Smithsonian Journeys on Regent Seven Seas Mariner

Andy will be speaking on Explorations and Adventures with the Smithsonian Collections Smithsonian Journeys program on Regent’s Seven Seas Mariner.  Join him for the  “Autumn Delights” cruise, which leaves from New York, New York, and ends in Montreal, Canada.  He will be discussing the following topics during the cruise.

Books mentioned in his talks can be found here.

Innocents Abroad

Sail with Mark Twain and the other American “Innocents Abroad” from New York in 1867 aboard the cruise ship Quaker City across the Atlantic, into the Mediterranean, and back home.  See the sights of 19^th century Europe and the Holy Land through their eyes while you learn about history’s first luxury cruise and the passengers Twain’s best-selling book made famous.

Lost in the Ice

Lightship Cross Rip vanished off her station near Nantucket, Massachusetts, in February 1918 during the record “freeze-up” that year, the coldest North American winter in a century, and the first of American participation in the Great War.  Caught in pack ice in the Nantucket Sound, the old, small vessel with her crew of Cape Cod watermen drifted out into the broad Atlantic, and was never seen again.  What precisely happened to Cross Rip and why, and was her first mate a hero?

Disaster at Lady Franklin Bay: the Greely Expedition

High level disinterest in Washington, and the failure of two scheduled annual resupply missions to arrive condemned Army Lieutenant Adolphus Greely’s bold scientific expedition, encamped at Lady Franklin Bay in Arctic Canada, to a third year marked by starvation, cannibalism, and death.  The Signal Corps expedition’s plight and the eventual rescue of its few survivors by the U.S. Navy were major news stories in the early 1880’s.

Great Britain, the United States, and World War I

The story of the Great War at sea before and after America finally joined the fighting in 1917, of Imperial Germany’s great and eventually fatal gamble on the submarine, and of armored cruiser USS Tennessee’s odd mission to Europe and the Middle East at the outbreak of the Great War, and of her sudden destruction months later.

The Last Lincoln Conspirator

Flee in 1865 with John Surratt, Jr., the youngest Lincoln assassination conspirator, from his hideouts in Canada, down the St. Lawrence and across the Atlantic, Europe, and the Mediterranean as he attempted to escape from American justice in 1865-66.  Chased out of Rome, where he hid for a year as a soldier in the Papal Zouaves, Surratt was eventually caught in Alexandria, Egypt, and returned to the U.S. for trial.

Extra Talk

England, Scotland, the Confederate Navy and the American Civil War at Sea

British shipbuilding in violation of neutrality regulations, especially powerful commerce raiders from great shipyards on the Mersey and Clyde Rivers, made possible the Confederacy’s destructive war at sea against the Union.  The Confederate States Navy couldn’t alter the course of the war between the states, but it delayed its outcome, increased its toll, and accelerated the decline of the American merchant marine, which didn’t fully recover until World War II.

Books mentioned in his talks can be found here.