Captain Haddock Hergé thought this was a perfect name for Tintin’s new mariner friend, and so Captain Haddock was born. There was a real 20th-century ship's master bearing this unlikely but appropriate surname: Captain Herbert Haddock had been the skipper of the famous White Star Line's passenger vessel "Olympic". He had also been temporarily at the helm of Olympic's even more famous sister ship "Titanic" before "Titanic" was officially handed over to White Star for her doomed 1912 maiden voyage. Another famous namesake, and a possible inspiration for the Captain's ancestor Sir Francis, was the English admiral Richard Haddock, a veteran of
Unicorn (ship) Unicorn (ship) The Unicorn () is a fictional 17th-century three-masted armed Royal Navy vessel appearing in "The Adventures of Tintin", the comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé. The ship plays a leading role in both "The Secret of the Unicorn" and "Red Rackham's Treasure", published in 1943 and 1944, respectively. The "Unicorn" also appears in the 2011 film adaptation "". In the "Tintin" adventures, the "Unicorn" is the setting of a battle between pirates and sailors followed by a duel between its captain, Sir Francis Haddock (an ancestor of Captain Haddock) and the pirate Red Rackham. The "Unicorn" is scuttled