Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable." - Mark Twain

This is SO good it gets its own dedicated post:

One of the digital books I got to listen to while driving is a series called "Sea Stories." Most of them are excerpts taken from novels including "Two Years Before the Mast" (that's a very good book I need to re-read), "Robinson Crusoe," and "Mutiny on the Bounty."

One of the stories is set on a frigate - a (sailing) ship designed for battle. The officer in charge of the canons had failed to secure the chains (not ropes as in this pic) that hold the canon in place. The canon has to be rolled back into the ship for muzzle loading and then back out for firing. The ropes or chains make that possible. But they also prevent the canon from rolling all the way back across the ship when it recoils after firing.

They weren't in battle but the ship in this story did get into some high seas. Because the canon wasn't secured it started rolling all around the lower deck as the ship pitched on the waves.

The larger of these canons weighs tons, so several thousand pounds is rapidly moving in erratic and unpredictable ways all over the deck. Three sailors were killed as the great beast slammed against them, sometimes pinning them against the hull. That hull was broken open when the rapidly moving multi-ton canon slammed against it.

How do you stop it? When you can't predict where it's going to roll next, when it rolls so fast, and because it weighs so much no man can stop it. No sailor dares get close enough to it to...do what? How does a man stop a 4,000 pound block of cast iron flying unpredictably across a pitching ship's deck?

So why is this incident so cool that it gets its own blog post?
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Wait for it!
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This is where we get the expression loose canon.