Captain Of Ship Research Articles

Bury the chains: prophets and rebels in the fight to free an empire's slaves

From the author of the prize-winning King Leopold's Ghost comes a taut, thrilling account of the first grass-roots human rights campaign, which freed hundreds of thousands of slaves around the world. In 1787, twelve men gathered in a London printing shop to pursue a seemingly impossible goal: ending slavery in the largest empire on earth. Along the way, they would pioneer most of the tools citizen activists still rely on today, from wall posters and mass mailings to boycotts and lapel pins. This talented group combined a hatred of injustice with uncanny skill in promoting their cause. Within five years, more than 300,000 Britons were refusing to eat the chief slave-grown product, sugar; London's smart set was sporting antislavery badges created by Josiah Wedgwood; and the House of Commons had passed the first law banning the slave trade. However, the House of Lords, where slavery backers were more powerful, voted down the bill. But the crusade refused to die, fueled by remarkable figures like Olaudah Equiano, a brilliant ex-slave who enthralled audiences throughout the British Isles; John Newton, the former slave ship captain who wrote Amazing Grace; Granville Sharp, an eccentric musician and self-taught lawyer; and Thomas Clarkson, a fiery organizer who repeatedly crisscrossed Britain on horseback, devoting his life to the cause. He and his fellow activists brought slavery in the British Empire to an end in the 1830s, long before it died in the United States. The only survivor of the printing shop meeting half a century earlier, Clarkson lived to see the day when a slave whip and chains were formally buried in a Jamaican churchyard. Like Hochschild's classic King Leopold's Ghost, Bury the Chains abounds in atmosphere, high drama, and nuanced portraits of unsung heroes and colorful villains. Again Hochschild gives a little-celebrated historical watershed its due at last.

Jefferson’s Legacy to the Supreme Court: Freedom of Religion

Jefferson’s Legacy to the Supreme Court: Freedom of Religion BARBARA A. PERRY Religion in Colonial Virginia Except for Rhode Island, each ofthethirteenAmerican colonies created some form ofestablished religion. The English venturists who undertook settlements in New England and Virginia simply assumed that religion would be inextricably tied to their colonial enterprises.1 The 1606 charter creating the Virginia colony required that all ministers preach Christianity that followed the “doctrine, rights, and religion now professed and established within the realme ofEngland”—in other words, the Church of England.2 To bolster the struggling Jamestown settlement, in 1610— 11, Sir Thomas Dale promulgated “Articles, Lawes, and Orders, Divine, Politic, and Martiall for the Colony in Virginia.” Clergymen were to read “Dale’s Laws,” as they were labeled, to assemblies every Sabbath. The thirty-seven rules included eight that specifically referred to God and prohibited impiety, blasphemy, sacrilege, and irreverence towardpreachers or ministers. The sixth law was particularly notable for its strict religious requirements and harsh penalties for violations: “Every man and woman duly twice a day... shall... repair unto the Church to divine service upon pain of losing his or her days allowance for the first omission, for the second to be whipped, and for the third to be condemned to the Gallies for six months. Likewise no man or woman shall dare to violate or break the Sabbath by any gaming... but duly sanctify and observe the same, both himself and his family, by preparing themselves at home with private prayer, that they may be better fitted for the public according to the commandments of God and the orders of our Church... .”3 Colonists faced the death penalty after the third offense of missing morning and afternoon Sunday devotional services. Over the next century, English mission­ aries, assisted by the Church of England’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and Society for the Promoting of Christian Knowledge, spread Anglicanism throughout the Chesapeake region and founded more than 75 parishes in Virginia and Maryland, which constituted over half of the 150 parishes in America, by Jefferson’s birth in 1743. Yet Vir­ ginia parishes hardly resembled those found 182 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY English missionaries had founded more than seventy-five parishes in Virginia and Maryland by the time of Jefferson's birth in 1743, including this church in King William County, Virginia. Clerics complained about the small salaries and the long distances they had to travel to visit their small congregations. in the mother country. The population was so dispersed that Anglican clerics complained about the long distances they had to cover in visiting their small congregations, in addi­ tion to legislative indifference to their salaries. Moreover, the England-based church hierar­ chy failed to assign a bishop to Virginia, which resulted in a lack of discipline, ordi­ nation, and clerical authority. Into this ec­ clesiastical power vacuum stepped Anglican parish vestries, which the clergy thought were too powerful. In turn, parishioners saw too many priests as escapees from England, leav­ ing financial and family burdens behind for “retirement” in Virginia. Life in early colonial Virginia was hardly one of leisure, however. English criminals who were offered the op­ tions ofhanging for their crimes or deportation to Virginia reportedly chose the gallows!4 The Anglicans’ monopoly had profound ramifications for those colonists who were not members of the Church of England. In the chapteron religion from his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson addressed the sad his­ tory of intolerance by the Anglican church in his native colony, especially against “the poor Quakers.” Jefferson noted that Quakers had fled from English persecution in hopes of finding “asylums of civil and religious free­ dom; but they found them only for the reigning sect.”5 In 1659, 1662, and 1693 the Virginia legislature criminalized Quakers’ refusal to baptize their children, “prohibited the unlaw­ ful assembly ofQuakers,” forbid ship captains from bringing Quakers to Virginia, required those already in the Old Dominion or those who arrived later “to be imprisoned till they should abjure the country,” established the JEFFERSON AND FREEDOM OF RELIGION 183 death penalty for Quakers who had accumu­ lated three offenses ofcoming to the state, and...

