Some Sailing History in the Present

I went to the 14th Downrigging Weekend event at Chestertown, Maryland on Sunday, November 3. It was a bit chilly and windy on the river so not all the ships\boats went out for the morning sail and none of them let out all their sails, but it was bright and sunny. Below are photos of some of the boats that participated. All of these vessels are involved in educational programs. I've linked the names of the ships\boats (in bold) to their websites. This event is near the end of the sailing season, so look for them again in the spring.  Except for the Kalmar Nyckel, the rest of the vessels do represent something of a history of sail on the Chesapeake from the late 1700's to the early 1900s.

Kalmar Nyckel

Kalmar Nyckel

Recreation of a three masted square rigged gun-armed merchant ship or "Dutch Pinnace"

Original was built around 1625 in Holland and carried the first Swedish settlers to the Delaware River in 1638. And it made three more successful trans-Atlantic voyages.

Original had 12 six pound cannons and 2 swivel guns

Reproduction built in 1997

Sparred length 141 feet

Rig Height 105 feet

168 Gross Tons

Draft 12 feet 5 inches

Home port is Wilmington Delaware

Sultana

Sultana

Recreation of a topsail schooner 

Original was built in Boston in 1767 and purchased by the British Navy in 1768 and sailed the Atlantic coast preventing smuggling and collecting duties for four years, enforcing the "tea tax"

Original had 8  1/2 pound swivel guns

Reproduction built in 2001

Sparred length is 97 feet
Rig Height 70 feet

43 Gross Tons

Draft 8 feet

Home port is Chestertown, Maryland

Pride of Baltimore II

Pride of Baltimore II

Recreation of a topsail schooner known as a "Baltimore Clipper". A number of such ships served as privateers in the War of 1812 The first recreation, the Pride of Baltimore was lost at sea in a storm in 1986.

The Chasseur, one of the more famous Baltimore Clippers had 16  12 pound cannons

Reproduction built in 1988

Sparred length 170 feet
Rig Height 107 feet
97 Gross Tons
Draft 12 feet 4 inches
Home port is Baltimore, Maryland

Schooner Virginia

Schooner Virginia

Recreation of a two masted, gaff topsail schooner, the last pure sailing vessel used by the Virginia Pilot Association to train pilots in the Chesapeake Bay between 1917 and 1926. It was the first tall ship built on the Norfolk waterfront in 80 years.
Reproduction built in 2004
Sparred length 126 feet
Rig Height 112 feet
98 Gross Tons
Draft 12 ft 3in
Home port is Norfolk, Virgina

Lady Maryland

Lady Maryland
Recreation of a Pungy Schooner, a two mated gaff-rigged schooner. They were built originally between the mid to late 1800's. The name is believed to derive from the Pungoteague region of Accomack County, Virginia, where the design was developed in the 1840's. They were use for in oystering and carrying cargo like watermelons, tomatoes, fish, peaches, grain, mail and lumber. She is the only Pungy Schooner in the world.
Reproduction built in 1985
Sparred length 104 feet
Rig Height 92 feet
60 Gross Tons
Draft 7 ft 6 in
Home port is Baltimore, Maryland

Skipjack Sigsbee

Sigsbee
I don't have my own good picture of the Sigsbee because I was on her when I took the other pictures. Sigsbee was originally built in 1901 and dredged oysters for 88 years. She is named for Charles Sigsbee, the commanding officer of the USS Maine, sunk in Havana harbor in 1898. Sigsbee was the first skipjack captained by a woman in the early 1980s.
Built in 1901
Sparred length 75 feet
Rig Height 65 feet
25 Gross Tons
Draft 3 ft
Home port Baltimore, Maryland

Jim Thorpe, 1912 and American Indians in the Olympics

With the Summer Olympics being held in London this year, the National Museum of the American Indian has an exhibit focused on a unique aspect of Olympic history. In the exhibit Best in the World: Native Athletes in the Olympics, enlarged photos and wall text show how Native Americans have been a part of one of the world’s premier sporting events with a special focus on the games of 100 years ago in 1912.

Jim Thorpe at the 1912 Olympics

In those games Jim Thorpe (Sac and Fox) won gold in the pentathlon and decathlon, Duke Kahanamoku (Native Hawaiian) won silver the 100 meter freestyle swimming event, Lewis Tewanima (Hopi) won the silver medal in the 10,000 meters and Andrew Sockalexis (Penobscot) came in fourth in the marathon.

