Maritime disasters can happen during either war or peace, but either way the loss in terms of human lives hits hard.

A bomb, an explosion, a torpedo, a missile, an iceberg, no matter the cause, each translates into a statistic, the number of men and women whose lives were cut short.

On February 15, 1898, the American battleship, the Maine, exploded in Havana, Cuba’s harbor, killing 260 U.S. Navy sailors. Americans blamed the Spanish, who owned and controlled Cuba then, but no one since has determined the explosion’s actual cause.

The result though was that the Americans declared war on...