Creative History

  First launched in 1826 the HMS Daedalus was a forty-six gun top of the line frigate of the Royal Navy.  Having never been used in combat in that capacity, after eighteen years of service in 1844, the HMS Daedalus was literally cut down in size and recommissioned as a smaller, faster more maneuverable nineteen gun Corvette of the Royal Navy. On August 6, 1848 the HMS Daedalus was cruising in the south Atlantic about 300 miles off the coast of west Africa.  The weather was dark and cloudy and seemed to presage the onset of a midsummer thunderstorm at sea. At approximately 5 o’clock that afternoon midshipmen aboard the Daedalus alerted their officers to a most unusual sight.  The ship’s Captain Peter M’Quhae along with the First Lieutenant and all of the ship’s officers rushed to the quarterdeck to view what the crewmen had described as a “sea serpent” swimming above the surface of the water alongside their ship. A Royal Navy Corvette of the 1840's similar to Dae...

  Located along Massachusetts’ North Shore, on the banks of Cape Ann is the historic port city of Gloucester. The harbor at Gloucester, Massachusetts was first mapped in 1609 by French explorer Samuel de Champlain and the town itself was first incorporated as a permanent English settlement by the Massachusetts Bay Colony less than forty years later in 1642. Gloucester is the oldest continuously operating fishing port in the United States, and for well over 400 years the Cape Ann area of Massachusetts’ North Shore has had a mysterious and haunted history. In 1638 English traveler and writer John Josselyn while on a trip to the New World wrote of the local English settlers and indigenous peoples who lived along Massachusetts North Shore that, “They told me of a sea serpent, or snake, that lay coiled up like a cable upon a rock at Cape Ann.  A boat passed by with two English on board and two Indians.  They would have shot the serpent, but the Indians dissuaded them say...

  The USS Stein , a Knox Class destroyer of the United States Navy, was on a special operations mission in the Pacific Ocean sometime in the summer of 1978. Named after Marine Corps Corporal Tony Stein of Dayton, Ohio who posthumously received the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery in combat during the Battle of Iwo Jima in February 1945, the USS Stein was first launched in December of 1970 and immediately assumed a prominent place among ships in the United States Pacific Fleet. The Stein was unique among vessels at the time because it was equipped with the most state of the art sonar equipment in the world and it was deployed by the Navy to listen for the tell-tale sonar signatures of Soviet nuclear submarines at the height of the Cold War. Somewhere on its mission between Mexico and El Salvador the USS Stein had a terrifying encounter.  Unexpectedly, the ship was felt to rock from side to side and almost instantaneously the ship’s highly advanced sonar equipme...