At the gold medal ceremony for Thorpe, the story is that King Gustav V of Sweden shook Thorpe’s hand and said “You, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world” and Thorpe’s response was, “Thanks, King.”

Thorpe was caught up in controversy when after the games, the International Olympic Committee stripped him of his medals because he had played semi-pro baseball violating the rule banning professional athletes.  He died in 1953, but in later years many advocated that Thorpe’s medals should be restored. In 1983 commemorative medals were given to two of his children replacing those that had been taken away.

The exhibit doesn’t go into it, but Thorpe’s story in itself is pretty amazing. Although he had been born in Oklahoma, he went to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. That school had been established by Captain Richard Henry Pratt in 1879 to “civilize” or assimilate Indian children from 140 tribes across the country. Sports had become an important part of the school by the time Thorpe arrived including football and track and field. And the legendary Pop Warner was the coach. After the Olympics, Thorpe would play on the Carlisle’s football team that would defeat Army’s team at West Point and Thorpe would be named to college football's All-American Team for a second year.

Thorpe would go on to play professional basketball, baseball and football, the latter from 1920-28 and was nominally the first President of the American Professional Football Association (APFA), which would become the National Football League (NFL) two years later. His statue is right in front when you walk into the National Football League Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.

There are several other medals in the exhibit, including Kahanamoku’s 1912 silver and Billy Mill’s (Oglala Lakota) gold which he won in the 10,000 meters in 1964 in Tokyo.

A list of other American Indians that have participated and won medals in both summer and winter games over the years is a part of the exhibit. This includes a nod to Clarence “Taffy” Abel (Ojibwe) who won a silver medal as part of the 1924 U.S. Ice Hockey team and later became the first U.S. – born player in the NHL.

So if you can’t make to London this summer, you can at least revel in some of past glories right here in D.C. The exhibit runs through September 3^rd.

The link below will take you away from this website to the exhibit website Best in the World: Native Athletes in the Olympics at the National Museum of the American Indian site.

Best in the World: Native Athletes in the Olympics

A Man, His Bible and His Country

In 1886, Cyrus Adler, a student at Johns Hopkins University found something unusual in a private library. He discovered two King James Bibles that had been cut up; not chaotically but sliced neatly to remove very specific passages.  A note attached to the books told him that one of America’s founding fathers had used the clippings to make another book. Later, serving as the Smithsonian’s librarian and curator of world religions, he tracked down that created book and in 1895, purchased it for $400.  He had purchased The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth  from Carolina Randolph, the great- granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson.  

In 1820, well into retirement and six years before he died, Jefferson decided to make a second attempt at creating his own devotional text. He took Bibles in four languages, English, French, Greek and Latin and cut out the passages from the four Gospels that he wanted and lined up the verses in the different languages in parallel. He took out all the miracles and anything he considered to be “contrary to reason.” Jefferson kept the basic moral teachings of Jesus which he considered the best of any religious leader or philosopher in history. He told only a few close friends that he had done this. Some historians think he may have read from this every night during the last years of his life.

Then in 1904, by act of Congress, his version of Scripture was printed in bulk and newly elected senators were given copies. That supply of books ran out in the 1950s. 

The National Museum of American History has recently completed a complicated restoration of Jefferson’s original book and it can be seen through July 15 in Jefferson’s Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth at the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.

Whatever one thinks of Jefferson’s editing of the Bible, his real contribution to religion in America was in helping to define the church – state relationship. And I think that believers and non-believers of all stripes owe him and the other like-minded founders, a debt of gratitude because of it. His work in promoting the idea that state and federal governments of the US should not establish or interfere with religion is one of the foundational ideas of American democracy and though certainly not enforced perfectly down through the years by our legal system, it has helped define us as Americans.

Outside of authoring the Declaration of Independence (as if that wasn’t enough), one of the most well known phrases that Jefferson wrote is the “wall of separation between church and state.” It was a part of a letter that President Jefferson had written in 1802 to the Danbury Baptists, a minority religion in Connecticut at the time, who were concerned about their rights in the new nation.  The phrase has been used by the Supreme Court in deciding church – state legal cases.

