Unless a ship sinks, ships are rarely discussed. Ships have been the drivers of human migrations, economy, trade, and culture for thousands of years, but we don’t pay them much attention. They simply go about their business, ruling the planet in silence.

The month of March 2021 was an outlier. It was a time when a ship became trapped and virtually the entire world took notice. And what a location to become stuck in.

On March 23, 2021, the Ever Given, one of the world’s largest container ships, became caught in the Suez Canal, and since the Suez Canal is so narrow, the stopped ship blocked the Canal. That was it; a ship had become stranded, and a large portion of global trade had come to a halt. That’s when the rest of the world took notice.

It wasn’t all the fault of the poor giant. A sandstorm occurred just as the ship was crossing the Canal, and the ship went aground on a sandbank due to a strong gust of wind.

The Suez Canal is responsible for 12% of global trade, therefore it’s a terrible place to get stalled. According to estimates, the block was holding up items worth $9.6 billion dollars every day, or $400 million per hour.

The ship became the world’s favourite news and meme fodder of the year while trapped. After all, history isn’t written by well-behaved, disciplined ships.

To liberate the 200,000-ton cargo ship, it needed every tugboat in the area, a large number of ocean salvage specialists, and a lot of effort. However, before the ship was released, a little excavator became well-known.

For a long time, the image of hope, determination, and efforts will remain the little boy digging up sand to refloat the Goliath ship looming before it.

The ship sparked some of the year’s best and most inventive memes.

There’s a website where you can have Ever Given become trapped wherever you want it to get stuck. Why should the Suez Canal have all the fun? The cleverly named website ‘Ever Given Ever Ywhere’ allows you to stick Ever Given everywhere.

After nearly a week, Ever Given was eventually let free. While the Canal was closed, Egyptian authorities proclaimed a state of emergency. They had even filed a billion-dollar lawsuit against the shipowners. Ever Given was stranded, not literally, but legally, in the Great Bitter Lake for months after being refloated while the court dispute raged on.

The ship was finally liberated in July, and it crossed the Canal again in August this year, happily without being trapped. After arriving at the UK’s Felixstowe port on December 27, the world-famous ship has safely crossed the canal a couple of times and is now in the North Sea. It is now en route to Hamburg, Germany.

The Suez Canal is the shortest shipping route between the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, measuring around 120 miles long. It connects the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean and is extremely important since, without it, ships would have to circumnavigate the whole African continent before reaching the Indian Ocean, as they did until 1869.

Ever Given got trapped, providing us with some much-needed relief from the Covid pandemic’s never-ending doom. For once, we weren’t talking about mortality, diseases, infections, or hospitals. In other ways, the ship symbolised how the world must keep moving forward, despite the fact that the epidemic is merely a sandbank. It can only slow us down, not stop us.

Let us all hope that global trade will continue unabated in 2022 and that no ships will become stranded.