Pacific Vortex: Mutiny on the Bounty and more

The Pacific Ocean

...the voracious appetite of the Pacific.

The Pacific Ocean is the largest of the Earth's oceans. It extends from the Arctic in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, bounded by Asia and Australia in the west, and the Americas in the east.

At 165.2 million square kilometres (63.8 million square miles) the Pacific covers about 46% of the Earth's water surface and about one-third of its total surface area, making it larger than all of the Earth's land area combined.

The equator subdivides it into the North Pacific Ocean and South Pacific Ocean, with two exceptions: the Galápagos and Gilbert Islands, while straddling the equator, are deemed wholly within the South Pacific. The Mariana Trench in the western North Pacific is the deepest point in the world, reaching a depth of 10,911 metres (35,797 ft).

The Pacific Ocean was sighted by Europeans early in the 16th century, first by the Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa, who crossed the Isthmus of Panama in 1513 and named it Mar del Sur (South Sea). Its current name was given by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan during the Spanish expedition of world circumnavigation in 1521, who encountered favourable winds as he reached the ocean and called it Mar Pacifico in Portuguese, meaning "peaceful sea".

The mutiny on the Bounty took place in the Pacific....Pitcairn Island

The mutiny on the British Royal Navy ship HMS Bounty occurred on 28 April 1789. (The movies that have been made dramatizing the story generally take liberty with the facts).

The mutiny was led by Fletcher Christian against the commanding officer, William Bligh. According to most accounts, the sailors were attracted to the idyllic life on the Pacific island of Tahiti and repelled by the harsh treatment of their captain.

On 5 April 1789, after five months in Tahiti, the Bounty set sail with its breadfruit cargo. On 28 April, some 1,300 miles west of Tahiti, near Tonga, mutiny broke out. From all accounts, Fletcher Christian and several of his followers entered Bligh's cabin, which he always left unlocked, awakened him, and pushed him on deck wearing only his nightshirt, where he was guarded by Christian holding a bayonet.

The eighteen mutineers set Captain Bligh and 18 of the 22 crew loyal to him afloat in a small boat. Mutineers then settled on Pitcairn Island or in Tahiti. The Bounty was subsequently burned off Pitcairn Island to avoid detection and to prevent desertion. Descendants of some of the mutineers and Tahitians still live on Pitcairn island.

After Bligh and his crew of 18 made an epic and eventful journey in the small boat to Timor in the Dutch East Indies, he returned to England and reported the mutiny.

Herman Melville's Moby Dick

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, written by American author Herman Melville and first published in 1851, is widely considered to be a Great American Novel and a treasure of world literature. The story tells the adventures of the wandering sailor Ishmael, and his voyage on the whaleship Pequod, commanded by Captain Ahab. Ishmael soon learns that on this voyage Ahab has one purpose, to seek out a specific whale: Moby Dick, a ferocious, enigmatic white sperm whale. In a previous encounter, the whale destroyed Ahab's boat and bit off his leg, which now drives Ahab to take revenge.

The Essex, the only known ship to be sunk by a whale

Two actual events served as the genesis for Melville's tale. One was the sinking of the Nantucket ship Essex in 1820, after it was rammed by a large sperm whale 2,000 miles (3,200 km) from the western coast of South America. First mate Owen Chase, one of eight survivors, recorded the events in his 1821 Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex.

The other event was the alleged killing in the late 1830s of the albino sperm whale Mocha Dick, in the waters off the Chilean island of Mocha. Mocha Dick was rumored to have twenty or so harpoons in his back from other whalers, and appeared to attack ships with premeditated ferocity. One of his battles with a whaler served as subject for an article by explorer Jeremiah N. Reynolds in the May 1839 issue of The Knickerbocker or New-York Monthly Magazine.

So does the Hai Maru, blown to bits when an underwater volcano erupted beneath her hull.
I've been unable to find any record of a ship called the Hai Maru, let alone one destroyed by an underwater volcano.

Only one such incident has ever been reported:
From the New York Times, October 14, 1987: Underwater Volcano Erupts, Shaking Ship of Researchers

An undersea volcano in the south-central Pacific Ocean erupted directly beneath a California-based research vessel on Sunday, causing a fearful clamor as large bubbles of steam and gas shook the ship, bursting under her hull and in the surrounding water.

In a radio-telephone interview yesterday, Dr. Harmon Craig, chief scientist on the research ship Melville, described how one gigantic bubble pushed six feet above the ocean surface and exploded, shooting out jets of gas and exposing in its core a cluster of 20 or 30 volcanic rocks. Rocks Too Hot to Handle

The rocks were so filled with gas that they floated briefly. It was thought risky to place a small boat in the churning water, but the ship was maneuvered close enough to net a football-sized rock. Dr. Craig said he tried to pick it up but it was too hot to handle.

In a message to the ship's base, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, affiliated with the University of California at San Diego, Dr. Craig said bubbles bursting in nearby waters and under the hull made ''horrendous clangs and clamors.''

Such activity, he said in the radio-telephone interview, seemed to support the hypothesis of French seismologists in Tahiti, about 1,000 miles to the northwest, that mysterious rumblings they record from time to time originate from the bursting of bubbles in undersea volcanic eruptions.

The French, who operate seismic stations in the area to monitor atmospheric nuclear explosions at their test center on Mururua island, have long debated the source of these peculiar acoustic waves.

The determination that some originated beyond the southeast end of the Tubai, or Austral island chain, led 10 years ago to the discovery there of the undersea volcano that erupted Sunday, Dr. Craig said. ''It was remarkable that it was discovered exactly 10 years ago,'' he said.

The volcano has become known as the MacDonald Seamount.

A number of oceanographers said yesterday that they could not recall any previous incident in which a ship suddenly found itself in the midst of an undersea eruption. They pointed out that ships have passed areas of discolored water produced by earlier eruptions, and in some cases had intentionally ventured near eruptions that were building new islands.

In 1963 a fishing boat crew observed that the sea had begun to boil south of Iceland. Subsequent eruptions built the island of Surtsey.

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Pacific Vortex, by Clive Cussler. 1982
This annotation comes from the 2010 Bantam Books Mass Market Edition, and from Wikipedia unless otherwise identified.