Maritime Stories
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Early Women Sailors- Lagertha
Tradition allows the presence of women sailors in history as marginal and generally achieving fame dressed as men. In this form they are largely pirates or in the navy. However, women have been sailing for centuries providing for their families by shipping cargo to larger ports, supporting the men who were battling to save their…
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The Maiden Voyage of the Cutty Sark, February 15th 1869.
The introduction of the tea trade globally from the early sixteen hundreds was the start of highly competitive trade practices, the instigation of several wars, growth of illegal drug trading, indentured working, slavery and in the mid nineteenth century it impacted on ship design. By this time the favoured design was sleek and able to…
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Dreaming the Voyage
(Six years ago, the first phase of Dreaming the Voyage was created at my studio at The Wheelhouse in Trinity Bouy Wharf on the banks of the Thames in London. With the support of the TBW artist’s fund, I was able to buy the equipment needed for the installation. A big thank you to them…
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Distant Voyages: Charles Dickens Visits America for the first time.
On 4 January 1842, Charles Dickens left Liverpool with his wife and her companion on the RMS Britannia. The Britannia was the flagship of the embryonic Cunard Line. She was build in Greenock, Scotland in 1840 and was the first of four paddle steamers of this class. The Arcadia, the Caledonia and Columbia soon followed.…
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Landing the first transatlantic telegraph cable
Source…https://www.flickr.com/photos/lac-bac/31367042642 On July 27th 1866, the first working public transatlantic telegraph cable was landed in Hearts Content, Newfoundland from Valentia Island off of the west coast of Ireland. Previous cables had failed and required upgrading and Morse code instruments needed to be developed to meet the new technical specifications. The ship used for the laying…
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Celestial Navigation
(Image from NASA) Early sailors would probably want to stay within sight of land in order to stay safe as they had no obvious means of navigation. However, as their expertise in recognising star patterns, direction of the waves and swell, the colour of the sea and the behaviour of the birds extended, so grew…
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The Isle of Dogs
I was looking through some photos and came across some taken roughly a year ago while having a look at the launch site on Napier Avenue of the SS Great Eastern. It was the largest ship to have been built in its day, 1858, and indeed was too large to launch traditionally….thus it was launched…
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The Canadian Government Ship Arctic
 In September 1880 Britain ceded the rights of Arctic Sovereignty to Canada which was taken up in 1903 when looking to establish trade routes using the Hudson Bay and Straits….greater grain production and the expansion of markets in the western provinces as the areas became more populated required routes to be created that would…
Julie Newman, visual artist 