I visited Monticello recently and the epitaph that Jefferson wrote for himself is carved into the tombstone over his grave. It lists the three accomplishments of which he was most proud. The first is as author of the Declaration of Independence and the third is as the father of the University of Virginia. The second is as the author of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom. We take it for granted that there ought to be freedom of worship in the US, but it wasn’t always so,  and the echoes of Jefferson’s ideas on this matter resound loudly two hundred plus years later and still inform our own debates today.


The Thomas Jefferson's Bible website at the National Museum of American History site is just below. By clicking on the link, you will be taken away from this site to the museum site.
Thomas Jefferson's Bible.

The Greatest Wave

Let’s stay on this topic of the art world’s most iconic images, since I was able to see one recently, and those visiting the DC area during the next month can see it as well. This one is Asian, and the popularity of a Japanese woodblock print known as the The Great Wave (ca 1830), made Katsushika Hokusai Japan’s most famous artist.  It can be seen along with the other images made in the series in Hokusai: 36 Views of Mount Fuji at the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery of Art through June 17.

Hokusai  The Great Wave Off Kanagawa

Born in 1760 in Edo (now Tokyo), Hokusai showed an early aptitude for art and was trained for a time as a block-cutter for making prints, one of the only designers in the field known to have any training in this work.

The stories of Hokusai’s life are legendary. In 1817 he organized a crew to paint a 60 ft. high picture of a favorite Buddhist saint. Not being satisfied he went on to create a painting with an ordinary brush of two sparrows that could only be seen with a magnifying glass. He lived in 93 different houses during his life and used more than 30 artistic aliases, changing names with his various styles.

In his sixties and deep in debt due to a grandson’s gambling, he needed work and created the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. Besides being the beloved significant geographical landmark of central Japan, Fuji was considered sacred. Hokusai’s images were revolutionary, partly due to his use of a new Prussian blue color, but also his use of ordinary people walking or working, or even viewing the scene, as a part of it.

In The Great Wave, Mout Fuji is a tiny peak in the distance, the wave itself is the central figure as viewers can just make out the tops of the boatmen’s bald heads as the lean over on their oars. The series was so popular that after the first thirty-six prints were published he created another ten. Examples of all forty-six images are in the exhibit, including one of the last that does not include Mount Fuji’s famous silhouette. It depicts religious pilgrims climbing on the mountain itself.

At one point Hokusai gave himself the name “The Old Man Mad About Art” and in his seventies wrote “...nothing I did before seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stoke I paint will be alive.” He lived to be eighty-nine.

This link is from the BBC series Private Life of a Masterpiece about Hokusai's Great Wave. All five parts can be viewed on You Tube. 

One of the interesting aspects of Hokusai’s legacy is that art historians recognize that that he was influenced, at least indirectly by Western art. He would have seen the works created by Shiba Kokan who had studied Western art images and had been an advocate of it. Some of Hokusai’s earlier images show a clear influence. Later in the 19^th century along with other Japanese print designer Hokusai’s images would go on to help inspire the European impressionists.

The link to the Hokusai website at the Freer & Sackler Galleries site is just below. By clicking on that link you will be taken away from Tripping on History and will go to the museum site.
Hokusai

The Face That Launched a Thousand Therapists

The art world was buzzing last week that a version of one of the most iconic images in the history of art sold at auction for almost $120 million, the highest price ever reached for an artwork at auction. And that work, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, is the universally recognized symbol of anxiety of all kinds in our modern age.

Edvard Munch was born in 1863 in a farmhouse north of Oslo (then Kristiana). His mother died when he was five, at fourteen, his favorite sister, Sophie died and twelve years later, he lost his father to a stroke. He would write of his father, “From him I inherited the seeds of madness. The angels of fear, sorrow, and death stood by my side since the day I was born.”  Another of his other sisters was diagnosed with mental illness from an early age.

Not long after his father died and while spending time between Paris and Berlin he began work on a series of twenty-two paintings called the Frieze of Life with titles such as Melancholy, Jealousy, Anxiety and The Scream. When the frieze was shown in Berlin in 1902 he was recognized as a significant artist and his work became collectible.

In 1908 he was hearing hallucinatory voices and suffering from paralysis on his left side and checked himself into a sanatorium in Copenhagen. Later in Norway he would be honored for his art on a national level, but would end up living in isolation in his final decades.

