Hull City Quotes

In my experience, whatever happens clings to us like barnacles on the hull of a ship, slowing us slightly, both uglifying and giving us texture. You can scrape all you want, you can, if you have money, hire someone else to scrape, but the barnacles will come back or at least leave a blemish on the steel.

There was something heartbreakingly beautiful about the lights of distant ships, I thought. It was something that touched both on human achievement and the vastness against which those achievements seemed so frail. It was the same thing whether the lights belonged to a caravel battling the swell on a stormy horizon or a diamond-hulled starship which had just sliced its way through interstellar space.

There was a period just after the inevitability of ruin hove into view and just before it smashed into the hull of your life that was the closest to pure freedom anybody got.

but in the city in which I love you, no one comes, no one meets me in the brick clefts; in the wedged dark, no finger touches me secretly, no mouth tastes my flawless salt, no one wakens the honey in the cells, finds the humming in the ribs, the rich business in the recesses; hulls clogged, I continue laden

I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull. He got a good estate by merchandise, and leaving off his trade, lived afterwards at York, from whence he had married my mother, whose relations were named Robinson, a very good family in that country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but, by the usual corruption of words in England, we are now called - nay we call ourselves and write our name - Crusoe; and so my companions always called me.

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year, I felt a door opening in me and I entered the clarity of early morning. One after another my former lives were departing, like ships, together with their sorrow. And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas assigned to my brush came closer, ready now to be described better than they were before. I was not separated from people, grief and pity joined us. We forget—I kept saying—that we are all children of the King. For where we come from there is no division into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be. We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part of the gift we received for our long journey. Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago— a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel staving its hull against a reef—they dwell in us, waiting for a fulfillment. I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard, as are all men and women living at the same time, whether they are aware of it or not.

I love coming back into Chersonesus in the afternoon; the city is lit up by the sun beginning to set. The sound of the water rushing past the hull, and the sky is as blue as Helena’s eyes.” “Did I hear a woman’s name?

Questions of Travel There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams hurry too rapidly down to the sea, and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion, turning to waterfalls under our very eyes. —For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains, aren't waterfalls yet, in a quick age or so, as ages go here, they probably will be. But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling, the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships, slime-hung and barnacled. Think of the long trip home. Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Where should we be today? Is it right to be watching strangers in a play in this strangest of theatres? What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life in our bodies, we are determined to rush to see the sun the other way around? The tiniest green hummingbird in the world? To stare at some inexplicable old stonework, inexplicable and impenetrable, at any view, instantly seen and always, always delightful? Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them, too? And have we room for one more folded sunset, still quite warm? But surely it would have been a pity not to have seen the trees along this road, really exaggerated in their beauty, not to have seen them gesturing like noble pantomimists, robed in pink. —Not to have had to stop for gas and heard the sad, two-noted, wooden tune of disparate wooden clogs carelessly clacking over a grease-stained filling-station floor. (In another country the clogs would all be tested. Each pair there would have identical pitch.) —A pity not to have heard the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird who sings above the broken gasoline pump in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque: three towers, five silver crosses. —Yes, a pity not to have pondered, blurredly and inconclusively, on what connection can exist for centuries between the crudest wooden footwear and, careful and finicky, the whittled fantasies of wooden cages. —Never to have studied history in the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages. —And never to have had to listen to rain so much like politicians' speeches: two hour of unrelenting oratory and then a sudden golden silence in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes: "Is it lack of imagination that makes us come to imagined places, not just stay at home? Or could Pascal have been entirely right about just sitting quietly in one's room? Continent, city, country, society: the choice is never wide and never free. And here, or there...No. Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?

CAPT. J. W. SIMMONS, master of the steamship Pensacola, had just as little regard for weather as the Louisiana’s Captain Halsey. He was a veteran of eight hundred trips across the Gulf and commanded a staunch and sturdy ship, a 1,069-ton steel-hulled screw-driven steam freighter built twelve years earlier in West Hartlepool, England, and now owned by the Louisville and Nashville Railroad Company. Friday morning the ship was docked at the north end of 34th Street, in the company of scores of other ships, including the big Mallory liner Alamo, at 2,237 tons, and the usual large complement of British ships, which on Friday included the Comino, Hilarius, Kendal Castle, Mexican, Norna, Red Cross, Taunton, and the stately Roma in from Boston with its Captain Storms. As the Pensacola’s twenty-one-man crew readied the ship for its voyage to the city of Pensacola on Florida’s Gulf Coast, two men came aboard as Captain Simmons’s personal guests: a harbor pilot named R. T. Carroll and Galveston’s Pilot Commissioner J. M. O. Menard, from one of the city’s oldest families. At

