Coincidences

Poking around last night for something to blog about today, I visited this great website Historivision, which caters to short attention spans and offers Ripleyesque content, and the post entitled "The Strangest Coincidence Ever Recorded?" Having blogged about coincidences before, I had a listen and suggest that you do, too. It's an amazing story about 3 shipwrecks decades apart (1664, 1785, and 1820) in the same location - each with a lone survivor of the identical name. When I searched for further information about these wrecks, I found that writer and blogger Rick Spilman had published the answers I was looking for a mere 38 minutes earlier. Spilman authenticates the story in his article, "The Unsinkable Hugh Williams – Truth Behind the Legend?," but points out the following:

• The Menai Strait off the coast of Wales (depicted above) was treacherous, but was also frequently travelled. Spilman estimates that some 300 ships went down in the 2 centuries that the story spans and there were probably thousands of victims, increasing the likelihood that some would share the same name.
• "Hugh Williams" is a very common Welsh name.
• The date of the 19th c. shipwreck is in question, with sources indicating a different year (1842) and a conflicting month (August rather than May).

Spilman writes, "So it appears that the video version on the Internet may have been slimmed down and improved a bit." I agree with his conclusion that "It is a good sea story all the same." But perhaps the strangest maritime coincidence - although again the name of the victim is not uncommon - is that covered in my post, Custom of the sea.

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Previous shipwreck-related posts:

Flotsam and jetsom

Going down with the ship

Titanic memorabilia

Submerged steamers

Castaways, real and imagined

Dendochronology

The Raft of the Medusa

Franklin Expedition

Emmett Kelly

The clown persona of Emmett Kelly (1898-1979) was "Weary Willie." When he was in costume, he never cracked a smile. The exception came when he learned of the birth of his daughter Stasia in 1955 - the photograph of him breaking character was seen around the world. A quarter of a century later, his daughter took another look at the old newspaper clipping as she sat in her airline seat waiting to take off to attend her dad's funeral in Florida. "The only time Willie smiled in public, the world smiled with him," she writes. She had just spoken to him on the phone the day before and he told her that moment was one of the happiest in his life. Stasia was grieving quietly when the man who had taken the seat next to her asked if she was okay. She told him that her father had died that day, but the photo she was looking at was taken on the day she was born. She didn't need to explain - he was Frank Beatty, the very man who had taken the photograph!

I heard this story yesterday, when Squire Rushnell was promoting his latest book about coincidences. He calls them "God winks," but we Forteans prefer the term synchronicity.