The American Merchant Mariner’s Memorial in New York, New York

Hidden away in the water off Battery Park is one of the most moving memorials you are ever likely to see. The American Merchant Mariner’s memorial, sculpted by Marisol Escobar in 1991, takes the form of three merchant seamen stranded on a sinking ship, terrified, calling for help and trying to reach the desperate hand of one of their shipmates floundering in the water below.

The sculpture bears the following inscription: "This memorial serves as a marker for America’s merchant mariners resting in the unmarked ocean depths." The monument is based on a true event, the sinking of SS Muskogee by German U-boat 123 on March 22nd, 1942. The Muskogee was sailing from Venezuela to Halifax carrying a cargo of petroleum. Without an escort and unarmed, the Muskogee was hit by a torpedo in her engine room and began to sink within a quarter of an hour, southeast of Bermuda. Ten survivors clung to life rafts in the burning sea as the U-boat surfaced. The submarine captain Reinhard Hardegen took their photograph, and it’s from this, that Escobar based her sculpture. 

What makes the memorial so moving is that the helpless sailor in the water is covered by the Atlantic Ocean with each high tide. His fingertips permanently out of reach to his companions, he drowns twice a day. The plaque next to the memorial makes the striking statue all the more poignant, where we learn that for the crew of the SS Muskogee "left to the perils of the sea, the survivors later perished."