Seabourn: Panama Canal and the Caribbean

Andy will be a special interest conversationalist on Seabourn Odyssey’s Panama Canal and Caribbean voyage.  He’ll be presenting this series of conversations throughout the cruise.  Click here for more information on the books mentioned in his conversations.

Between Los Angeles and the Panama Canal

1. Innocents Abroad

Sail with Mark Twain and the other American “Innocents Abroad” from New York in June 1867 aboard the sidewheel steam ship Quaker City on the months-long, first luxury cruise in American history.  See the sights of 19^th century Europe and the Levant through their eyes while you learn about the cruise and the passengers Twain’s best-selling book made famous.

2. Disease in 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 pace and direction of the march of time.

3. Rounding Cape Horn

For four centuries, from the 16^th to the 20^th, the perilous route around Cape Horn or through the Strait of Magellan was the way that explorers and mariners sailed and steamed between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, seeking everything from fame and wealth to whale oil and Oriental preciosities. Hear about the history of navigation along these fabled passages.

4. The Spanish American War

The war at the end of the 19^th century signaled the end of history’s first truly global empire, Spain, and the rise of the brash new imperial power, the United States, which would soon dominate the 20^th century.  The short, decisive naval battles in Philippine and Cuban waters sharpened American interest in building “a path between the seas” and reshaped the map of the world.

5. The Suez and Panama Canals

The Suez Canal, opened to commerce in 1869, centuries after the first Nile-Red Sea canal of the ancient Egyptians, shrank the globe, and changed the political map of three continents for a century.  Seduced by this apparent success, its chief entrepreneur looked to repeat his success in Panama… and failed miserably.

6. Maritime Connections: Trade Routes and Strategic Waters in the Ages of Sail and Steam

A survey of the history and economics of the seventy percent of the world that’s not earth.

Between Panama Canal and Fort Lauderdale

7. The River of Doubt

Former President Theodore Roosevelt’s small expedition on the mysterious Amazon tributary, “the River of Doubt,” after his failed attempt at re-election, almost killed him.  Travel with “Colonel” Roosevelt through the political history of the United States in the first decades of the 20th century, and through Amazonia, then one of the last great unexplored regions of the world.

8.    American Civil War Afloat

A description of the cabinet secretaries, strategies, ships, sailors, and key battles that shaped the war at sea and in the Gulf of Mexico, at the ports, and on the rivers of the Confederacy. 1861-65.

9. The Caribbean and the Early Age of Exploration

Global wind and ocean current circulation patterns determined where off the continents of the New World early European explorers, searching for the riches of the Orient, made their first landfalls.  Those patterns, the limitations of late 15^th century seafaring, and the lush islands of the Caribbean and their congenial climate, ensured that the Caribbean and later the shores of the Gulf of Mexico became early focal points in the colonization of the Americas, the enslavement of their native peoples, and the hunt for wealth.

Between Fort Lauderdale and Barbados

10. Black Rock and Blue Water: The Wreck of RMS Rhone

The story of the beautiful and nearly new Royal Mail Ship Rhone, sunk off Peter Island in the Caribbean during the terrible hurricane of October 1867.  Breaking for the safety of the open sea, Rhone ran hard aground on Black Rock at full speed and snapped in half.  The great storm struck the British Virgin Islands soon after a summer yellow fever epidemic and was followed by a tsunami two weeks later.  These three great trials devastated the islands.  Recovery took years.  The wreck of the Rhone is a popular scuba dive site today.

11. The Guns of August: World War I at Sea

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.

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12. The Last Lincoln Conspirator

Flee with John Surratt, Jr., the youngest Lincoln assassination conspirator, across the Atlantic, Europe, and the Mediterranean as he attempts to escape from American justice in 1865-66.  Chased out of Rome, where he hid for a time as a member of the Papal Zouaves, Surratt was eventually caught in Alexandria, Egypt, and returned to the U.S. for trial fully two years after his mother’s conviction and execution.