The Piper Maru was a French salvage ship that found the remains of a P-51 Mustang in the Pacific Ocean and inadvertently rediscovered the black oil. The name of the Piper Maru is a curious hybrid of English and Japanese that roughly translates as the "SS Piper". Maru is Japanese for "ship". Piper is either a job name meaning a bagpipe-player, the scientific name for a genus of plant (Piper), the common name (Sandpiper) for a family of birds (Scolopacidae), or the common name (New Zealand Piper) of a species of fish (Hyporhamphus ihi).