In the 1930s the Nazis labeled Munch’s work “degenerate art”, along with Picasso, Matisse, Gaugin and Klee. Later, when the Germans invaded Norway during the war Munch feared that his work would be confiscated. Some seventy pieces that had been confiscated by the Nazis had been returned to Norway by purchases of collectors. Munch died before the war ended in 1944 at eighty years old. Some Norwegians wondered if he had been a Nazi sympathizer due to funeral the Germans organized to honor him.

Like the Mona Lisa and American Gothic, and few other images in the history of art, The Scream has become widely recognized in the popular culture. Everyone from Andy Warhol to the Simpson’s have appropriated the image and it is instantly recognizable as a symbol of anxiety, our modern day mental plague.

There are numerous theories about the influences on its creation. One is that the eruption of Krakatoa in Indonesia in 1883 created vivid sunsets even in Norway that might have inspired Munch’s use the neon colors in The Scream’s sky. Another suggests that he might have seen a Peruvian mummy at an exposition that had the same bald head, open mouth and hands pressed against the head as The Scream’s central figure. The video below shows an example.

In the pastel version that was sold earlier this month Munch had painted these words on the frame “I was walking along a path with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature” 

It is something to consider that such a brooding and troubled artist created a silent scream that has resonated with so many for so long.

Oh the Humanity!

I didn’t think I would be writing about two transportation disasters in a row, but hey, an anniversary is an anniversary. And as it turns out, 25 years and 3 weeks after the Titanic sank, wouldn’t you know it, the Hindenburg exploded in a ball of fire over the Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey, on May 6^th 1937, making this the 75^th anniversary of its demise. 98 people died; 13 passengers and 22 crew on the airship, and one grounds crewman. Herbert Morrison made one of the most famous radio broadcasts in history which was aired the day after the event. It is not clear what the actual cause of the fire was, but the fact that the airship was filled with very flammable hydrogen meant that once it was ignited, it would be as they say, all she wrote. Like other well-known historic disasters, there are lots of theories about the actual cause, including sabotage. You can read more here.

 In this clip Morrison’s radio broadcast has been attached to film that was taken of the disaster.

The “golden era” of airships lasted from the early 1900s until almost 1940 and the world’s first passenger airline was DELAG (The German Airship Transportation Company Ltd) and was established in 1909 as an offshoot of the Zeppelin Company. Before WWI, DELAG carried some 34,000 passengers on 1500 flights between cities in Germany, all without injury. During the war, the airships were pressed into military service with mixed results. After the war the Graf Zeppelin made a round-the-world flight in 1929 and both it and the Hindenburg made numerous trans-Atlantic flights with very few problems, although there had been accidents, fires and deaths with other airships during the period.

The Hindenburg had sleeping accommodations for passengers, a dining room and lounge and could cross the Atlantic in a little over two days. Now days we can obviously do it much faster, but the amenities aren’t quite the same.

There is a small exhibit in Washington D.C. with a unique angle that has objects, documents and photographs relating to both the Titanic and Hindenburg. The American Postal Museum is hosting Fire and Ice: Hindenburg and Titanic with special emphasis on the postal aspects. Both the RMS (Royal Mail Ship) Titanic and the Hindenburg were floating post offices, one on the sea and one in the air.

Oscar Scott Woody, of Clifton, Virginia was one of five postal clerks that were on the Titanic when it sank, none of whom survived. His body was recovered and his postal keys on a chain are part of the exhibit along with a facing slip with clear postmark from the Titanic. There is also a letter and post card that were sent from the Titanic before it left Europe. The Titanic carried some 3000 bags of mail all of which are sitting two miles down with the wreck.

Hindenburg on May 6, 1937

For stamp collectors, mail stamped on the Hindenburg was and still is highly sought after and a number of the covers mailed on various trips it made are part of the exhibit. There is also a partially burned letter that survived the explosion as well as a postmark device and a postal scale. Some 160 pieces out of 17,000 survived the disaster. It’s poignant to see items that were handled by people who were part of these historic tragedies and brings them to life in a more personal way. The exhibit runs through January 6, 2014.


The website for Fire & Ice: Hindenburg and Titanic at the National Postal Museum is just below. By clicking on that link you will be taken away from Tripping on History and will be going to the museum site.
Fire & Ice: Hindenburg and Titanic