A fine statue of a naked Theseus stands proudly today in Athens' central place of assembly, the city's hub, Syntagma Square. Even today he is a focus of Athenian identity and pride. The ship he brought back from his adventures in the Labyrinth of Crete remained moored in the harbour at Piraeus, a visitor attraction right up to the days of historical ancient Athens, the time of Socrates and Aristotle. Its continuous presence there for such a long time caused the Ship of Theseus to become a subject of intriguing philosophical speculation. Over hundreds of years, its rigging, its planks, its hull, deck, keel, prow, stern and all its timbers had been replaced so that not one atom of the original remained. Could one call it the same ship? Am I the same person I was fifty years ago? Every molecule and cell of my body has been replaced many times over.

I knew it was my duty to my own legend to survive this trial. But I was still crippled by my own devices. Imagine me as a great fully-rigged man-of-war. Four masts, great bulwarks of oak and five score cannon. All my life I have sailed smooth seas and waters that parted for me by virtue of my own splendor. Never tested. Never riled. A tragic existence, if ever there was one. “But at long last: a storm! And when I met it I found my hull . . . rotten. My planks leaking brine, my cannon brittle, powder wet. I foundered upon the storm. Upon you, Darrow of Lykos.” He sighs. “And it was my own fault.” I war between wanting to punch him in the mouth and surrendering into my curiosity by letting him continue. He’s a strange man with a seductive presence. Even as an enemy, his flamboyance fascinated me. Purple capes in battle. A horned Minotaur helmet. Trumpets blaring to signal his advance, as if welcoming all challengers. He even broadcast opera as his men bombarded cities. After so much isolation, he’s delighting in imposing his narrative upon us. “My peril is thus: I am, and always have been, a man of great tastes. In a world replete with temptation, I found my spirit wayward and easy to distract. The idea of prison, that naked, metal world, crushed me. The first year, I was tormented. But then I remembered the voice of a fallen angel. ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, or a hell of heaven.’ I sought to make the deep not just my heaven, but my womb of rebirth. “I dissected the underlying mistakes which led to my incarceration and set upon an internal odyssey to remake myself. But—and you would know this, Reaper—long is the road up out of hell! I made arrangements for supplies. I toiled twenty hours a day. I reread the books of youth with the gravity of age. I perfected my body. My mind. Planks were replaced; new banks of cannon wrought in the fires of solitude. All for the next storm. “Now I see it is upon me and I sail before you the paragon of Apollonius au Valii-Rath. And I ask one question: for what purpose have you pulled me from the deep?” “Bloodyhell, did you memorize that?” Sevro mutters.

Jane Addams, the urban reformer who founded Chicago’s Hull House, wrote, “Never before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon the city streets and to work under alien roofs.” The women sought work as typewriters, stenographers, seamstresses, and weavers. The men who hired them were for the most part moral citizens intent on efficiency and profit. But not always. On March 30, 1890, an officer of the First National Bank placed a warning in the help-wanted section of the Chicago Tribune, to inform female stenographers of “our growing conviction that no thoroughly honorable business-man who is this side of dotage ever advertises for a lady stenographer who is a blonde, is good-looking, is quite alone in the city, or will transmit her photograph. All such advertisements upon their face bear the marks of vulgarity, nor do we regard it safe for any lady to answer such unseemly utterances.” The

The subway was the great leveler—underground, the Wall Street titans stood in the shuddering car and clutched the same poles as the junior IT guys to create a totem of fists, the executive vice presidents in charge of new product marketing pressed thighs with the luckless and the dreamers, who got off at their stations when instructed by the computer’s voice and were replaced by devisers of theoretical financial instruments of unreckoned power, who vacated their seats and were replaced in turn by unemployable homunculi clutching yesterday’s tabloids. They jostled one another, competed for space below as they did above, in a minuet of ruin and triumph. In the subway, down in the dark, no citizen was more significant or more decrepit than another. All were smeared into a common average of existence, the A’s and the C’s tumbling or rising to settle into a ruthless mediocrity. No escape. This was the plane where Mark Spitz lived. They were all him. Middling talents who got by, barnacles on humanity’s hull, survivors who had not yet been extinguished. Perhaps it was only a matter of time.

