New details of HMS Bounty's last hours battling Hurricane Sandy

[HooptieWagon]

9. The meme is a bunch of romantic rot.

The old sailing ships had little warning when a hurricane approached. They left port and were simply too slow to get out of the way. The Florida coast is littered with Spanish Galleon wrecks caused by hurricanes. Doubloons and pieces of eight still wash up on beaches after storms.
Modern Navy ships can do 40 knots, they can be over 1000 miles away with 48 hours warning. Ships like the Bounty are not only slow, but the weight and windage of the old-fashioned spars and rigging combined with internal ballast (meaning the ballast is in the hull, not in a keel below the hull) means they have marginal stability characteristics. Quite an alarming number, considering how few there are, have capsized and sunk in storms over the past several decades...usually with loss of life.
The whole reason Lloyds of London was formed was because so many sailing ships sunk that no ship-owner would send a ship on a voyage without insurance covering ship and cargo.