Regent Navigator New York to Amsterdam

Join Andy for a Transatlantic cruise from New York to Amsterdam on Regent Navigator.

He will be giving eight talks during the crossing.

Innocents Abroad 

Sail with Mark Twain and the other American “Innocents Abroad” from New York in 1867 aboard the luxury cruise ship Quaker City into the Mediterranean and back.  See the sights of 19^th century Europe and the Holy Land through their eyes while you learn about the cruise and the passengers his 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.  Caught in pack ice, the old, small vessel with her crew of Cape Cod watermen drifted into the broad Atlantic and was never seen again.  What precisely happened to Cross Rip and why, and was her first mate a hero?

Maritime Chokepoints and Strategic Waters

Beginning with the Age of Sail, the geography of the oceans, as well as their winds and currents, became important to governments and their navies.  The Strait of Hormuz is today the best known of these choke points, but other such places have been flash points throughout history.

Ships, Sailors and the Sea, Maritime Technology and Ocean Commerce 

Political rivalries and the quest for gold, markets, and resources drove the great age of exploration, but it was new ship designs and construction techniques, growing navigational expertise, innovative financing structures, improvements in shipboard sanitation and crew health, and the invention of marine insurance exchanges that made possible the achievements of this epic era.

Disease and History 

Until the age of modern medicine, lethal epidemics and fatal disease shaped human history as much—arguably more—than did the acts of great men (and women), and the events of politics and wars.  Learn how plague, influenza, yellow fever, and small pox (as well as the “great pox,” syphilis), and especially cholera, powerfully changed the direction of the march of time.

Horrible Shipwreck!

“A full, true and particular account of the melancholy loss of the British convict ship Amphitrite, the 31st August 1833, off Boulogne, when 108 female convicts, 12 children, and 13 seamen met with a watery grave, in sight of thousands, none being saved but three.”  The wreck of Amphitrite horrified and scandalized Victorians, and prompted Parliamentary intervention and an Admiralty investigation to fix blame.

The Guns of August and the 1914-15 European Cruise of the Armored Cruiser USS Tennessee

The story of USS Tennessee’s extraordinary mission during the first months of World War I (to deliver gold to prime the continent’s paralyzed banking system; to ease the path home for tens of thousands of stranded American tourists, students and expatriates; and to relocate thousands of impoverished refugees in the Middle East, all desperate to avoid the fighting), and of the cruiser’s sudden and public death on the Santo Domingo waterfront a century ago.

The Catholic Kings of Europe: Portugal, Spain and the Contest for Empire  

For more than century after the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 the kings (and queens) of Spain and Portugal, proud royalty of the world’s soon-to-be first global empires, literally split the unknown world between them.  Their successful quest for wealth and power overseas is a fascinating, colorful (and for those who were native to these distant places, tragic) story.