You Can Be Anything › All careers › Transportation & Logistics
Merchant Mariner
Works on commercial ships — operating engines, navigating, and maintaining vessels at sea.
Did you know?
Deep-sea merchant mariners are usually hired for voyages lasting several months, living and working aboard the ship the whole time.
How subjects help
- Physics: Understand how the ship's engine turns fuel into power that spins the propeller.
- Mathematics: Calculate fuel use and cargo weight so the ship is never overloaded.
- Geography: Steer by charts, tides and currents when sailing across open ocean between ports.
- Engineering: Fix pumps, pipes and generators far out at sea where there is no repair shop.
A famous name
Joseph Conrad: Spent almost 20 years in the merchant navy, rising to captain, before becoming a famous novelist.
Try it yourself: Make a grid-reference treasure hunt
- Draw a bird's-eye map of one room or your garden. Rule a grid over it and number the columns along the bottom and the rows up the side.
- Mark a few landmarks, like the door or the sofa, and add an arrow showing north.
- Hide the object somewhere easy to reach, then write its grid reference: the column number first ("along the corridor"), then the row number ("up the stairs").
- Hand over only the map and the grid reference. Did your searcher find it straight away? If not, what would make your map clearer?
Ship officers and harbour pilots plot their position on charts using grid lines, so everyone on the bridge can say exactly where the ship is.
Adapted from Royal Geographical Society: Map skills: Year Six.
Also try: Make a sauce-packet submarine.
Known for it in
Greece, Norway, Philippines, UK, Denmark