but it was a party, the shipyard area was closed, and what we did with Javi was climb a promontory at the end of the beach and lean out to see it from afar, stranded on land in a roadstead next to to a hangar.

We watched him wrapped in a silence punctuated by the sound of the waves and I looked out of the corner of my eye at the expression of infinite anguish on the captain's face: I guess that in order not to suffer like that later, that's why they prefer to go down with the ship.

I believe that neither the

after the encounter with the whale nor the

behind theirs with the iceberg are like this, poor

;

I would say that his days at sea are over, although, of course, I am not a naval engineer (unlike my great-grandfather, another Jacinto, who built the first

aircraft carrier , I would not know where to start);

and there is always hope: if it even seems that Jack Sparrow will sail again.

More information

The mysterious disappearance of the sailboat 'Sylphe' 75 miles from Begur

The

—and what a misfortune that of our

addresses, precisely, the largest ship cemeteries in the world, Alang, in India, and Chittagong, in Bangladesh, sad marine necropolises in which the ships , from big rusty tankers to obsolete cruise ships and old-fashioned yachts (and even aircraft carriers like the

, in Alang), are torn apart by hand and torch by hordes of wretched junkmen, until there is nothing left: perishable memory of the ships like their foam wake in the sea.

One is left wondering where the

, the

, the

(Indeed: it overturned but did not sink; when

, which we say in Catalan, the stuck body of Shelley Winters must have come out)...

There are many other stories in the book, the work of maritime historian and former member of the French Navy Cyril Hofstein, that recall the sad fate of the

Especially the chapter

in which he recounts how the hitherto successful commander-in-chief of the Sun King's squadron set sail in 1678 from the Antilles with a fleet of 17 warships to seize them the island of Curaçao to the Dutch and, due to a loophole in the charts and the inexperience of a pilot, is going to crash his flagship, the

against the reefs of the Island of Birds.

Hardly has the ship been mounted on the rocks, her hull tearing apart with a deafening crash, when they follow in disaster the

the

, the

the

, the

and the

, all sinking one after the other.

It must have been something to be seen, and the admiral's face, that really was

...

The sinking of the <i>Erika</i>, on December 12, 1999. ASSOCIATED PRESS

I feel a special affinity with Cyril Hofstein, who writes that "fear is poison" at sea, and not just because we are both readers of Patrick O'Brian and, like him, I was embarked on an aircraft carrier, the

in my case, to write a report (he wrote a book about his stay at the

and won an award).

But because another ship joins us, the frigate

the one that took Lafayette to North America to enroll in the revolutionary cause of the colonies that gave rise to the independence of the United States. I was lucky enough to be able to see the works of construction of the new

, according to the original plans, in a shipyard in Rochefort, and Hofstein had much better luck in embarking on part of the voyage commemorating the 1780 voyage.

In the thirty stories that make up the atlas of misfortunes, grouped by geographical areas and with a certain tendency to the French, there are old ships known as the confederate corsair

of Captain Semmes, the

and the

of Franklin, found in 2014 and 2016 respectively, the missing frigates with the explorer Count de La Pérouse, or the

, the Swedish navy's biggest blunder that capsized as soon as it was launched (recovered in 1961, it has been spectacularly exhibited since 1990 in Stockholm in its own museum that is worth more worth the visit than Abba's).

Among my favourites, the story of the brigantine

which disappeared in 1838 with a veritable treasure of archaeological objects from Ancient Egypt, including the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Mycerinus, which we thought we would lay our hands on in Cartagena, oh, in 1995 with the Clos Foundation and Adolf Luna, whom I always imagine with the saber in a place as unseaworthy as Meroe... Space also for famous mysteries such as the Mary Celeste, adrift with no one on board, and legends such as the Flying Dutchman (undoubtedly a his great misfortune).

Surprising the case of

the great Russian sailing ship with four masts and 117 meters in length, the country's training ship, which was seized (many current echoes) in 2000 during the international maritime festival of Brest due to litigation between Russia and a Swiss company.

And the drama of the

, an English ship from which three castaways ate the fourth, the cabin boy, who is like the intern, in the lifeboat after spending almost a month with only two cans of turnips, giving a new meaning to the

expression

;

Fortunately, I tell myself, in the shipwreck of my brother-in-law, the ruthless law of the sea did not have to be resorted to as in the cases of the

the

or the

…

The German submarine U-534, sunk in 1945, recovered from the seabed in 1993 and put on display in Birkenhead, Great Britain.

And to finish, nothing better than a German submersible from World War II... unfortunate.

Remember that for those who have not already read it, Peninsula has just reissued (published by RBA in 2004) the exciting

, Robert Kurson's extraordinary chronicle of the discovery and exploration of a mysterious submarine in spooky conditions (at the end find out which one) sunk off the coast of the USA with all its crew in “the time of the sour pickle”, the

as the U-Boat sailors called it, when the tide of war changed its course and the steel sharks they became steel coffins.

Authentic epic of wreck diving, a book that should not be missing in your suitcase this summer, especially if you are going to travel by sea...

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