Albert Soiland

He told people that his vocation was sailing and his hobby was radiology. In fact, he was the son of a Norwegian ship captain. But the success of Albert Soiland in skippering a series of small sailing boats, all “Vikings,” in Pacific races would not bring him the fame he earned as a pioneer radiologist and as the founder of the ACR.

English-Russian language contacts

The paper reveals the beginning and development of English-Russian language and culture contacts generated by social history. Nine stages of the contact development characterized by different intensity and depth (starting from the sixteenth century until present) have been overviewed. An overview of the history of cultural interactions between Russia and English-speaking countries shows that neither the Russian language nor the English language has been immune to this process. In the case of Russian, the impact of exposure to English culture on the language has gone through various phases. Until recently, English was never the preferred foreign language in Russia, but it has come into and gone out of fashion with the ebbs and flows of Russian (and Soviet) relations with English-speaking nations. At the high tides of cross-cultural contact, linguistic borrowing has occurred in every imaginable field, from literature and finance to science and pop culture. The low tides have never been so low as to completely eradicate the influence of English on the Russian language. In the following pages, we explore briefly the history of these contacts. The history of Russian and British contacts dates back to the mid-sixteenth century when the British ship Edward Bonaventure was anchored in the mouth of the Northern Dvina River on August 24, 1553 1 (Aristova, 1978: 14). Russian Czar Ivan IV (''Ivan the Terrible'') granted an audience to Richard Chancellor, the captain of the ship. Chancellor handed the czar a letter from King Edward VI. The objective of Chancellor's expedition was to open a new market for British merchandise. Both Russia and Great Britain were interested in trading with each other. Improved economic and cultural ties with Western countries would help Russia strengthen its internal and external credibility. Ivan IV supported Russian-British trade by awarding free entry and freedom of movement, as well as tax-free trade, to British merchants from the Moscow Company. This trading company was established in London in 1554. In Russia, British merchants found a vast market for sugar, paper, cloth, weapons, medicine, spices, jewelry, and other imports. Additionally, entree into Russia opened trade routes to the Near East, Central Asia, and India. British and Russian merchants brought the first English words to Russia. These were primarily words the Russian language lacked: mester (<Mister), lord, aldraman (<alderman), etc. The words were transcribed by means of Russian letters according to their sound in oral speech. Thus,many words had a number of graphicand phonetic variants:ser,sar,sor (<sir); erl, erl', ell', er (<earl). Although few Russians visited Britain in the sixteenth century, many British people came to Russia. The Russian government encouraged British professionals - doctors,