They bear down upon Westminster, the ghost-consecrated Abbey, and the history-crammed Hall, through the arches of the bridge with a rush as the tide swelters round them; the city is buried in a dusky gloom save where the lights begin to gleam and trail with lurid reflections past black velvety- looking hulls - a dusky city of golden gleams. St. Paul's looms up like an immense bowl reversed, squat, un-English, and undignified in spite of its great size; they dart within the sombre shadows of the Bridge of Sighs, and pass the Tower of London, with the rising moon making the sky behind it luminous, and the crowd of shipping in front appear like a dense forest of withered pines, and then mooring their boat at the steps beyond, with a shuddering farewell look at the eel-like shadows and the glittering lights of that writhing river, with its burthen seen and invisible, they plunge into the purlieus of Wapping. ("The Phantom Model")

City streets I see your lies, I will not play your game No longer will you talk to me, you think I'm going insane But I've forgot my number, now I'm remembering my name I've been too long traveling on your train You tried your best to strangle me, but I could take the pain You tried to hypnotize me, but I see'd right through your game And now your tatty tricks to me are really rather tame I've been too long traveling on your train City lights don't shine, they glare And your music doesn't speak, it swears And in your streets, the ghosts have forgotten why they're there Some day soon I know I'm going miles and miles away Back to the garden where the magic children play And to the country lady who knows more than I can say Whose nights shine brighter than your day

A mosaic of memories takes me back to my own childhood, and then to my children. My earliest memory of St. Augustine was a day trip from Jacksonville; a day with some neighbors who were nice enough to purchase me a plastic toy-tugboat with a blue superstructure and white hull. Other accounts meld into my adult years. With its history and attractions, The Ancient City is pristine and picturesque by most accounts; but from the Newer Jail (not the Old Jail) , the perspective is very different.

Born in 1635, Henry Morgan was a Welsh plantation owner and privateer, which was really the same as a pirate, only with the consent of the king who was Charles II of England, Scotland, and Ireland at the time. Little is known about Morgan’s early life or how he got to the Caribbean. He began his career as a privateer in the West Indies and there is evidence that in the 1660’s he was a member of a marauding band of raiders led by Sir Christopher Myngs . Having an engaging personality he soon became a close friend of Sir Thomas Modyford, who was the English Governor of Jamaica. Captain Henry Morgan owned and was the captain of several ships during his lifetime, but his flagship was named the “Satisfaction.” The ship was the largest of Morgan’s fleet and was involved in several profitable conflicts in the waters of the Caribbean and Central America. More recently, on August 8, 2011, near the Lajas Reef, off the coast of Panama, a large section of a wooden hull, that is believed to have been the sail ship “Satisfaction,” was found by Archaeologists from Texas State University. In 1668 Captain Morgan sailed for Lake Maracaibo in modern day Venezuela. There he raided the cities of Maracaibo and Gibraltar and taking the available gold divested the cities of their wealth before destroying a large Spanish naval squadron stationed there. In 1671 Morgan attacked Panama City during which he was arrested and dispatched to London in chains. When he got there, instead of imprisonment he was treated as a hero. Captain Morgan was knighted and in November of 1674 he returned to Jamaica to serve as the territory’s Lieutenant Governor. In 1678 he served as acting governor of Jamaica and again served as such from 1680 to 1682. During his time a governor, the Jamaican legislature passed an anti-piracy law and Morgan even assisted in the prosecution of other pirates. On August 25, 1688 he died on the island, after which he became an inspiration and somewhat of a glorified hero in both pirate stories and in the movies.

They spent the night tucked beneath a spare scrap of canvas in the boat bottom, listening to the sluicing of waves against the pine-tarred hull and watching the night wheel over them like a dancer's star-studded skirt. Ade nestled into the softness of his arm and thought about happily-ever-afters and sweet-tasting endings. Yule thought about once-upon-a-times and bold beginnings. At dawn they departed. When asked what she wanted to see, Ade replied, "Everything," so Yule obediently charted a course toward everything. They docked first at the City of Sissly, where Ade could admire the pink domes of the local chapels and taste the pepper-bite of fresh gwanna fruit. Then they stayed three nights on the abandoned Island of Tho, where the ruins of a failed City loomed like broken gray teeth against the sun, before skipping along a string of low, sand-scoured islands too small to be named. They walked the streets of the City of Yef and slept in the cool grottoes of the City of Jungil, and walked across the famed bridge connecting the twin Cities of Iyo and Ivo. They sailed north and west, following the summer currents out of the sweating heat of the equator, and saw Cities so distant even Yule had only read their names on his charts.

