Famous Ships Trivia
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99 free Famous Ships trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Some ships outlive their voyages. The Titanic is still the most famous wreck on Earth, HMS Victory has been in commission for over 240 years, and a container ship called Ever Given stopped 12 percent of world trade for six days by getting stuck sideways. These ship trivia questions and answers cover the liners, warships, explorers' vessels and infamous wrecks of maritime history: Columbus's Santa María, Drake's Golden Hind, Darwin's Beagle, the Bounty and the Mary Celeste, Bismarck and USS Missouri, Vasa, Endurance, Kon-Tiki and the modern giants. Every answer is sourced and explained.
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Q 01From which port did the Titanic depart on her maiden voyage in April 1912?
Southampton
Southampton: as Titanic pulled away, the liner New York's mooring ropes snapped, and a collision was only narrowly avoided.
Q 02Who led the Franco-American expedition that found the Titanic wreck on 1 September 1985?
Robert Ballard
Robert Ballard found Titanic lying in two main pieces, proving she broke apart as she sank instead of going down intact, as long assumed.
Q 03Which company employed Titanic's two wireless operators?
Marconi
Marconi employed them: Jack Phillips and Harold Bride worked for the Marconi International Marine Communication Company, not the White Star Line. Phillips died in the sinking; Bride survived and later testified.
Q 04Which Cunard liner picked up more than 700 Titanic survivors from the lifeboats?
Carpathia
Carpathia's engineers cut the ship's heating and hot water to send every bit of steam to the engines, and she was later sunk by a U-boat in 1918.
Q 05The Lusitania sank in just 18 minutes in 1915; off which country's coast did she go down?
Ireland
Ireland: she went down off the Old Head of Kinsale, and though a passenger liner, she was also carrying rifle ammunition in her cargo.
Q 06As of 2025, which warship, first commissioned in 1778, is the world's oldest naval vessel still in commission?
HMS Victory
HMS Victory was Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar, where a French sharpshooter on the Redoutable shot him on her deck and he died hours later.
Q 07As of 2025, which American frigate, launched in 1797, is the oldest commissioned warship still afloat?
USS Constitution
USS Constitution earned the nickname Old Ironsides in 1812, when many of HMS Guerriere's shots reportedly bounced harmlessly off her hull.
Q 08Which leaky ship sailed with the Pilgrims in 1620 but turned back?
Speedwell
Speedwell leaked so badly that her voyage was scrapped, and some of her passengers squeezed aboard the other ship for the crossing.
Q 09What agreement did the Pilgrims and 'strangers' sign aboard ship before going ashore in 1620?
The Mayflower Compact
The Mayflower Compact was needed because they had landed outside Virginia's territory, and some 'strangers' argued no one there could command them.
Q 10Which naturalist sailed around the world on HMS Beagle's second voyage?
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin was only 22 and expecting to become a parson when he sailed, and he spent over three years of the voyage exploring on land.
Q 11HMS Endeavour carried James Cook to Tahiti to observe which event in 1769?
The transit of Venus
The transit of Venus was not the voyage's only goal: Cook also searched for a great southern continent, and found New Zealand was two islands, not that land.
Q 12What cargo was HMS Bounty sent to the Pacific to collect before the 1789 mutiny?
Breadfruit plants
Breadfruit plants: Bounty was to carry breadfruit saplings from Tahiti to the West Indies as cheap food for enslaved people, until the 1789 mutiny.
Q 13Where did the Bounty mutineers burn the ship in 1790?
Pitcairn Island
Pitcairn Island: the mutineers set Bounty ablaze there in January 1790, probably so that Royal Navy searchers could not spot her.
Q 21The Cutty Sark is named after a character in which poet's work?
Robert Burns
Robert Burns's witch Nannie wears only a 'cutty sark', a short shirt, in Tam o' Shanter, and the clipper later gave up China tea for Australian wool.
Q 22Since 1954 the Cutty Sark has been displayed in dry dock in which part of London?
Greenwich
Greenwich has been her home in dry dock since 1954, and she survived a 2007 fire during restoration before reopening in 2012.
Q 23Brunel's SS Great Britain of 1843 was the first big ocean-going ship to pair an iron hull with what?
A screw propeller
A screw propeller: she was the first big ocean ship to pair one with an iron hull, and after being scuttled in the Falklands she was towed home to Bristol in 1970.
Q 14Which British warship did the Bismarck destroy in May 1941, triggering a massive Royal Navy pursuit?
HMS Hood
HMS Hood blew up in the Denmark Strait with only three survivors, and the hunt that followed ended with Bismarck sunk three days later.
Q 15What kind of aircraft crippled the Bismarck's steering?
Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers
Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers from Ark Royal jammed her rudder, so British battleships were able to catch her the next morning.
Q 16Columbus's flagship Santa María met what fate in 1492?
Ran aground off Hispaniola
She ran aground off Hispaniola on Christmas Day 1492, and Columbus used her timbers to build a fort he named La Navidad.
Q 17What was the original name of Francis Drake's ship the Golden Hind?
Pelican
Pelican was renamed Golden Hind in 1578 to honour Drake's patron Sir Christopher Hatton, whose family crest was a golden hind.
Q 18Which Swedish warship capsized on her 1628 maiden voyage and was raised in 1961?
Vasa
Vasa's sinking led to an inquiry to find those responsible, but in the end no one was punished for the disaster.
Q 19Henry VIII's warship Mary Rose sank in 1545 in which strait?
The Solent
The Solent took her as Henry VIII watched from the shore, and one survivor blamed open gunports that let the sea pour in as she heeled.
Q 20Which English city displays the raised hull of Henry VIII's warship Mary Rose?
Portsmouth
Portsmouth's Historic Dockyard shows the hull, which after its 1982 raising was sprayed for years with a preservative to stop its waterlogged timbers shrinking and cracking.
Q 24Which steamship laid the first lasting transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866?
Great Eastern
Great Eastern was by far the biggest ship of her day, but she lost money carrying passengers before finding her calling laying cable.
Q 25Shackleton's Endurance was crushed by pack ice and sank in which sea in November 1915?
Weddell Sea
The Weddell Sea's pack ice trapped and crushed Endurance, yet all 28 men survived after escaping in the ship's boats to Elephant Island.
Q 26Which explorer's lost ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, were finally found in the Canadian Arctic?
John Franklin
John Franklin's ships vanished while seeking the Northwest Passage, and Inuit testimony later helped searchers locate the wrecks.
Q 27Thor Heyerdahl's 1947 raft Kon-Tiki was built mainly from what?
Balsa logs
Balsa logs, lashed together with rope, carried the raft for 101 days before it struck a reef in the Tuamotus.
Q 28Kon-Tiki's voyage aimed to show people from which continent could have settled Polynesia?
South America
South America: the voyage showed the crossing was possible, but it could not prove anyone had made it, and many scholars disagreed with Heyerdahl's theory.
Q 29The Japanese surrender ending World War II was signed on the deck of which US battleship?
USS Missouri
USS Missouri hosted the ceremony in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945, and the 'Mighty Mo' is now a museum ship at Pearl Harbor, where America's war began.
Q 30Which Pearl Harbor battleship lost 1,177 men when a bomb detonated her magazine?
Arizona
Arizona was left where she sank, beneath a memorial whose marble wall bears the names of all those killed aboard her.