Essay

We have all marveled at the gifts of talented clinicians at work, individuals who can put troubled patients at ease with a few simple words or make a complex diagnosis at a glance. Understanding how they acquired excellence and how to pass it on to others, however, poses a challenge. The timeless inquiry into human excellence constitutes the branch of philosophy known as virtue ethics.1 Virtue ethics identifies the individual as a central moral agent and characterizes those dispositions that predispose to right or excellent actions as virtues, and those that predispose to wrong or poor actions as vices. Aristotle used physicians–as well as ship captains–as one of his central models for a virtuous person.1 Both make decisions based on complex and sometimes conflicting observations, and both exemplify the value of virtues such as courage, judgment, fidelity, and prudence. Physicians are well suited to the study of virtue ethics because clinical care provides them an unadulterated view of human virtues and vices, ready familiarity with the language people use to describe them, and direct experience with their consequences. So how do we learn excellence? The great medical virtues–compassion, fidelity (trust), justice, and integrity–develop gradually and frequently build on simpler virtues such as tact, self-awareness, good humor, reverence, and simplicity. These simpler virtues are less celebrated and often overlooked. It may seem odd to consider tact a virtue worthy of mention in that it can neither save a life nor advance technology. If it is taught, it is never taught formally. Highlighting its presence in a colleague might raise suspicions that it is being mentioned in lieu of other, more tangible, capabilities. Tact can be defined as the ability in conversation to say and leave unsaid just the right things. Tact helps protect patients from excessive or needless exposure. …

A RUSSIAN BOURGEOIS'S ARCTIC ENLIGHTENMENT

Studies of Europe's Enlightenment have been enriched by attending to its real and imagined impacts on indigenous peoples and of indigenous peoples on Europeans. Applying these methods to new-settled eighteenth-century societies offers another standpoint on the Enlightenment. This study is a sample: a civic history of a relatively new – in European terms – place suggests the possibilities. In 1792, a bourgeois, Vasilii Krestinin, from Russia's White Sea shore, published a history of Archangel, founded in 1584. Krestinin's view from a new Arctic society is as far from Europe's elegant metropoles and eloquent lumières as the ship captains, Pacific Islanders, and cat killers in influential recent studies of the Enlightenment. Just as these studies – and others on readers and reading – transformed studies of the Enlightenment, historians can use sources from new societies to observe answers and actions of people casting themselves as Enlighteners. This study of enlightened sensibility in an Arctic society suggests how the Enlightenment – viewed from settler societies – became anxious, how it fanned nationalisms, and how it was ensnared by naïve presuppositions that progress was a prerequisite of power.

The Chance of the Moment: Coffee and the New West Indies Commodities Trade

Spanish colony of Puerto Rico where he reported: We loaded what of the wood we could get there and sent express to the out bays near us, who returned for answer, that there was very little and so situated that we could not get at it either with ship or boats . . . we proceeded then to another design for we found neither wood nor mules, but a good deal of coffee.' Jamaicans were unlikely to buy Ash's coffee when he returned to Kingston because they produced enough of their own, yet he purchased between two and three thousand pounds, reasoning it could be resold in North America to offset the expense of his endeavor. A decade later many more merchants and ship captains were discovering, as Ash had learned, the lucrative potential of coffee trading. Demand for coffee in the United States grew rapidly after 1783, both as an article of home consumption and as one of the new nation's most profitable reexported commodities. The postrevolutionary coffee trade illustrates the importance of the West Indies to early American economic development and the increasingly international orientation of

The Journal of a Sea Captain's Wife, 1841-1845 by Lydia Rider Nye, Doyce B. Nunis, Jr.

