Tell me something historically interesting about ships

Tell me something historically interesting about ships.

The most popular WW2 era botes were shit.
>iowas - shitty tds
>bismarcks - basically a ww1 design
>hms hood - haphazardly cobbled together monstrosity that should had been scrapped on the slipway alongside her sisters
>yamatos - shit aa, poor tds, antique firecontrol systems
>kongos - people only like these obsolete battlecruisers because of wows and kc
>uss enterprise - decent treaty carrier but an even bigger meme than yamato

>Implying you will ever get close enough to an Iowa to torpedo it.
>Implying that the Essex class carrier wasn't the most iconic vessel of the war.

>WW2

OP said he wanted something interesting.

Emile Bertin was rejected by the French design establishment for being a loony (The french then went on to make absolutely atrocious pre-dreadnoughts even into the dreadnought era, but that's neither here nor there.). He then went to Japan, where he convinced them to make the Matsushima class cruisers, defined by their single 12.6 inch main gun (Matsushima herself had it aft-mounted(!), the other two had it bow mounted), heavy forward torpedo armament, and absolutely atrocious performance in combat that led him to be kicked out by the Japs after the first Sino-Japanese War, where the IJN beat the shit out of the Chinese navy despite their shit ship designs and lack of proper heavy ships (because Bertin convinced them that fast, heavily armed (one 12.6 is heavily armed, right?) cruisers would easily defeat the slow, vulnerable, battleships.

The Jeune Ecole were a funny lot.

Not the actual ship, but at the Battle of Trafalgar one of the captured Spanish ships had a crew member dressed entirely in a Harlequin outfit. He was an actor that had been press-ganged after a performance the night before.

They weren't capable of sailing to Sardinia up until right after the Renaissance

I don't know if it's just because it involves my country or not, but it was very interesting to find out about the controversy behind the Minas Geraes-class battleships. Basically two dreadnoughts commissioned by the Brazilian government and built in the United Kingdom in the early 1900s, making Brazil the third country in the world to actually have dreadnoughts in its navy, which simultaneously instantaneously rendered every other navy in South America obsolete and sent the Great Powers into a frenzy because everyone was suspecting that the Brazilian government was merely serving as a front for the transaction and that the ship would actually be delivered to a third party upon completion. So the British were accusing the Americans, who were accusing the Germans, who were accusing the Japanese, who if is to be believed were at the time trying to figure out how to actually build a boat the right way.

The ships then proceeded to sit in harbor doing absolutely nothing of relevance for the next fifty or so years, except for having its collective crew rise in a mutiny in 1910 [the exact same year in which both ships were delivered to Brazil], by which point there was no other power left in the entirety of South America capable of stopping them.

I could be wrong, but I thought they were used in some of the convoy protection duties in WW2.

They used to pour sand on the decks of a warship before battle which would absorb the blood and water that spilled, so that sailors wouldn't slip running across the ship.