Seabourn Viking Route Exploration

Andy will be a special interest conversationalist on Seabourn Quest as it travels through Ireland, Scotland, Iceland, Greenland and Canada.

He will be talking on the following topics.

“The Mary Rose and the Rise of the Tudor Navy.” 

The Tudors created the standing navy, and in 1510 during Henry VIII’s notoriously colorful reign built the handsome, well-armed Mary Rose.  She sank in the Solent in 1545.  Discovered in 1971, raised in 1982, and now fully restored, Mary Rose is the centerpiece of her namesake museum, reopened just last month, in historic Portsmouth, England.

“Horrible Shipwreck! The Wreck of the Female Convict Transport Amphitrite in 1833.” 

A full, true, and particular account of the melancholy loss of the Amphitrite on August 31, 1833, when 108 female convicts (a third of them women from Scotland), 12 children and 13 seamen met with a watery grave, in sight of thousands, none being saved but three.  The wreck horrified and scandalized Victorians, and prompted parliamentary intervention and an Admiralty investigation.

“Great Britain, the United States, and World War I.” 

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

“Iceland, Norway and the Cold War.” 

During the Cold War, Norway’s North Cape and the cold waters between Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom through which Quest will be sailing were maritime counterparts to Germany’s Fulda Gap, both decisive theaters in the war that happily never grew hot.

“Disaster in the Canadian Arctic at Lady Franklin Bay.” 

Disinterest in Washington and the failure of two annual resupply missions condemned US Army Lieutenant Adolphus Greely’s scientific expedition on the western shore of the Davis Strait to starvation, cannibalism, and death.  The expedition’s plight and its few survivors’ rescue were major news stories in the 1880s.

“The Last Lincoln Conspirator.” 

John Surratt Jr., allegedly the youngest Lincoln assassination conspirator, fled from Quebec to Liverpool, then through France to Rome, and finally across the Mediterranean as he attempted to escape from American justice in 1865-66.  Chased out of Rome, where he hid for a while as a member of Pius IX’s Papal Zouaves, Surratt was eventually caught in Alexandria, Egypt, and returned to Washington for trial.

“Heimaey, Vestmannaeyjar and the Mt. Kirkjufell  (Eldfell) Eruption.” 

The surprise volcanic eruption on Heimaey Island (largest in the Westmann Archipelago off Iceland) on January 21, 1973, threatened the fishing town, its harbor, and its people with a fate like Pompeii’s. That nothing so awful happened was thanks to a fast Icelandic and American response to the photogenic catastrophe.

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

British shipbuilding in violation of its neutrality regulations, especially products of the great shipyards on the Mersey and Clyde Rivers, made possible the Confederacy’s war at sea against the Union.  The Confederate States Navy couldn’t affect the course of the war between the states, but it did accelerate the decline of the American merchant marine, which didn’t recover until World War II.

Books mentioned in Andy’s talks can be found here.