Museum in 1935,and conserved and installed in the museum's sculpture court in 1998. Proctor isalso represented at the Metropoli tan Museum ofArt, BrooklynMuseum, Smith sonian American ArtMuseum, and numerous others, including theA. Phimister ProctorMu seum inPoulsbo,Washington, established in1997 by theartist'sgrandson.Monuments by Proctor are located inDenver,Washington, D.C., Pitts burgh, and other cities. Hassrick suggeststhathis supreme accomplishments are the equestrian, multi-figured Pioneer Mother inKansas City, Missouri, and the two-man, two-horse monu ment toRobert E. Lee inDallas, Texas. The monograph is spaciously designed and well organized and written.A seventyfive-page introductoryessay,divided into seven chapters, presents a chronological discussion of Proctor 's early life,development as an artist, happy marriage and family life, and successes and frustrations as he competed with his western art contemporaries Charles M. Russell and Frederick Remington as well as high style Beaux-Arts sculptors, especially followers of Daniel Chester French, rivalofProctor'smentor Saint-Gaudens. The essay is followed by a chronologi cal catalogue that illustrates and discusses each sculpture, providing information on patron-artist relations, significance of subject, date ofmodeling and casting, location, and other known versions. The catalogue is cited throughout the essay so that one can turn to detailed discussion of a particular work while reading the broader commentary in the essay. (In thediscussion ofOregon PioneerMother on page 89, citation is omitted for the catalogue entryon page 225 ? aminor but temporarily confusing discontinuity.) The book, situatingProctor in regional,na tional, and international contexts, is a valuable addition toAmerican art historical studies. It contributes to art scholarship about the Ameri canWest, on thebasis ofwhich Proctor staked his fame,and Northwest, which Proctorwooed and, inOregon to a surprisingdegree,won. The Journal ofa Sea Captains Wife, 1841-1845 By Lydia Rider Nye, edited byDoyce B. Nunis, Jr. Arthur H. Clark Company, Spokane, Wash., 2004. Photographs, maps, bibliography, appendices, index. 254 pages. $32.50 cloth. Reviewed byNancy Pagh Western Washington University,Bellingham Historian jo Stanley recently wrote about the need for books on women at sea. "How can gender issues be raised in a discipline (maritime history) that traditionally uses straightforward social and economic his tory approaches rather than drawing in tools available fromcultural studies, women's studies, and post-colonial studies?" she asked ina review essay inGender & History (April 2003, p. 136). The Journal of a Sea Captains Wife is a beautifully designed, traditional scholarly edi tion of Lydia Rider Nye's journal, including her account of traveling from Boston toHawai'i tomeet her husband and trade voyages to the PacificCoast. The book includes a prologue and epilogue, giving it some narrative shape, and numerous appendices ? including accounts of theBritish seizure ofHonolulu in 1842, King Ka mehameha Ill's restoration, and theCalifornia hide and tallow trade.Given the current inter est inwomen's accounts of sea travel,this text, promoted as "the only known journal kept by a wife of a ship captain during a voyage along the Pacific Coast prior to 1848" (although Frances Reviews 511 Barkley's 1787 account ofNootka predates it), will garner interest by feminists,social historians ofHawai'i, and economic historians interested in thehide trade. Nye herself points out, "I do not want for matter, but language,O that I had the pen of a readywriter" (p. 91). Unlike the fascinating journals of Caroline Leighton and Libby Bea man, Nye's writing lacks a sense of personality and reflection. Early entries wear a heavy mask ofpiety (theeditorfinds thisrhetoric"genuine"; I credit her fellow passengers, who were mis The Oregon Historical Society Press congratulates Lewis L. McArthur winner of a 2005 Merit Award for individual achievement from the American Association for State and Local History McArthurin2003 xvith the firstsixeditions ofOregon Geographic Names Lewis L. McArthur grew up learning about Oregon places. His father, Lewis A. McArthur, began research for the first edition of Oregon Geographic Names shortly after Lewis was born. After his father died in 1951, the younger McArthur con tinued the tradition, completing the fourth and preparing the fifth, sixth, and, in 2003, a seventh edition of what has become a classic reference work. He also serves on the Oregon Geographic Names Board and the Place Name Commis sion of theUnited States...

The poetry of history

The poetry of history

Amazing Grace in John Newton, Slave Ship Captain, Hymn-Writer and Abolitionist By William E. Phipps: Macon, Mercer University Press, 2001. 270 pp. $35.00

Amazing Grace in John Newton, Slave Ship Captain, Hymn-Writer and Abolitionist <i>By William E. Phipps</i>: Macon, Mercer University Press, 2001. 270 pp. $35.00

Amazing Grace in John Newton: Slave Ship Captain, Hymnwriter, and Abolitionist. By William E. Phipps. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2001. xxiv + 270 pp. $35.00 cloth.

Amazing Grace in John Newton: Slave Ship Captain, Hymnwriter, and Abolitionist. By William E. Phipps. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2001. xxiv + 270 pp. $35.00 cloth.

