Pioneer North Sea Divers: In the 1970s, deep sea divers were at the sharp end of the North Sea oil boom. Alex Last has been speaking to the former diver David Beckett, who wrote The Loonliness of a Deep Sea Diver, about his dangerous life working under the waves.
Empty barrels of beer come in handy on a voyage in this woodcut illustration from Conard Gessner’s Historia animalium, Liber 4 of 1558 (link). Thrown overboard, they provide a playful diversion to marauding sea monsters.
Woodcut from Aubin’s Dictionnaire de Marine of 1736 (link)
Brewing and seafaring are ancient human endeavors. Beer was first fermented by at least the 5th millennium BC in Mesopotamia. From the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers of the Fertile Crescent, the grain beverage either traveled along trade routes or was spontaneously developed in other ancient civilizations (including Egyptian, Grecian, Roman, Norse, Aztec, Chinese) before landing in northern Europe in the early medieval period.
Producing beer became a standard domestic chore in households, and later, on a slightly larger scale, in taverns and monasteries. It is something of a myth that drinking beer was much safer and more common than imbibing the oft-contaminated water. There was plenty of fresh water abounding in lakes, streams and rivers and good wells. However, for seafarers, those sources were not always within reach…
Typically, a jellyfish aimed for your plate is caught fresh and immediately – while still alive – steeped in a specialised mixture of table salt and alum, a potassium-aluminium compound commonly used in leather tanning and baking powder. Over the course of a month, the steeping process goes through multiple steps as the treatment reduces the water content of the jellyfish, preserving it and rendering it into a somewhat rubbery, chewy product. keep reading
The Time Thousands of Bags of Chips Washed Ashore in the Outer Banks
In November of 2006, the tastiest disaster struck on the waters around North Carolina’s Outer Banks. A shipping container stuffed full of Nacho Cheese, Spicy Nacho, and Cool Ranch Doritos tipped and went overboard into the ocean.
Thousands of bags of chips washed up on Hatteras Island, where locals then salvaged—ate—the shipwrecked snacks.
Set in the Second World War when whisky rationing is in effect, Scottish islanders on the Isle of Todday, try to plunder cases of whisky from a ship that is stranded on rocks just offshore.
The SS Cabinet was carrying 50,000 cases of Scotch whisky to America when she ran aground affording the islanders the opportunity to get their hands on the ‘water of life.’
There are two problems though; the local minister (a strict Sabbatarian) who will not allow work to take place on a Sunday and Captain Waggett, the Home Guard officer who wants to stop any looting and who also searches for the whisky in the islanders homes afterwards. Official website
Hundreds of feet long, buried in the earth, thousands of oyster shells are pressed against one another, overtaking the few shards of bones and broken pottery within its depths. The monstrous heap is heavy and enormous—and it’s literally a pile of garbage.
If you’re in one of the coastal areas of the world, particularly in New York, that oyster garbage might even be beneath your feet right now. These huge, ancient heaps of shells are called oyster middens, and they’ve fascinated people for centuries.
A midden is an archaeological term for a pile of trash left by humans long gone, and oyster middens are some of the oldest and largest piles of intact garbage dating from after the late ice age.
The heaps were begun at least 2,200 years ago and contain ceramic materials (pottery) from the earliest period. Since no European artifacts have been found in the midden, its construction apparently ceased well before they arrived. Whaleback Shell Midden on MaineEncyclopedia
A typical Native American oyster deposit, or midden, dating to about 1,000 years ago – Ancient Native-American methods may be key to sustainable oyster harvests on SmithsonianDeck tours are available daily from 10:00 AM to 7:00 PM. Tickets are $10 for adults, $5 for children aged 5-11, and children under 5 are free! Tickets may be purchased online or at the docks
El Galeón Andalucía is a replica Spanish galleon, owned by the Fundación Nao Victoria and completed in 2009. El Galeón is a tall ship unlike any other – a floating museum with over 3,400 square feet of deck space filled with exhibits for visitors to explore.
The structural design process of El Galeón took six months, and construction of the vessel lasted 17 months. She was launched in Huelva, Spain in November 2009. El Galeón is 164 feet long, with a 33 foot beam, 10.5 foot draft and 500 ton gross tonnage. Since her launching, she has travelled the world sailing over 48,000 nautical miles through the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans.
Denizler Kitabevi Bookshop in Istanbul, specializing in antique maps and maritime books – 13 Things I Found on the Internet TodayLieutenant with Japanese skull used as a mascot aboard a Navy torpedo boat, 1944
Winfield Townley Scott’s poem “The U. S. Sailor with the Japanese Skull” details the process by which a head becomes a skull. Skinned, gutted, dragged behind a ship in a fishing net, and finally bleached white in the sun, the skull in Scott’s account evolves until it is “made elemental, historic, parentless by our Sailor boy,” a sailor who cannot now, after all that work, say, “Alas! I did not know him at all.”
lobstahlady: My husband and his sternman rescued a one eyed eagle today.
BIRCH HARBOR, Maine (AP) — A Maine lobster boat crew used some Yankee ingenuity to rescue a waterlogged eagle that it spotted struggling offshore in the North Atlantic.
Lobsterman John Chipman, of Birch Harbor, said Monday that the struggling bird seemed to be relieved to see his boat and even tried to hop on board after Chipman came across the unusual sight of an eagle flopping around about a quarter-mile offshore, near Schoodic Island.
“The way he was acting, I knew that he wanted help. He seemed to try to come to the boat on his own and tried to get in. He wanted out of the water,” he said. more
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