Come Sail With Me Trivia Quiz

Answer: Christopher Columbus

The Santa Maria began life as La Santa Maria de la Inmaculada Concepcion (The Holy Mary of the Immaculate Conception) and was launched in Spain in 1460.

She is famous for being the flagship on Christopher Columbus' first voyage to the Americas in 1492. Along with the Nina and Pinta she was on the journey that led to the discovery of the Caribbean Islands and North America.

She didn't complete the return journey as she ran aground on Christmas Day off the coast of what is present day Haiti. Columbus had to leave some of his crew behind and used materials salvaged from the Santa Maria to build a fort called La Navidad.

Answer: Henry VIII

The Mary Rose was launched in Portsmouth, England in 1511. As she was built during King Henry VIII's reign she is often referred to as 'his' battleship. She served for 33 years in wars against Brittany, France and Scotland.

She had a substantial refit in 1536 but was lost in battle on 19 July 1545 when she led an attack against a French invasion fleet in the Battle of the Solent. She capsized and sank taking the majority of her crew with her.

The Mary Rose wreck was located in 1971. After years of excavation she was successfully raised from the seabed in 1982 but it was not until 2016 that she could be viewed by the public without being preserved behind glass.

Answer: Francis Drake

The Golden Hind was actually launched as the Pelican in 1577 as the flagship for Sir Francis Drake in his expedition to explore beyond the Strait of Magellan. He renamed it the year after to honour his patron, Sir Christopher Hatton, whose family crest was a golden deer. This exploration of course became the first to circumnavigate the globe.

Partially sponsored by Queen Elizabeth I, Drake was able to cause maximum damage to Spanish vessels and settlements without repercussions as a privateer although it did eventually lead to the Anglo-Spanish War.

The Golden Hind disintegrated and broke apart in the late 1600s but numerous replicas have been made. A full size replica was launched in 1973 and she sailed the world for 20 years. Since 1996 she has been berthed in the Thames River just up from Tower Bridge and is open to the public.

Answer: Pilgrims

Not much is known of the Mayflower's early years, although we do know her maiden voyage was some time before 1609. In 1620 she transported a group of English pilgrims, who were seeking religious freedom, to the New World.

She arrived at what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts 10 weeks later with 102 passengers and about 30 crew. Arriving in November in harsh weather only 53 people survived the first winter.

While aboard the ship the pilgrims wrote a document known as the Mayflower Compact which was an agreement on how they all agreed to govern their new colony.

The ship was taken out of service in 1622 and most historians agree she was probably taken apart by a shipbreaker in London circa 1624.

Answer: Ghost ship

De Vliegende Hollander or the Flying Dutchman is a legendary ghost ship with written legends beginning in the late 18th century but probably dating back to the Golden Age of Dutch Exploration in the 17th century.

She is commonly described as a 17th century Dutch fluyt - a long, large three-masted ship with pear-shaped stern used as cargo transport. She is said to glow with a ghostly light and a sighting is always a bad omen.

The one common theme between all the stories is that the ship is doomed to sail the seas forever and never make it into a port, usually because the captain made some sort of deal with the devil.

Answer: Edward Teach

Queen Anne's Revenge began life as a merchant ship known as the Concord circa 1710. She was captured by French privateers and renamed La Concorde and became a merchant ship, used mostly for slave trading.

Notorious British pirate Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, captured her in 1717 and renamed her Queen Anne's Revenge after the Stuart monarch.

He actually only used the ship for less than a year for his pirate expeditions in the West Indies and the eastern American colonies but she was such a formidable force her name has gone down in history.

She ran aground in 1718 off the coast of North Carolina and her wreckage was discovered in 1996. She has been added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.

Answer: James Cook

Launched as a colliery ship named the Earl of Pembroke in 1764 she was purchased and refitted in 1768 by the Royal Navy and renamed the HMS Bark Endeavour. The 'Bark' refers to the type of ship she was.

In 1768 she left Plymouth under the command of Captain James Cook and reached Tahiti, her intended mission, to observe the Transit of Venus across the Sun in 1769.

She then kept sailing, claiming the islands of Huahine, Bora Bora and Raiatea for Britain. She anchored off the coast of New Zealand in the same year, chartered the coast line and claimed it for Britain as well. Setting sail again she then became the first European ship to reach the east coast of Australia. Cooke went ashore at Botany Bay and then sailed up along the north coast for the next four months till he reached the northernmost point and then went ashore and proclaimed British sovereignty over the eastern Australian mainland.