William Lloyd Garrison, Benjamin Lundy and Criminal Libel: The Abolitionists' Plea for Press Freedom

Abolitionists Benjamin Lundy and William Lloyd Garrison in 1829-31 were sued and prosecuted in Maryland for criminal libel for condemning a ship owner and captain for transporting slaves. Lundy and Garrison's legal experiences, including Garrison's seven weeks in jail, resulted in a series of their writings that advocated broad protection for freedom of the press. Although their views on abolition were unpopular, their views on press freedom won support from other editors and helped shape subsequent debate over constitutional theory of freedom of expression, especially in the South.

Refuge Upon the Sea: Captivity and Liberty in The Florida Pirate

Refuge Upon the Sea:Captivity and Liberty in The Florida Pirate Daniel Williams (bio) In the final scene of The Florida Pirate, the escaped slave Manuel languished in a Charleston prison, awaiting execution for piracy. When his one remaining friend in either race visited him shortly before his death, he exclaimed: "Ah, is it you, sir? . . . you are the person I most wished to see. How kind it is in you to visit a poor negro! for I am no more now. I am glad to be treated as a rational creature by at least one white man."1 Here, in a jail cell a few hours before his death, Manuel lamented that he was nothing more than "a poor negro." Like the walls around him, the racist conventions that reduced him to being nothing more than an irrational creature awaiting ignoble execution held him captive. A prisoner of both criminal and linguistic codes, he was forced to become what his captors perceived him to be. Yet at his death Manuel also alluded to his having been something greater in life. While declaring his readiness to die, he stated: "I had a weary life of it. I was chased from the land, and took refuge upon the sea; but notwithstanding that, I could not escape the blood-hounds of the Southern States of America." Manuel's "refuge upon the sea" was a pirate ship. After suffering extreme abuse and even mutilation on land, he escaped into piracy, where—according to his narrative—he discovered an alternative social order that allowed him to exist as a free, rational creature. Once able to determine his own fate, he displayed his natural talents, ultimately becoming the captain of a pirate ship. Ironically, his downfall resulted not from southern bloodhounds but from his own rationality. As a rational creature, as a man of reason over passion, he refused to allow his crew to murder the survivors of their last pirate attack, but his compassion directly resulted in his destruction when three of the survivors led an American warship back to his ship's location. Thus, in the movement from slavery to piracy the narrative tracks Manuel's journey of self-realization from subjugation to liberation. Yet the pirate's rational self-governance made him ill suited for either extreme [End Page 71] and inexorably led him back to the ultimate negation of self in the ritual of execution. For English and American readers during the 1820s, the story offered a sensational tale of violence, love, and revenge while featuring two of the period's most dramatic subjects, slavery and piracy. Beneath its textual surface, however, the narrative carried turbulent currents concerning the limits of rationality and the near limitless capacity for human cruelty, mitigated only by momentary acts of charity. Strangely, by juxtaposing their cruel excesses, the narrative linked slavery and piracy. Although representing opposite polarities of human liberty, the two displayed similar levels of ruthless brutality and vicious self-interest. Manuel's fictional tale, The Florida Pirate, was first presented to Anglo-American readers in the August 1821 issue of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. The story was engaging enough that within a year Sylvester T. Goss, a New Hampshire printer in Haverhill, advertised his own edition of the story as the Life and Adventures of Manuel, the Florida Pirate. The following year W. Borradaile, a New York printer, thought the story was marketable enough to invest his own time and energy in producing three separate editions, all of which were printed in 1823 under the title The Florida Pirate, or An Account of the a Cruise in the Schooner Esparanza. Five years later another New York printer, S. King, still considered the story a marketable commodity and produced two separate editions in 1828. Six years later, in 1834, two Pittsburgh printers, Felt and Cook, published the final American edition of The Florida Pirate. Thus, in a little more than a decade, and at a time when few texts were reprinted in multiple editions, Manuel's story of slavery and piracy was printed a total of nine times on both sides of the Atlantic. Such relative frequency of publication clearly indicates that several American...

