climbed onto the bridge of the nuclear submarine Starbuck
Cussler probably named the Starbuck after the Starbuck of Herman Melville's Moby Dick (which may also have been the origina of the name for the character in the play The Rainmaker), but that novel was published in 1851.
Where did Melville get the name?
The Starbuck family were a group of whalers operating out of Nantucket, Massachusetts from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Some members of the family gained wider exposure due to their discovery of various islands in the Pacific Ocean.
The two most prominent explorers in the family:
Valentine Starbuck - born in 1791
Obed Starbuck - 1797- 1882
(Starbucks, the coffee shop people, was indeed named after Melville's Starbuck.)
capable of cruising at one hundred twenty-five knots...two thousand feet beneath the sunlit surface.
Although the Starbuck was supposed to be the newest and most advanced sub afloat, Cussler was really exaggerating the speed of this submarine. The contemporary Los Angeles class attack subs (first built in 1972, last one built in 1996, could only go about 22 knots (about 23 miles per hour)-submerged. Today's attack class submarines (the Virginia-class) can't go much faster.
The knot (pronounced not) is a unit of speed equal to one nautical mile (which is defined as 1.852 km) per hour, approximately 1.151 mph. Etymologically, the term knot derives from counting the number of knots that unspooled from the reel of a chip log in a specific time.
1,852 m is the length of the internationally-agreed nautical mile. The U.S. adopted the international definition in 1954, having previously used the U.S. nautical mile (1,853.248 m).[5] The U.K. adopted the international nautical mile definition in 1970, having previously used the U.K. Admiralty nautical mile (6,080 ft [1,853.184 m]).
The speeds of vessels relative to the fluids in which they travel (boat speeds and air speeds) are measured in knots. For consistency, the speeds of navigational fluids (tidal streams, river currents and wind speeds) are also measured in knots. Thus, speed over the ground (SOG) (ground speed (GS) in aircraft) and rate of progress towards a distant point ("velocity made good", VMG) are also given in knots.
The Starbuck was like a thoroughbred jumper
The Thoroughbred is a horse breed best known for its use in horse racing. Although the word thoroughbred is sometimes used to refer to any breed of purebred horse, it technically refers only to the Thoroughbred breed. Thoroughbreds are considered "hot-blooded" horses, known for their agility, speed and spirit.
The Thoroughbred as it is known today was developed in 17th and 18th-century England, when native mares were crossbred with imported Oriental stallions of Arabian, Barb, and Turkoman breeding. All modern Thoroughbreds can trace their pedigrees to three stallions originally imported into England in the 17th century and 18th century, and to a larger number of foundation mares of mostly English breeding. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the Thoroughbred breed spread throughout the world; they were imported into North America starting in 1730 and into Australia, Europe, Japan and South America during the 19th century. Millions of Thoroughbreds exist today, and more than 118,000 foals are registered each year worldwide.
Thoroughbreds are used mainly for racing, but are also bred for other riding disciplines such as show jumping, combined training, dressage, polo, and fox hunting. They are also commonly crossbred to create new breeds or to improve existing ones, and have been influential in the creation of the Quarter Horse, Standardbred, Anglo-Arabian, and various warmblood breeds.
Thoroughbred racehorses perform with maximum exertion, which has resulted in high accident rates and health problems such as bleeding from the lungs, low fertility, abnormally small hearts and a small hoof to body mass ratio. There are several theories for the reasons behind the prevalence of accidents and health problems in the Thoroughbred breed, and research continues.
The Department of Underwater Warfare ordered the trials to be conducted
This is a fictional title - for the United States it's called the Naval Undersea Warfare Center.
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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.
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