On return to England the Endeavour was put back into the Navy as a transport ship. She was eventually totally refitted, named the Lord Sandwich II and used in the American War of Independence where she was eventually deliberately scuttled at the entrance to Newport Bay.

Answer: Horatio Nelson

HMS Victory was ordered by the Royal Navy and launched in 1765. She is the world's oldest naval vessel still in commission - 245 years in 2023.

She was a seagoing naval vessel until 1824 when she became a harbour ship and in 1922 was moved to dry dock in Portsmouth and has been preserved as a museum. From 2012 she has been the flagship of the First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff.

She is a true icon of the British Navy but is most famous as Lord Horatio Nelson's flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar on 21 October 1805. The Battle of Trafalgar was a decisive naval engagement between the British Royal Navy and the combined fleets of France and Spain. Nelson led the British fleet to a decisive victory establishing Britain's naval supremacy for many years.

Unfortunately Nelson himself was fatally wounded. His body was placed in a cask of brandy mixed with camphor and myrrh which was then lashed to the main mask of the Victory and placed under guard.

Answer: Charles Darwin

HMS Beagle was launched in 1820 but there was no immediate need for her services. She was later adapted as a survey barque and took place in three survey expeditions.

The first was from 1825-30 under Captain Pringle Stokes while she was allocated to the Hydrographic Office.

A third survey team from 1837-1843 was under Commander John Clements Wickham where she was commissioned to survey large parts of the Australian Coast.

The second was her most famous: mapping coastlines around the world from 1831-1836, under the command of Flag Lieutenant Robert FitzRoy. The ship had a young naturalist as a passenger named Charles Darwin.

While the Beagle circumnavigated the globe, exploring and mapping coastlines, Darwin conducted extensive research and observations and the time he spent on the Galapagos Islands in particular laid the groundwork for his theory of evolution by natural selection.

He gained fame by publishing his diary journal, best known as "The Voyage of the Beagle", in 1839 followed by his most famous work "On the Origin of Species" twenty years later.

The Beagle was transferred to Coastguard service in 1845 and sold and salvaged in 1870.

Answer: British tea clipper

The Cutty Sark is a legendary British clipper ship; launched in 1869 she was built specifically for the China tea trade. Her sleek design made her incredibly fast and she set several speed records and was famed for her ability to outrun other clippers as they raced to bring the season's first tea crop back to England.

She only spent a few years in the trade because steamships soon became more efficient and took over the route. She then started working for the wool trade from Australia where she held the fastest record for ten years.

Steam ships eventually took over that route too and she changed hands a few times before being bought by the Cutty Sark Preservation Society in 1953 and became a museum ship. She is berthed at Greenwich in London and is open to visitors.

Answer: The Titanic

RMS Carpathia was a transatlantic passenger steamship that was launched in 1902 with her maiden voyage from Liverpool to Boston in 1903.

Her maritime history was unremarkable in itself except for one night on the 15 April 1912 when she was the only ship to respond to the distress signals from the RMS Titanic when she struck an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic Ocean.

She was under the command of Captain Arthur Rostron and he ordered all nonessential services to be cut in order to save as much steam as possible for the engines. She arrived at the scene at 4.00 am - three and a half hours after the call and approximately an hour and a half since the Titanic had sank.

The crew worked tirelessly over the next 5 hours and managed to save 705 of the survivors from the lifeboats and retrieve 337 bodies. In total 1523 were lost in the disaster.

The Carpathia was sunk during World War I on 17 July 1918 after being torpedoed three times by the German submarine U-55 off the southern Irish coast, five crew members losing their lives.

Answer: Famous mutiny

Launched in 1900 the Russian battleship Potemkin was a pre-dreadnought battleship built for the Imperial Russian Navy's Black Sea Fleet.

Trouble began amongst all the Black Sea Fleets ships during the Russian-Japanese War of 1904-1905 when the experienced sailors were all seconded to the ships in the Pacific and the fleet was left with inexperienced officers and new recruits.