A Human Factors Perspective on Helicopter Human External Loads

Human external loads (HEL) refer to operations where humans are transported while suspended below a helicopter. HEL operations are often required to access remote work sites, to access power lines in need of maintenance and repair, for transport of offshore ship captains, and for rescue operations. This paper reports a human factors investigation of HEL operations and the devices used to secure HELs involved in work (non-rescue) activities. The goal of this investigation was to determine if HEL operations pose a significant safety hazard. Specifically, the paper describes the various devices used to secure HELs, the accident history associated with HELs, and human factors recommendations for the regulation of HEL devices and operations. Review of 616 helicopter accident reports revealed that only 1.5% of the accidents occurred during HEL operations and only 0.5% were directly attributable to the presence of an HEL.

Captain of a Sinking Ship?

KAREN FORBES has been an advanced practice nurse for over 20 years, and is currently involved in a collaborative practice and consulting.

TV's 1968: War, Politics, and Violence on the Network Evening News

It was a year of horrors and failures, CBS Evening News substitute anchor Harry Reasoner declared in his commentary on the last day of 1968. Reasoner's brief but pointed description summed up how the network evening news programs presented the year's events. They concentrated on war, politics, and violence. The Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War, the presidential election campaign, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia were television's big stories. Each produced memorable images and moments of high drama, assuring them prominent places on newscasts in the visual medium of television. By 1968, more than half of the American people relied on television as their principal source of news. What they saw informed, engrossed, and unsettled them. The unexpected and unimaginable were no longer the unusual. Shocks and traumas in rapid succession suggested that disorder, disarray, destruction, and death were the most important facts of American life and international affairs. Reasoner spoke for many who were aghast at what they saw in their living rooms.I The first big story of 1968 on the evening newscasts was the North Korean seizure of the U.S. intelligence ship Pueblo.2 For the first time in a hundred years, an American ship has been captured on the high seas, ABC news anchor Bob Young announced on 23 January. The Pentagon said that the Pueblo was in international waters in the Sea of Japan, but there was little solid information about exactly what had happened to the ship or about the crew's situation in captivity. U.S. news organizations had no correspondents in North Korea, and television journalists treated information from Pyongyang, such as the alleged confession of the ship's captain, Commander Lloyd Bucher, with skepticism. Much of the reporting suggested that the North Korean action was part of a coordinated Communist strategy to exploit U.S. vulnerability because of the heavy concentration of U.S. forces in the Vietnam War or to distract the attention of high officials in the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson at a time when the North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front (NLF) might be

Stephen Esslemont Woods. 12 January 1912–18 June 1994

Stephen Esslemont Woods was born in Cardiff on 12 January 1912, the fifth of eight children, to Scottish parents, William Woods and Annie Whyte. His father was a fifth–generation merchant seaman who was an apprentice in sail and eventually became captain of a steam ship.

実験参与船員の意見に見られるTSL飛翔の安全な航行方法

A project of a high speed craft, Techno-Super-Liner had been held and a prototype ship "Hishou" was constructed. A part of final experiment of "Hishou" had been executed to investigate the way of safety navigation of a high speed craft encountering with an ordinary speed ship by Ship Research Institute in 1995. The experiment was done both at sea and on our simulator. We got some subjective evaluation results for safety navigation from participants who had evaluated Hishou's safety on the experiment. Based on their subjective evaluation results, we investigated the way of safety navigation for Hishou in congested sea area and reported it in our last paper of the Japan Institute of Navigation. In this paper we carried out more detailed investigation of the subjective evaluation results. The participant mariners were classified into 3 classes which were ordinary ship's captain, officer and Hishou classes. Their subjective evaluation results were compared among 3 classes. Then it was found that Hishou and the captain classes determined their recognition of the encountering situation severer than the officer's one. As the items which had been used on their judgement of collision danger were examined by Principal Components Analysis, we found differences between captain class and officer class. By comparison between the onboard experiments and the simulators', a simulator was conceded to be an effective tool getting mariner's characteristics. Finally we offered basic criteria of Hishou's safety navigation.

