Tales, Marvellous Tales, of Ships and Stars ... Quiz

Answer: Dawn Treader

Captained by Prince Caspian, the Dawn Treader takes our heroes, Edmund, Lucy and their snotty cousin Eustace, to the World's End, the home of Aslan himself, in search for the seven lords banished by Miraz. Stirring stuff.

Answer: Thermopylae

It was the same White Star Line which some 40 years later commissioned the RMS Titanic. The record set by the Thermopylae still stands to this day for this passage under sail. The Cutty Sark was another clipper of the same era - in 1872 she raced Thermopylae from Shanghai to London, but was defeated by 7 days, when she lost her rudder. She is now preserved at Greenwich in London, and is thought to be the last classic clipper surviving. The clipper ship design originated in the US, and the other two options were classic American clippers.

Thermopylae was sold to Portugal in 1895, where she was used as a training ship. She was torpedoed by the Portuguese Navy in 1906, a sad end for a proud ship.

Answer: Mary Celeste

The correct name is Mary Celeste, but good ole Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, confused things somewhat when he wrote the story of a derelict ship under similar circumstances, which he named the "Marie Celeste" Many sources use the French spelling, so I've accepted both.

The Mary Celeste was put back into service, but some 12 years later during an apparent insurance fraud, she was run aground on the Rochelois reef in Haiti. Interestingly, her remains were found in 2001 by the author Clive Cussler, who also fronts the television underwater archaeology series "Sea Hunters".

Several sources claim to have solved the mystery, and a Google search will bring up many references to this most famous of sea mysteries.

Answer: She was trapped in the pack ice and sank

Endurance was built in Norway in 1912, specifically for use in polar conditions. She was trapped in sea ice in the Weddell Sea, well short of her destination, and 280 days later, she was crushed by the ice and sank. Shackleton and his crew escaped, dragging the 3 lifeboats over the ice with them.

When they eventually reached the open sea, they sailed to Elephant Island, little more than an inhospitable barren rock in the South Shetlands. Shackleton decided that their only hope of rescue was for a small party to sail across the stormy Southern Ocean to the whaling station on South Georgia.

This involved travelling some 800 miles in an open boat 6.7m long, in some of the worst sea conditions in the world. After many tribulations, they made it, and Shackleton, after numerous attempts rescued those members of the crew still marooned on Elephant Island. Miraculously, not a single member of Shackleton's party was lost.

Answer: Hispaniola

From Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island". The other three Hispanic-sounding ships sailed with Ferdinand Magellan on the first circumnavigation of the world in 1519.

As for the cook, the rest of us know him as Long John Silver, but, to his shipmates, he was known as Barbeque. I put that in to throw you off the scent. Sneaky, eh?

Stevenson purists will note that I've written the name Hispaniola in sentence case, rather than the uppercase which was used throughout the book: HISPANIOLA. I've no idea why Stevenson adopted this unusual practice. Can anyone enlighten me?

Answer: Fram

Despite the bad sailing characteristics due to her unusual hull design, she did have the huge advantage that, if she became trapped in ice, instead of being crushed, she would rise above it, rather like trying to pinch a wet bar of soap between your fingers.

She was used by Nansen on his attempts to reach the North Pole - his theory was that the polar ice pack drifted, and that, if he could remain wedged in the ice-pack for long enough, he would be carried over the North Pole. Sadly, his theories were not borne out - the ship performed well, but the ice-pack didn't carry him sufficiently far north.

Some years later in 1912, she carried Roald Amundsen and his team to Antarctica, where he became the first man to reach the South Pole.

She is now preserved in Bygdoy, Oslo. Go and see her if you get the chance.

Answer: The African Queen

Starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn, this 1951 film was based on the 1935 book of the same name by C.S. Forester. Bogey won an Academy Award for Best Actor for it. AND he got to snog with Katherine Hepburn as well, lucky man!.

Answer: Beagle

HMS Beagle was built in 1820 at Woolwich Dockyard for the Royal Navy. A Cherokee-class brig, she was converted to bark rig. Her class mounted 10 guns and were used for a number of duties, including anti-slavery patrols and survey work.

As for Darwin, his observations in the Galapagos, particularly his study of the 13 different species of finches, kicked off the train of thought which led to his book "On the Origins of Species" (1859), which proposed the theory of evolution by natural selection, and changed the way we thought about our world forever.

Answer: Flying Dutchman

Strictly speaking, the Flying Dutchman was the captain of the phantom ship, rather than the ship itself. However as the name has passed into general usage, I hope you'll be charitable. Interestingly, the partly-quoted log entry above was made by a 16-year-old Royal Navy midshipman, who was later to become King George V of Great Britain. The ghost ship has been seen on many occasions by many respectable witnesses.

The Flying Frenchman is fictitious, The Flying Pickets were a fairly successful a capella band in the early 1980's (remember "Only You"?), and the Flying Scotsman is one of the the most famous steam locomotives in the world.

Answer: Nautilus

Written in 1870, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea (by Jules Verne) remains popular today. There had already been a number of attempts to build submarines, but this book really foreshadows the modern nuclear submarine ("my kind of electricity is different from yours"). Nemo himself was probably the prototype superhero, out to save mankind from itself.

The Nautilus also featured in The Mysterious Island, a sequel to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

It also, bizarrely, makes an apperarance in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, in which Campion Bond recruits Captain Nemo and Alan Quatermain (by now an opium addict), Jeykll/Hyde and Griffin the Invisible Man to defeat Fu Manchu and Moriarty (who in fact, turns out to be "M", Bond's boss) And that's only Vol 1.

Vol 2 takes place on Mars and involves Dr Moreau... but, hey, that sounds a bit implausible, doesn't it?

The other options are also fictional submarines.

Thanks for playing - I hope it's tickled your sense of quirkiness as well as whetting your thirst for knowledge, if that's not mixing a metaphor too far...

BTW, the title of the quiz comes from "The Golden Journey to Samarkand", by James Elroy Flecker. Go ahead, read it. You'll like it.