Tag: maritime history

So much going on this past week. Oh, and Happy Halloween!

Perhaps, now that things are finally starting to calm down somewhat (and I am getting some sleep), I can get back to posting regularly on here.  It has been an eventful week.

First, a hearty congratulations to my nephew Will, who earned his Eagle Scout rank this week.  He worked hard for it, and deserves a lot of credit for being a pretty disciplined young man.  He was also fortunate to get a lot of support from friends and family, especially his mom (my sister Liz) and his dad (my brother-in-law Dan).   He’ll be off for college next year.  Eeek, I am old.

Continue reading “So much going on this past week. Oh, and Happy Halloween!”

Autumn in New England

It has been kind of strange that we had such a dry, warm September, and there have been some warm days in October too.  But I think you can’t deny that fall has finally arrived in Greater Boston.

Continue reading “Autumn in New England”

Another maritime mystery closer to being solved

The Canadian government announced yesterday that it had discovered one of the lost ships from Franklin’s Expedition, the British Arctic exploration voyage led by Captain Sir John Franklin that disappeared in the 1840s.  While it is still unknown whether the shipwreck is that of HMS Erebus or HMS Terror, it is pretty clear that one of the two vessels has been found by an remotely operated underwater vehicle using side-scan sonar.

Continue reading “Another maritime mystery closer to being solved”

Well-preserved wreck in Baltic Sea to be explored

The 16th century Swedish shipwreck Mars the Magnificent will now be explored thanks to a grant by the National Geographic Society.  Like similar wrecks (the Vasa comes to mind immediately) the wreck of the Mars is expected to yield all sorts of artifacts and give historians and archaeologists a detailed view of what is a fairly famous ship in the history of Sweden.

Continue reading “Well-preserved wreck in Baltic Sea to be explored”

Quick trip to New Bedford today

Kelly and I decided to take a quick road trip down to the South Coast to New Bedford so we could catch the Charles W. Morgan before she left.  It also gave us the chance to stop in at New Bedford Antiques at the Cove, one of our favorite antique malls anywhere and definitely one of our favorite places on the South Coast.

Continue reading “Quick trip to New Bedford today”

Two historic ships on this stormy day

Two gorgeous old historic ships are in the news this week.  Both of them were built here in Massachusetts (although more than 40 years apart), both of them are among the last surviving examples of classic American wooden shipbuilding, and both of them are ships I have visited more than once over the years.  One is the oldest vessel in the United States Navy, and the other is the last surviving wooden whaling ship in the world.

Continue reading “Two historic ships on this stormy day”

A quick note on wine in ASOIAF/GoT

I have been thinking a lot about what I am going to make for my planned Dornish meal to honor the late Prince Oberyn Martell.  I haven’t tried doing any Dornish stuff yet, and I wanted to try since it all sounds so tasty.  Originally I wanted to do something before the big showdown with the Mountain.  The perfect time has passed,  I know, but I just didn’t have time to do it last weekend with all the server surgery.

The Red Viper also got me thinking about wine.  Especially those magnificent Dornish wines that get mentioned so frequently in the books.

Continue reading “A quick note on wine in ASOIAF/GoT”

The relevancy of technology and underwater archaeology

The ability of human beings to work in an underwater environment has obviously improved pretty dramatically in the last few decades, and our ability to find the wrecks of vessels like the Titanic in thousands of feet of water many decades later is pretty amazing when you think about it.

But there is still a long way to go when it comes to underwater searches.  The problems with locating that missing Malaysian Air flight immediately come to mind, but there have been a few other examples lately that make me wonder what the hell we are doing wrong and what we could do to improve.

We seem to have a widespread problem of not finding people in (relatively) shallow waters like lakes, ponds, rivers, and creeks.

Continue reading “The relevancy of technology and underwater archaeology”

Today is Four Chaplains Day

On February 3rd, 1943, a small convoy named SG-19 was making its way across the Atlantic to Greenland from New York.  It consisted of the United States Army Transport Dorchester and two smaller merchant vessels, the SS Lutz and the SS Biscaya, escorted by three Coast Guard cutters: Tampa, Escanaba and Comanche.  Somewhere off the coast of Newfoundland at about 12:55 AM that morning, a German submarine torpedoed the Dorchester, knocking out her power as well as opening up her hull to the sea.  Below decks were hundreds of young American servicemen, many of them on their first ocean voyage.  They had been instructed to leave their life preservers on in case of attack, but the heat of the ship’s boilers and engines led many of them to take the jackets off.  And with the loss of power they were all suddenly in the dark.

Among the personnel on board were four Army Chaplains, all First Lieutenants: George Fox (a Methodist);  Alexander Goode (Reform-Rabbi); Clark Poling (Dutch Reformed);  and John Washington (a Roman Catholic priest).  The four had become fast friends at the Army Chaplains School on the Harvard University campus, right here in Cambridge.

Continue reading “Today is Four Chaplains Day”

Tacloban, Samar Island, and two very different storms

After more than a week, many survivors of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines are still struggling to get basics like food, water and shelter.  And places like Samar, Leyte, and Tacloban are now getting mentioned in the news all over the world.  Samar and Leyte seem to have been hit the worst from the typhoon.

I know these place names.  Not because I have ever been there (I haven’t), but because of their famous place in history – specifically, in the fall of 1944, when the Allied invasion of the Japanese-occupied Philippines led to what was the largest naval battle in all of World War Two, and possibly the largest in recorded human history.

Continue reading “Tacloban, Samar Island, and two very different storms”