Robert Paltock and the Refashioning of "Inkle and Yarico"

Robert Paltock and the Refashioning Of "Inkle and Yarico"Peter Merchant Robert Paltock's Peter Wilkins, in the novel of the same name (1750), is as resourceful and ingenious a figure as eighteenth-century fiction has to show. One of his feats is to improvise a pair of spectacles out of "old Hat, pieces of Ram's-horn," and "an old crape Hatband."1 This essay, though far luckier in the raw materials dealt it, attempts something similar. It grows out of the need I feel for some new lens through which to view and read Paltock's extraordinary novel. For us, it suggests , the famous eighteenth-century story of Inkle and Yarico might become just such a reading aid. For Paltock himself, this story seems to have functioned as a vital stimulus to invention in the testing interim between his novel's "Introduction"—where some shots which a ship's captain speculatively fires at the sky bring "an elderly Man" mysteriously crashing down into the sea (p. 6)—and the eventual explanation (deferred for fifty-two chapters) of that most memorable of openings. We shall need to have the whole of Paltock's plot before us. Peter Wilkins, it emerges, is the name of the man so strangely shot from die sky in the South Atlantic, and picked up just in time to save him from drowning. When Wilkins then dictates his life-story to "R.S. a Passenger in the Hector," we travel back to his teenage years to learn of his marriage to Patty, his ruin at the hands of a cruel stepfather, and the start of his seafaring career. His subsequent adventures in Africa are only a prelude 1 Robert Paltock, Peter Wilkins, ed. Christopher Bentley, with an introduction by James Grantham Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 123-25. References are to this edition. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 9, Number 1, October 1996 38 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION to the drama of shipwreck off Patagonia, and what the novel's titlepage describes as "his wonderful Passage thro' a subterraneous Cavern into a kind of new World." Wilkins finds that he must now make his home on the beautiful uninhabited island of Grandevolet, where all links with the world he knew before are severed. Patty is duly consigned to the past when Wilkins dreams of her death, seeing her as an angelic figure who eludes his embrace (p. 104). But merged with the pain of Patty's passing, as if Wilkins's philosophical "come Life, come Death" (p. 105) at this point comprehended all the extremes of his experience, is the excitement of a fresh beginning. For immediately, in a reversal of the rescue at sea which gives the novel its frame, a loud thump announces that a beautiful female called Youwarkee has just delivered herself into Wilkins's hands by quite unaccountably landing on his roof. When Wilkins finds and saves Youwarkee, he carries her over the threshold (p. 106) as if already aware that she is soon to be his wife. But first they must negotiate a means of communication. Even then, everything Youwarkee can slowly bring Wilkins to understand—that she fell accidentally to earth, having come on a jaunt (or "Swangean") from "the Country of ... Men and Women that fly"—further inflames his curiosity and ours. Necessarily, there are lengthy passages devoted to describing the "Graundee" that serves Youwarkee both as clothing and as means of flight, and to detailing "the Laws, Customs, and Manners" of her native country, Doorpt Swangeanti. When Wilkins, thus briefed, finally travels to Doorpt Swangeanti (on an elaborate flying chair which he himself designs and builds) he is well enough forearmed to make himself a considerable power in the land. He modernizes its industry, thwarts a rebellion against King Georigetti, and—helped by his own translation of the Bible—brings the Swangeantine people to that "rational Knowledge" of God which he has already instilled in Youwarkee (p. 156). In addition to removing "the Misery and Bondage of Idolatry" (p. 247), he proclaims the abolition of slavery. Wilkins by now has transformed the Swangeantine system and also transformed himself—from shipwrecked sailor into beneficent colonial administrator. He only...

Severe weather in Mediterranean ports

AbstractEnvironmental phenomena such as strong winds, high waves, restrictions to visibility and thunderstorms can be hazardous to US Navy fleet operations. The Mediterranean region is an area where the complicated topography significantly influences these kind of environmental phenomena, particularly in the coastal regions. Because the US Navy recognised this as a concern to many ship captains, the Marine Meteorology Division of the Naval Research Laboratory, Monterey, California was asked to evaluate the severe weather suitability of 55 Mediterranean ports and document the results. The resulting analyses provide decision‐making guidance for ship captains as well as environmental information for operational forecasters. These port evaluations have been disseminated in hard copy form as individual port studies as well as in a compilation of all port studies in CD‐ROM format.