On December 8th Mexican authorities said they would intervene to support it by auctioning $200m on days when it sinks by at least 1.5% against the dollar.
But if a ship is fatally holed below the waterline, can you prevent it sinking by giving it a new name?
After exposing his ship to German torpedo fire ("That's going to kill an awful lot of chaps," he recalled thinking as he saw the metal streaking toward him), Mountbatten finally saw it sunk by German dive-bombers off the coast of Crete.
Diana Preston's panorama of the "epic tragedy" of the Lusitania is enlarged by her picture of bustling life aboard the liner before it sank, and by her following pages on the hard, wet, crowded, dangerous existence within a German submarine, where a man off duty was expected to sleep in order to conserve the common oxygen.
The British attempted to tow the crippled vessel to a friendly port; however, the next day, it sank, scuttled by Jervis.
Efforts to contain the damage from the burning rig became profoundly more complicated when it sank, leaving a one-by-five-mile sheen of what the authorities said was "crude oil mix".
If it sank or was taken by pirates, its subscribers could end up with huge losses.
In 1854, he and his wife and daughter Mary, who had just finished her studies abroad, went down with the steamer Arctic when it sank after being rammed by another ship.
And how can Brazilian and foreign firms, from lipstick-makers to investment banks, take advantage of the country's new stability?To see why Brazil currently seems so exciting to both Brazilians and foreigners, it helps to understand just how deep it had sunk by the early 1990s.
It was, in fact, a useful mantra -- until it was sunk by the potential anti-women interpretation of the word "rare".