ships arriving from the eastern Mediterranean were directed. There, vessels from suspect areas were impounded to be scrubbed and fumigated. At the same time crew and passengers were taken ashore under guard and isolated. The cargo and the passengers’ personal effects were unloaded, turned out in the sun, fumigated, and aired. Only at the end of forty days were the goods and passengers released to enter the city. The period of confinement, termed “quarantine” after the Italian word quaranta (forty), constituted the core of the public health strategy. Its duration was based on Christian Scripture, as both the Old and New Testaments make multiple references to the number forty in the context of purification: the forty days and forty nights of the flood in Genesis, the forty years of the Israelites wandering in the wilderness, the forty days Moses spent on Mount Sinai before receiving the Ten Commandments, the forty days of Christ’s temptation, the forty days Christ stayed with his disciples after his resurrection, and the forty days of Lent. With such religious sanction, the conviction held that forty days were sufficient to cleanse the hull of a ship, the bodies of its passengers and crew, and the cargo it carried. All pestilential vapors would be harmlessly dispersed, and the city would be spared. Meanwhile, the biblical resonance of quarantine would fortify compliance with the administrative rigor involved and would provide spiritual comfort for a terrified city.

What a coincidence it was for me to see the SS African Moon in Dar-es-Salaam! After leaving Farrell Lines I thought that I would never get back to Kenya but here I was. It was just like home coming when I came aboard and saw Eddie the first mate. Everything was just as I left it three years before so as we celebrated our reunion over a cup of coffee. Although I hadn’t planned it, I suddenly got an idea. This would be a once in a lifetime opportunity to bring something worthwhile back to The United States. So, I asked Eddie if he could bring something big back to New York for me. “What might that be” he asked suspecting that I was up to no good. “No, it’s not narcotics, it’s a dug out native canoe.” I replied. “Well, I won’t have room in any of the holds but we can lash it down on deck. “Good I’ll have it to you within an hour!” I left and found someone who was willing to sell his dug-out to me and deliver it to the Meteor for under fifty dollars, which at the time was a lot of money but the price included the delivery charge. My, newly acquired well used dug out canoe, was the last thing that crossed the fish plates of the African Moon. Talking to Eddie we watched as the crew professionally lashed it down just forward of the #1 hatch. Shortly thereafter the African Moon backed down and headed out into the Indian Ocean. As for the rest of the story… When the Moon returned, I picked up the dug-out dockside in Brooklyn. With a little help I got it into my pick-up and brought it to my father’s house in Jersey City.  Later without my knowing, it he drilled holes into its hull and decided that it would make a good planter. It didn’t take long for the dirt in it to cause the rot to set in. Within months my canoe was destroyed, however I still have the paddles which sadly but reminiscently serve as a decoration in my Florida home.

American Casualties on the USS Maine Two hundred & Sixty Six American sailors were killed when the American battleship, USS Maine, exploded and sank in Havana harbor after a massive explosion of undetermined origin. The first Board of Inquiry regarding the incident stated that a mine placed on or near the hull had sunk the ship. Later studies determined that it was more likely heat from smoldering coal in the ship’s bunker that set off the explosion in an adjoining ammunition locker. In February 1898, the recovered bodies of the American sailors who died on the battleship were interred in the Colon Cemetery, in Havana. Nearly two years later they were exhumed and now 163 of the crew that were killed in 1898 are buried at Arlington National Cemetery, near the USS Maine Memorial. The beautiful monument shown is located in Central Park West in New York City.

Crimping or Shanghaiing was the act of kidnapping unsuspecting men to serve aboard ships usually destined to sail to the far east. In most cases this happened on the waterfront of cities such as London, Bristol and Hull in England and San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Port Townsend on the West Coast and New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore on the on the East Coast of the United States. Portland, Oregon. In the mid-19th century eventually became the most infamously known city for shanghaiing. People engaged in this form of kidnapping were known as crimps and those members of a ship’s crew that were acquired in this way were referred to as being part of a ships “press gang.” This term had its origin Great Britain's Royal Navy. The need for Shanghaiing grew from shortage of sailors first in the British navy in England and then on merchant ships sailing on the lengthy trade routes primarily to China. With many seamen jumping ship along the west coast and joining the California Gold Rush it developed a cottage industry for boarding masters known as crimps, who found crews for ships. Being paid for every person they delivered there was a strong incentive to find as many seamen as possible and for this they were paid what was named blood money. Records show that these crimps could receive a percentage of the man’s pay or in some cases thousands of dollars of advance pay against the seaman’s pay for the voyage. In 1884 the practice of Crimping or Shanghaiing was curtailed when the Dingley Act came into effect. This law prohibited the taking advantage of the seamen, although some loopholes allowed the practice to continue into the 20th century.

