Maritime Museum Quotes

Look at a current list of the most popular tourist attractions in London and you would probably come up with a Top Ten which would include the British Museum, the Tate Modern, the National Gallery, the Natural History Museum, the London Eye, the Science Museum, the V&A, Madame Tussaud’s Wax Works, the National Maritime Museum, and the Tower of London. Throw in St. Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey and you have a dozen of the most popular sites

Ballard, however, remains optimistic about the sea’s effect on the ship but pessimistic about what man is doing to it.  And perhaps he has good reason for this because anxious to get what it could while it could, Premier Exhibitions, Inc., a part of  RMST, in 2007 bought the rights of all the personal belongings found on the ship.  In 2011, U.S. District Judge Rebecca Beach Smith ruled that the company had the right to the items, as long as they properly cared for and preserved them.  While this has allowed new Titanic museums and tourists attractions to spring up around the world, it also means that the ship will continue to be plundered.  In the end, it seems that whether nature wipes it out or men plunder it into oblivion, Titanic’s days remain just as numbered as they were on that fateful April day on which she was launched.

Lying in state now in an exhibit case at London’s National Maritime Museum, H-4 draws millions of visitors a year. Most tourists approach the Watch after having passed the cases containing H-1, H-2, and H-3. Adults and youngsters alike stand mesmerized before the big sea clocks. They move their heads to follow the swinging balances, which rock like metronomes on H-1 and H-2. They breathe in time to the regular rhythm of the ticking, and they gasp when startled by the sudden, sporadic spinning of the single-blade fan that protrudes from the bottom of H-2. But H-4 stops them cold. It purports to be the end of some orderly progression of thought and effort, yet it constitutes a complete non sequitur. What’s more, it holds still, in stark contrast to the whirring of the going clocks. Not only are its mechanisms hidden by the silver case enclosure, but the hands are frozen in time. Even the second hand lies motionless. H-4 does not run. It could run, if curators would allow it to, but they demur, on the grounds that H-4 enjoys something of the status of a sacred relic or a priceless work of art that must be preserved for posterity. To run it would be to ruin it.

Pauline let out a loud groan. “Everybody thinks everybody is the killer. The lady at the 7-Eleven says it’s that guy Sam from the Gill Creek Maritime Museum, because he has sinister eyebrows. I think it’s Liam.” Liam stared into the fire. “I did it with s’more sticks.

Catawamteak,” meaning “the great landing,” is what the Abenaki Indians called the early settlement that became Rockland, Maine. Thomaston and Rockland can be bypassed by Route 90, an eight-mile shortcut which I frequently used as a midshipman, but our bus stayed on the main road and stopped to let passengers on and off in both places. At one time Rockland was part of Thomaston, called East Thomaston, but the two towns have long since separated, having very little in common. In the beginning, Rockland developed quickly because of shipbuilding and limestone production. It was, and still is, an important fishing port. Lobsters are the main export and the five-day Maine Lobster Festival is celebrated here annually. The red, three-story brick buildings lining the main street of Rockland, give it the image of an old working town. I have always been impressed by the appearance of these small towns, because to me this is what I had expected Maine to look like. When I first went through the center of Rockland on the bus, I was impressed by the obvious ties the community had with the sea. The fishing and lobster industry was evident by the number of commercial fishing and lobster boats. Rockland was, and still is, the commercial hub of the mid-coastal region of the state. The local radio station WRKD was an important source of local news and weather reports. This was also the radio station that opened each day’s broadcasting with Hal Lone Pine’s song, recorded on Toronto's Arc Records label: “There’s a winding lane on the Coast of Maine that is wound around my heart....” The United States Coast Guard still maintains a base in Rockland, which is reassuring to the families of those who go fishing out on the open waters of Penobscot Bay and the Gulf of Maine. Rockland remains the home of the Farnsworth Art Museum, which has an art gallery displaying paintings by Andrew Wyeth, as well as other New England artists. The Bay Point Hotel that was founded in 1889 had a compelling view of the breakwater and Penobscot Bay. The Victorian style hotel, later known as the Samoset Hotel, had seen better days by 1952 and was closed in 1969. On October 13, 1972, the four-story hotel caught fire in the dining area due to an undetermined cause. Fanned by 20-mile-an-hour north winds, the structure burned to the ground within an hour. However, five years later a new Samoset Resort was founded.

Since its founding in 1941, the Academy had training ships that were furnished by the U.S. Maritime Commission. The first one was the training ship TS American Seaman and then the TS American Sailor. Both ships were loosely termed “West Coast Hog Islanders,” which meant their hulls were raised in the bow, stern and amidships and they had a counter-stern. This gave them the same basic appearance as the well-known “Philadelphia Hog Islanders,” though they were somewhat smaller. These ships were designed as freighters to be used during the First World War. Their construction was completed in Seattle, Washington, in 1919, just a little too late for the war. Had they been preserved, they would now be museum pieces, but this was not to be the case. Instead they were towed to the breakers, where they were converted into razor blades. A mural of the TS American Sailor was painted onto the dining room bulkhead. Later when we got a new ship, the training ship TS State of Maine, I painted her likeness on another Bulkhead.