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WET & HOT NEWS ! > General Maritime History
News and information about marine history.That ‘New World’ feeling: Nina, Pinta replicas in Winona
The 23 Jul. 2010 at 16:32General Maritime HistoryBy Danielle Wick - La Crosse Tribune
Columbus used the stars. They use GPS. Columbus’ crew slept on deck. They sleep below. Columbus and his men were on the sea for 50 days at time. They dock in a new port every few days.
The Columbus Foundation’s crew on the Pinta and Nina may not suffer as their predecessors did, but their ships are the closest replicas currently sailing the ocean blue — or, for a few weeks this summer, the Mississippi River.
The Pinta and Nina set sail in March from Gulf Shores, Ala., and made 15 stops on their way to dock Thursday afternoon in Winona.
The scale-size Nina has a 65-foot-long deck and is the most accurate copy of Columbus’ beloved ship ever built, according to Archaeology Magazine. Its traveling companion, the Pinta, is a little bit bigger than scale, with an 85-foot-long deck.
“People always ask about pirates,” Pinta senior deckhand Bradley Johnson said. “The ships were covered in tar; so since they’re black, people think they’re sinister.”
Not a single one of the seven crew members is a pirate, but the members do gain their sea legs over time. Volunteer Dave Balog, a retired electrician from Indiana, is on a three-week trip with the ships.
“It wasn’t on my bucket list,” Balog said. “But I didn’t know you could put something like this on the bucket list. When my wife saw (that people could volunteer), she said ‘This is you!’”Malouines, histoire d'un contentieux multiséculaire
The 27 Feb. 2010 at 05:31General Maritime History
Par Catherine Gouëset - L'Express.fr
Alors que la tension monte entre l'Argentine et la Grande-Bretagne après le lancement, par Londres, d'une campagne d'exploration pétrolière au large des Malouines, retour sur les grandes dates de l'archipel, situé à moins de 500 km de la côte argentine.XVIème siècle : l'archipel des Malouines est signalé sur les cartes des explorateurs européens.
1690 : des marins britanniques accostent et nomment les deux principales îles du nom du trésorier de la marine Britannique, le vicomte Falkland. Le nom sera plus tard étendu à l'ensemble de l'archipel.
1764 : le navigateur français Louis-Antoine de Bougainville nomme l'archipel "Malouines" en référence aux marins de Saint-Malo, premiers colons de ces îles.
1765 : les Britanniques s'installent dans l'île de West Falkland, mais ils en sont délogés en 1770 par les Espagnols qui ont acheté la colonie aux Français en 1767.
1820 : l'Argentine, qui a proclamé son indépendance de l'Espagne quatre ans plus tôt, déclare sa souveraineté sur l'archipel.
1831 : le navire américain "Lexington" fait détruire Puerto Soledad après l'arraisonnement de trois navires américains pour un contentieux sur les zones de pêche. les Américains rejettent le droit de Buenos Aires de règlementer les zones de pêche autour des îles malouines.Africatown project locates graves of ex-slaves who survived 1859 shipwreck
The 18 Jan. 2010 at 19:14General Maritime History
By Mark R. Kent - Al.comA Virginia archaeologist is using modern technology to locate and mark gravesites in the older half of Old Plateau Cemetery.
The cemetery is at Bay Bridge Road and Cut-Off Road, near the Cochrane-Africatown Bridge.
Often known as Africatown Cemetery, it is the final resting place for Cudjoe Lewis and 109 other surviving African slaves from the slave ship Clotilde.
On a Sunday in July 1859, the Clotilde, also known as the Clotilda, struck a sandbar the Mobile River. The federal government had outlawed slave importations since 1808, but slavery still was legal in Southern states. The Clotilde was the last ship known to have carried African slaves to the United States.
After the ship's slaves were freed, they founded Africatown in what is now Plateau and Magazine Point.
Read more...A sense of injustice lasting 130 years
The 22 Oct. 2009 at 16:03General Maritime HistoryBy Les Leyne - Times Colonist
George Abbott made his legislature debut as minister of aboriginal relations and reconciliation this week, and one of the first orders of business is a request for an apology.
There's lots to be sorry about in his new job, given how the last two centuries of history have left the original inhabitants of B.C.
And there's one specific incident that has slowly become an issue. Some native people on the west coast of Vancouver Island want the present-day government to atone in some fashion for what now appears to have been an atrocity 130 years ago.
The story, very briefly, is that after a shipwreck, word made its way to Victoria that survivors had been massacred by the Indians.
A gunboat was sent up the coast to investigate.
It shelled a native village and nabbed two suspects, Katkinna and John Anietsachist. They were tried and found guilty in Victoria, then taken back home, baptized en route, and hanged.Cannon balls really could sink ships, study finds
The 16 Jul. 2009 at 06:54General Maritime HistoryFrom LiveScience.com
Long before the Navy used torpedoes, rockets and nuclear missiles to fire at the enemy, ship captains relied on more blunt weapons - cannonballs.
But how effective were cannonballs at sinking battleships ? New research shows that cannon fire could have brought down at least one battleship, a recently discovered 19th-century warship that sank off the coast of Acre, Israel.
The ship's oak hull was unusually thick, leading researchers to question the possibility of cannon ball penetration. Experimental firings of cannons at replicas of wooden warships have been carried out in other countries, but due to the cost and complexity of such experiments, they have been few and far between.In general, they were only firing demonstrations, and scientific data has not always been obtained. So it was still hard to tell for sure whether the cannonballs found in the wreck off the coast of Acre would have been capable of sinking this particular ship.
