Heart of Oak

04/05/2017

I wince every time I see this. :/

03/15/2017

"When Storms and Tempests all are o'er / And Jack receives his Cash on Shore / Then for his Doxies all he'll send / What's dearly earn'd he'll freely spend." - The Sailor's Pleasure, c1790s. Note the envelopes he's got on the table - addressed to Mrs Trimhim, Moll Common, and Black Eyed Susan.

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02/04/2017

We had a film festival during lunch break today... watching other folks build ships!

Building of a wooden fishing boat, planing, sanding, drilling, soldiering, then launching. By permission of the Scottish Screen Archive at the National Library…

01/22/2017

All the more reason to add citrus juice (and a little brown sugar, and nutmeg) to your rum. Punch is more festive, anyways.

Scurvy killed more people than the American Civil War.

12/04/2016

When, in 1884, the starving crew of the ill-fated yacht Mignonette sacrificed a man in order to survive, the horrific killing became immortalised in legal history, relates Carl Thompson

11/15/2016

"The yeast was grown from the contents of a bottle of beer recovered from the wreck of the Sydney Cove, a British trading ship that got caught in a storm near the island of Tasmania, off Australia's south coast, in 1797 while on its way from Calcutta to the prison colony at Port Jackson, now the city of Sydney."

Yeast microbes from the world's oldest bottle of beer — a 220-year-old bottle found in one of Australia's earliest shipwrecks — are being used to create a new, modern beer with the characteristic taste of the 18th-century brew.

08/31/2016

Sailors are frequently seen wearing an unbuttoned jacket over only a shirt when it's hot. The only one not wearing a jacket is the rower. When actively doing hard physical labor (like rowing, chopping firewood, hauling a heavy load, &c.) it's acceptable to be seen with shirt sleeves exposed. A coat or jacket should be worn when sitting, talking with friends or walking. This picture is a detail taken from a c. 1775 handkerchief titled "Industry and Idleness Rewarded." at Colonial Williamsburg.

See page 107 of the book What Clothes Reveal by Linda Baumgarten.

08/21/2016

Ibrahima Thiaw wanted to find 200-year-old slave wrecks. First he had to learn to swim.

07/22/2016

During a recent port call in Eastport, ME, I walked through a local cemetery and discovered the grave of Asst. Surgeon Micajah Hawkes, who was aboard USS Hornet at the time of her celebrated victory over HMS Peacock in 1813.

06/11/2016

Every time I look at some of the sailors' tattoos recorded on protection certificates, I realize how far the tattooing industry has come and how high the artistic standards now are. A rising tide truly does lift all boats! ;)

_ When sailors disembarked from a long journey and left the dock to spend what little time and money they had in town, they were clearly distinguishable from other men by their gait. On ship, they...

05/22/2016

Not recent news, but still an interesting read. I'm a graveyard buff and am always surprised at how far from home you sometimes find people, and under what circumstances they got there. When I was in the Caribbean on the brigantine Corwith Cramer, I checked out a small graveyard on Iles des Saintes and found an entire corner of the cemetery devoted to foreign sailors (including US Navy) who'd died on or near the island over the years.

Two American military officers recently traveled into the Nicaraguan jungle to seek out the forgotten graves of two Navy

03/30/2016

"In the 19th century," he explains, "when steam took over from sail, seamen started coming along who'd never been in a sailing ship. What shipping companies discovered was that they were nowhere near as good. They realized that people trained in sail were infinitely better mariners. In a sailing ship, every member of the crew is an engineer, because the engines are the sails, they're just much more attuned to the ship. A deckhand on a steamship mostly just chips rust."

Sail training, Moreland says, evolved from that practical need, and it's not a need that's gone away. "I'm fully expecting a revival in that kind of vocational sail training," he says, "because it just makes 'a better goddamned seaman.' You're more alert to the wind, you're closer to the water; you have to worry about things a guy in a 100,000-ton bulk carrier just doesn't have to worry about."

There are more than 100 tall ships in the United States, almost all of them offering some sort of sail-training program…