Seawise Giant

No ship has ever been longer, and none is likely to be. Seawise Giant left Sumitomo's Oppama yard in 1979 already enormous, and her first owner — Hong Kong shipping magnate C.Y. Tung — promptly had her cut open and lengthened to 458.45 metres and 564,763 tonnes deadweight. Fully laden she displaced around 657,000 tonnes, drew nearly 25 metres of water, and needed over nine kilometres to stop. The English Channel was too shallow for her. So was the Suez Canal. So was the Panama Canal, by a factor of ten.

In May 1988, shuttling Iranian crude during the Tanker War, she was attacked by Iraqi aircraft in the Strait of Hormuz, burned, and settled to the bottom in shallow water — the largest ship ever sunk. The story should end there; instead, after the war, she was refloated, towed to Singapore, repaired with 3,700 tonnes of new steel, and returned to service in 1991 as Jahre Viking.

She worked another two decades — the last of them anchored off Qatar as the storage hulk Knock Nevis — before making a final voyage under the name Mont to the beach at Alang, India, where she was broken up in 2010. Her 36-tonne anchor survives at the Hong Kong Maritime Museum. On this site she is the fixed end of the length scale: the ship even the Eiffel Tower, laid on its side, cannot reach past.