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
Herbert Haddock Herbert Haddock Herbert James Haddock, CB RNR (27 January 1861 – 4 October 1946) was an English naval reserve officer and ship's captain, and was best known as the captain of the RMS "Olympic" at the time of the sinking of the "Titanic". He was the first person to captain "Titanic," overseeing the ship at Belfast while her delivery-trip crew was assembling there from 25 to 31 March 1912. A 1911 story in "The New York Times" described Haddock as the "only skipper in the Atlantic trade who wears the mid-Victorian mutton chop whiskers without a beard or mustache". Haddock