SiTU MUSEUM OF MYSTERIES: V for VICTORY

With history’s track record on major ships that didn’t make it, like the Santa Maria, C.S.S. Hunley, and of course the Titanic, one would wonder if there is an unsinkable ship out there.

There is the story of the HMS Victory in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. One of the largest wooden warships ever built, the ship not only saw considerable action in the last decades of the eighteenth century fighting both the French and Spanish fleets, but she became the stuff of legends at the pivotal battle of Trafalgar in 1805, where Nelson was to be mortally wounded but not before besting the combined French and Spanish fleet and effectively saving England from a sea-borne invasion.

Originally slated to be broken up shortly after the Napoleonic Wars ended, she was saved, the story goes, by the wife of the First Sea Lord, who, upon learning that the vessel that had served so long and gallantly was to be delegated to the wrecker’s yard, broke into tears and demanded that he rescind the order. Heavily restored in 1922 by the British government, she now serves as a museum in Portsmouth, England, making her one of the oldest ships still afloat in the world.