Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we've got our brave Captain to thank:
(So the crew would protest)that he's bought us the best-
A perfect and absolute blank!This was charming, no doubt; but they shortly found out
That the Captain they trusted so well
Had only one notion for crossing the ocean,
And that was to tingle his bell.
Christopher Monckton of Benchley had an article on WUWT, asking the question,
Is the Reuters news
agency committing fraud?.
A question to which Betteridge's law of headlines gives the answer.
This has been dissected at Hot Whopper, and I don't have anything to add, but I was intrigued by a typically Mittyesque anecdote he throws in for little reason.
Grockling All Over The World
I once saved the owners of the swank rent-a-suite megaship The World from losing a fortune when her otherwise perfectly sane skipper had conceived the notion of sailing her through the North-West Passage, and had sold them on the idea.
The World was lying in Fremantle at the time. My lovely wife and I were spending a few days aboard. We were grockling all over the ship when, by mistake, we stumbled into the skipper's day cabin, where he and his brother officers were merrily laying plans to penetrate the North-West Passage.
The World is certainly a swanky ship.
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To quote their own website:
The largest private residential ship on the planet, The World is home to only 165 Residences. Residents & Guests spend extensive time exploring the most exotic and well-traveled destinations, and return onboard to a lifestyle that exists nowhere else on earth.
...
With only 165 individual Homes, The World's Residents enjoy one of the most exclusive lifestyles imaginable. Not only do Residents own their individual Residences, but collectively, they own the ship, ensuring that the experiences – both onboard and off – are far beyond current luxury travel standards.
Monckton doesn't give a date for this story, nor does he explain how he came to be aboard this swank rent-a-suite megaship
.
The most likely date is February 2012, when The World was in Fremantle and had planned to sail the Northwest Passage,
as this archive from the start of 2012 shows.
Given the exclusivity of the ship it seems reasonable to assume that Monckton was on board as a guest of one of the owners; possibly Gina Rinehart, who had financed Monckton's controversial lecture tour of Australia the previous year.
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi
Monckton concludes:
The skipper took us up to the bridge and, with that faraway gleam in his eye that bespeaks the adventurer, told us all about his idea. I called up the University of Illinois' global and Arctic sea-ice data on the ship's computer and gave the skipper a short lecture on the very few occasions over the previous century or two when the North-West Passage had been open.
The Arctic, I said, was unpredictable, wherefore he should not be too ready to join the True-Believers in subscribing to every barmy but transiently fashionable dogma of the New Religion. He saw at once that the thing was impossible and cabled the owners to tell them to think again.
Like most of Monckton's stories this seems highly implausible.
The idea that the captain of the ship would abandon a cruise that had been advertised over a year in advance
on the say-so of a single eccentric English man,
the idea that going through the Northwest Passage was the dream of a temporarily insane captain,
the idea that cancelling a planned excursion would save the owners
any money, let alone a fortune.
(Bearing in mind the residents are the owners.)
But the most obvious problem with this story is that far from cancelling the planned journey, The World successfully sailed through the Northwest passage, as planned 6 months after Monckton's interference.
Setting sail from Nome, Alaska, U.S. on 18 Aug 2012 and reaching Nuuk, Greenland on 12 Sept 2012, the ship became the largest passenger vessel to transit the Northwest Passage. The ship, carrying 481 passengers and crew, for 26 days and 4,800 nautical miles at sea, followed in the path of Captain Roald Amundsen, the first sailor to complete the journey in 1906.
Here's a video of the attempt:
So how could Monckton have saved the owners a fortune persuading the captain to abandon the journey,
when it made the journey in any case?
It's possible everything Monckton said was true, but after the Captain cabled the owners to tell them to think again
,
they told him to stick to the plan.
Or more plausibly the Captain was just humoring Monckton when he said the thing was impossible
-
having realized this was the only way to get the Monckton to stop bothering him.
What's telling about Monckton is that four years later he's still telling this story, blissfully unaware that his meddling made no difference to the fate of the World.
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