University of Haifa's Yaacov Kahanov, who studies maritime civilizations and underwater archaeology, developed a unique model along with his colleagues that enabled firing experiments to be carried out on a reduced scale, thereby reducing costs, and enabling controlled, measured and documented experimentation.Five scale models of the ship's hull, based on the archaeological findings, were constructed and fired at using an experimental gun to shoot steel balls at 225-1,100 mph (100-500 meters per second), modeling the cannon fire of the 19th century.
Support for bid to clear pirate
The 24 Jun. 2009 at 07:05General Maritime History
From BBC News
The Scottish Parliament has been asked to support a campaign to clear the name of a captain who was hanged for piracy more than three centuries ago.
Captain William Kidd had been appointed by the Crown to tackle piracy and capture enemy French ships.
In 1698, he looted the Armenian ship the Quedagh Merchant, which was apparently sailing under a French pass. However, the captain of the ship was an Englishman and Capt Kidd was executed in London in 1701.
The Quedagh Merchant had been carrying satins, muslins, gold and silver when she was attacked by Kidd. It is thought that a large amount of the booty belonged to the British East India Company.
As well as the piracy charges, Capt Kidd was accused of murdering one of his crewmen during a row in 1697.Who Went With Columbus? Dental Studies Give Clues
The 19 May. 2009 at 08:50General Maritime HistoryBy Kari Lydersen - the Washington Post
The first planned colonial town in the New World was founded in 1494, when about 1,200 of Christopher Columbus's crew members from the 17 ships that made up his second journey to the Americas settled on the north coast of what is now the Dominican Republic.
Beset by mutiny, mismanagement, hurricanes and disease, the settlement of La Isabela lasted only a few years. The ruins remained largely intact until the 1950s, when a local official reportedly misunderstood the order from dictator Rafael Trujillo to clean up the site in preparation for visiting dignitaries, and had them mostly bulldozed into the sea. Little remained but the skeletons below ground in the church cemetery, which lay undisturbed until excavations began in 1983.
In the past few years, sophisticated chemical studies of the skeletons, especially their teeth, have begun to yield new insights into the lives and origins of Columbus's crew. The studies hint that, among other things, crew members may have included free black Africans who arrived in the New World about a decade before the slave trade began.
La Isabela was not the first settlement established by Columbus. When the Santa Maria ran aground off Hispaniola on Christmas Eve, 1492, during his first voyage, the 39 stranded sailors built a fort they christened La Navidad. When Columbus returned the next year, the fort had been burned and the crew massacred.
The study of the La Isabela skeletons grew out of a project in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, where in 2000 researchers were surprised to find the remains of West Africans among those buried in a mid-16th-century church cemetery in Campeche. Vera Tiesler and Andrea Cucina from the Autonomous University of Yucatan invited T. Douglas Price, director of the Laboratory for Archaeological Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, to do isotopic analysis of those skeletons' teeth.Declassified MI5 file shows nazi spy almost changed course of war
The 03 Mar. 2009 at 17:36General Maritime History
By Michael Evans
A nazi spy came within days of uncovering one of the Allies' most important missions and possibly changing the direction of the Second World War.
The story of a Portuguese wireless operator and the dramatic decision to pluck him from his vessel on the high seas to prevent him from betraying the position of a huge convoy bound for North Africa is revealed for the first time in a declassified MI5 file released by the National Archives.
Gastao de Freitas Ferraz was being paid by German intelligence to send coded messages about convoys to U-boat commanders and was on the tail of the Allied warships.
The convoy included the USS Augusta, an American light cruiser that was carrying no less a person than General George S.Patton. General Patton was at that time in command of Operation Torch, the planned invasion of French North Africa, which was aimed at destroying the Axis forces fighting the British there and improving naval control of the Mediterranean.The 'coffin brig' that sailed the ultimate voyage of discovery
The 12 Feb. 2009 at 14:48General Maritime HistoryBy Peter Davies
A ship that was thought likely to sink became the craft that took Darwin around the world.No one who witnessed the launch of HMS Beagle at Woolwich naval dockyard on the Thames on May 11, 1820, could possibly have imagined that this unremarkable, not to say dowdy, craft was destined to sail into the pages of history on one of the most famous voyages of scientific discovery ever undertaken.
Ships like the Beagle, ten-gun brigs (two-masted square-rigged vessels) displacing barely 250 tonnes - a tenth of the size of Nelson's Victory - were regarded as one of the lowest forms of naval life. Their nickname “coffin brigs” expressed the generally held belief in the Navy that once out at sea in any kind of heavy weather, they shipped unacceptable amounts of water and were highly likely to sink.
Planned as a class of ship for inshore blockading operations as the Napoleonic wars drew to a close, they were produced in droves, but after 1815 no immediate use could be found for them. Beagle never saw action. Instead she spent the first few years of her naval life in reserve, moored afloat.Sailing into history
The 02 Feb. 2009 at 03:45General Maritime History
By John Wilkens
It's one of the most famous ships in history, whose name is memorized by generations of schoolchildren learning about Christopher Columbus, the ocean blue and 1492. The Niña. In the mind's eye, it's a majestic vessel, larger than life, not so much slicing through the water as conquering it.
But those who visit a full-size replica of the ship when it docks in San Diego this week for a 13-day stay will learn the truth: The Niña was a runt.
“People are usually surprised by how small she is,” crewman Vic Bickel said. “The first time I saw the ship, I thought it must be a three-quarter-scale model. But it's not.”
The replica, built by hand with Old World tools and techniques in the late 1980s, is not quite 94 feet long – about one-third the length of San Diego's resident maritime marvel, the Star of India.Like the Star, the Niña is a floating museum, but it rarely stays in one place for long. It has visited hundreds of coastal and inland river ports in the Western Hemisphere in the past 17 years – sometimes drawing protests from people who link Columbus to oppression and genocide. This is the third time it has been to San Diego.