On April 19, 1912, surviving crew members of the RMS Titanic gathered in the small assembly hall of the American Seaman’s Friend on Jane Street. They held a memorial service for those lost just four days before, swallowed up by the freezing Atlantic. The building, the American Seamen’s Friend Society Sailors’ Home and Institute, was built in 1908 to accommodate the society’s growing membership.
Rooms were only a quarter a night (double for captains), and within the first year, over 16,000 men had taken advantage of what an annual report in 1911 called, “a bright, airy, comfortable place to sit without being annoyed by the fumes of liquor or soul-rasping profanity.”
The building is now a New York City landmark, designated in 2000.
If three shipwrecked English sailors really did travel by foot from Florida to Nova Scotia in 1569 then it would certainly count as one of the most remarkable walks undertaken in recorded history. Although the account’s more fantastical elements, such as the sighting of elephants, have spurred many to consign it to the fiction department, John Toohey argues for a second look.
“We had Messerschmitts flying overhead, thousands of extras on the beach, minesweepers in the background, a 350ft destroyer and torpedo boats all in the same shot.”
Nolan and his team actually filmed on location in Dunkirk with real war ships and fighter planes. “On certain days, there were up to 60 ships in the water,”
George Washington: first President of the United States, father of his country, crosser of the Delaware, and descendant of Odin. This, at least, was the claim put forward by the late nineteenth-century genealogist Albert Welles. In the floridly titled, four-hundred-page tome The Pedigree and History of the Washington Family Derived from Odin, the Founder of Scandinavia. B.C. 70, Involving a Period of Eighteen Centuries, and Including Fifty-Five Generations, Down to General George Washington, First President of the United States (1879), Welles created a family tree for Washington of truly mythical proportions, and one which shows just how useful nineteenth-century Americans found the Middle Ages to be when it came to shaping their understandings of their country’s origins.
Viking, an exact replica of the Gokstad ship, crossed the Atlantic Ocean from Bergen, Norway to be exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893; it remains on exhibit near Chicago. wikipedia
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