THE ROBOT MEN OF BUBBLE CITY, by Rog Phillips Originally published in Fantastic Adventures, July 1949. Turlogh Hogan pressed the stud that raised the parabolic projector but of its recess in the hull of his ship. The second the light on the panel flashed on, signaling the projector was in operating position, he flicked the relay button that sent the ultra-high frequency current through its opposing coils.

However ghostly it seems, you sense solidity through the soles of your shoes and know yourself to be a part of something big and strong;” wrote Dickinson; “a thousand other men and more, great guns, a powder magazine, an electric power plant that could run a city, a machine shop, beds and kitchens; all of this is compactly organized inside a vast steel hull, your planet.

The little plantations at Weymouth, Hull, and Mount Wollaston, although within the limits of Boston Bay, nevertheless do not concern us here so much as the solitary men who had made homes for themselves upon the land now actually part of the modern city. On an island in the harbour was settled David Thomson, "Gent.," an attorney for Gorges, with his family. Thomson died in 1628, leaving to his family his island and to the island his name, which it has borne ever since.

After it turned so cold, it snowed enormous quantities of snow. I have no recollection of the number of inches or the temperature recorded, but it was much colder than in the Twin Cities, which we thought were semi-tropical by our standards.

I put my ear to the plaster, trying to listen from my bed. I couldn’t make out the words she said, but the tone of her voice sounded like the mermaids at Webb’s City, underwater and ethereal.

spread to the city itself fuel their determined efforts. Gallon after gallon from the hoses attacks the fire, filtering down in torrents from the upper decks to the very bottom of the hull’s interior.

THERE WAS A PERIOD just after the inevitability of ruin hove into view and just before it smashed into the hull of your life that was the closest to pure freedom anybody ever got. The fateful decisions had all been made by some remote historical figure, a you who no longer existed. Nor would the you who’d eventually have to live them down resemble in any but the most general sense the you you were today.

Among other jobs that we did, my brother Bill and I were shoe shine boys in Jersey City and Hoboken during the World War II years. We went from tavern to tavern shining shoes for ten cents and hopefully a generous tip. The Hoboken waterfront bristled with starkly looming, grey hulled Liberty ships. Secured to the piers facing River Street, they brandished their ominous cannons towards what I thought was City Hall. An unappreciated highlight was when I shined Frank Sinatra’s shoes at a restaurant on Washington Street, just west from the Clam Broth House. There was no doubt but that Hoboken was an exciting place during those years. Years later I met Frank at Jilly's saloon, a lounge on West 52d Street in Manhattan, for a few drinks and a little fun around town. Even though I was an adult by then, he still called me “kid!” It was obvious that Frank Sinatra enjoyed friendly relations with Mafia notables such as Carlo Gambino, “Joe Fish” Fischetti and Sam Giancana. Meyer Lansky was said to have been a friend of Sinatra’s parents in Hoboken. During this time Sinatra spoke in awe about Bugsy Siegel and was in an AP syndicated photograph, seen in many newspapers, with Tommy “Fatso” Marson, Don Carlo Gambino 'The Godfather', and Jimmy 'The Weasel, Fratianno. Little wonder that the Federal Bureau of Investigation kept their eye on Sinatra for almost 50 years. A memo in FBI files revealed that Sinatra felt that he could be of use to them. However, it is difficult to believe that Sinatra would have become an FBI informer, better known as a “rat.” It was in May of 1998 when Sinatra, being treated at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles told his wife Barbara, “I’m losing.” Frank Sinatra died on May 14th at 82 years of age. It is alleged that he was buried with the wedding ring from his ex-wife, Mia Farrow, which she slid unnoticed into his suit pocket during his “viewing.” Aside from his perceived personal and public image, Frank Sinatra’s music will shape his enduring legacy for decades to come. His 100th birthday was celebrated at the Hollywood Bowl on Wednesday, July 22, 2015. Somehow Frank will never age and his music will never fade….

I knew Hoboken well during the 40’s & 50’s, and still remember the gray, steel-hulled Liberty and Victory Ships with their gun encasements on their bows, looming above the sheds on the waterfront along River Street. Much of this area has been reclaimed with fill and is very different looking now, with brownstones, parks and Sinatra Drive along the waterfront. Where I once walked is now gone! Where I rode the ferry to New York City and marveled at the ships in the Hudson River and the tall buildings in Manhattan has all changed. At that time I took grainy photos of my world with a Baby Brownie Camera, and still have some of them in an old album.