A generalised mutiny had been discussed but no dates had been fixed when events aboard the Potemkin led to them jumping the gun. On 27 June 1905 the enlisted men were given borscht with maggot-infested meat. After they refused to eat it the ships second-in-command, Ippolit Giliarovsky, threatened to have them shot and summoned the ship's guards in an attempt to intimidate them.

The tactic backfired and the crew mutinied. They killed 7 of the officers, including Giliarovsky and the ship's captain, and captured its torpedo boat. The mutineers sailed her into the port of Odessa where the crew began more protests and strikes in a workers uprising where hundreds of citizens were killed.

The Potemkin has since become a symbol of the resistance and was a key episode in the lead up to the 1917 Russian Revolution. After the Russians regained the ship they changed her name to the Panteleimon.

She became a warship in WWI and was lost to the Allies: the British destroyed her engines but left her in the Crimea. She eventually ended up back in Russian hands and was scrapped in 1923.

Answer: British battleship

The HMS Hood was a British battleship. An Admiral-class battlecruiser she was one of the largest and fastest capital ships of her time. Launched in 1918 she wasn't commissioned until 1920 so missed out in action during WWI.

She did see action in the Mediterranean Fleet during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War in 1935 and the Spanish Civil War the year after.

She remained the largest warship in the world for 20 years after her commissioning and earned the nickname "The Mighty Hood". Unfortunately she is best remembered for her dramatic loss during WWII.

In May 1941 the Hood and a battleship named the Prince of Wales were ordered to the Denmark Strait to intercept the German Battleship the Bismarck. In the resulting engagement she was struck by several shells and exploded, splitting the ship in half and losing all but 3 of her 1418 member crew. Although many theories have been put forth it is still unknown as to why such a catastrophic event occurred.

Her loss was a major blow to the Royal Navy but the emotional toll on the people of Britain was an even worse effect. Due to her perceived invincibility she stood as a symbol of British strength and power, her loss deeply affected the morale of the British people. It also led to the relentless pursuit of the Bismarck by the British Navy.

Answer: German battleship

Named after Chancellor Otto von Bismarck this mighty ship was one of two Bismarck-class battleships built for Nazi Germanys Kriegsmarine. The other was named the Tirpitz. They were the largest battleships ever built by Germany and two of the largest built by any European power.

She was launched in 1939 and commissioned in 1940. Extensive trials and updates were performed after this time and she was finally declared fit for service in 1941.

On 5 May 1941 Hitler and his head of Nazi Germanys armed forces, Wilhelm Keitel, visited the ship and made plans for Operation Rheinubung and were assured the ship was ready. The operation was to break into the Atlantic Ocean and raid the Allied shipping lanes from North America to Great Britain.

The Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen left port on the 19 May and reached the Denmark Strait 4 days later. On the morning of the 24th they engaged with the HMS Hood and HMS Prince of Wales. The Hood was destroyed and the Prince of Wales had to retreat. Her destruction lead to a relentless pursuit from the Royal Navy from dozens of warships.

The Bismarck had sustained damage and was forced to withdraw from her original mission. She headed towards France for repairs and 2 days later was found by the HMS Ark Royal, a British aircraft carrier, and 15 of her torpedo bombers hit the ship.

The next morning battleships HMS Rodney and HMS King George V and two heavy cruisers engaged in the final battle with the Bismarck. It is believed she was scuttled though there is still some debate over the cause of her sinking.

Of a crew of 2221 only 110 men were rescues by the British before they had to retreat because of arrival of the German U-boats. German vessels managed to save another 5.

Answer: Oil tanker

The Exxon Valdez was an oil tanker that was launched in 1986 and was in service until 2012 when it was sold for scrap metal. She is infamous for a devastating environmental disaster in 1989 when she caused a massive oil spill in Prince William Sound in Alaska.

At the time she was employed to transport crude oil from the Alaskan pipeline to the lower 48 states. On 24 March she struck a reef and released approximately 11 million gallons into the water affecting up to 1.300 miles of the coastline.

The environmental impact was catastrophic leading to the deaths of thousands of marine animals and birds as well as long-term damage to the ecosystem. The incident had significant repercussions for Exxon leading to extensive legal battles and changes in oil spill prevention and response regulations.

After repairs she was prohibited to return to Prince William Sound so she was placed on other routes under the names Exxon Mediterranean, SeaRiver Mediterranean, S/R Mediterranean then to simply Mediterranean in 2005.