––– Peter Guttormsen.
Birch Harbor, south of Prospect Point. 3 August 2014.
Cadillac Mountain
So named in 1918 after Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, Donaquec et Monts Déserts, who once owned 400 square kilometres in Nouvelle-France that included Mount Desert Island. De La Mothe founded Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit, a settlement that eventually became a now bankrupt city in Michigan.
On 1 January 2011, the Admiral and the seaman hiked up the Mount, five days after the Christmas Blizzard of 2010.
Acadia National Park, crowned by the île des Monts Déserts. 2 August 2014.
In Acadia
Acadia, settled from 1604 and onwards, was the province of Nouvelle-France that occupied most of today's Maine, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, as well as parts of today's Québec. The French lost Acadia to the English between 1710 and 1724.
Although Acadia has not existed as a political entity for almost 300 years, we were intrigued last year when we found entire towns in Québec that choose to fly the Acadian flag, sometimes to the exclusion of the Canada and the Québec flags (!). The Louisiana Cajuns are, of course, also descendants of the Acadian diaspora, but in the bayous they fly the Old Glory, as far as we saw a few years ago.
In any event, Peregrinus will be exploring the old Acadian coast during the next couple of months.
The Alférez looks out at other boats in Mackerel Cove, Swans Island. 31 July 2014.
Lucem Diffundo
Quakers from Plymouth Colony purchased the land from the indians in 1652; King Philip chartered its territory as part of Dartmouth township in 1664; when, in 1787, the village in the west bank of the Acushnet at its mouth became a town of its own, local grandees the Russells insisted it be named after their remote cousin the Duke of Bedford. But there was already a Bedford chartered inland to the northwest of Boston, and so the village became New Bedford.
In the mid-19th century, New Bedford surpassed Nantucket as the whaling capital of the United States; and since at the time the entire civilized world read at night mostly thanks to whale oil, it was only logical that the town's motto should be "I Spread Light", or Lucem Diffundo.
Whales since 1859 are very, very lucky that in that year the enterprising Edwin Drake built the first successful petroleum well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, and launched the oil industry that provides an oil which is more abundant and more humane than the kind of oil they used to get here.
Today's fishing fleet at New Bedford fishes no whales. View from Peregrinus, hanging from a mooring, July 24.
At 90 miles per hour, on the way to the Zuid Rivier
The Dutch hired Henry Hudson who mapped it in 1609. They called it the South River (Zuid) when they founded their initial settlement in the bay in 1631, but when King Charles II relieved them of Niew-Nederland in 1664, the English renamed it after the 3rd Baron De La Warr.
The Delaware was then linked to the Chesapeake in 1829, after an idea first conceived by the Dutch and later promoted by Benjamin Franklin. A public-private partnership, it was one of the great infrastructure works of the age; following a typically expansionist Roosevelt initiative of 1906, the Feds ended up buying the Canal in 1919.
The Chesapeake and Delaware Canal is 14 miles long and reportedly there is a minimum speed of 3 miles per hour. Apparently, however, there is no speed maximum.
On the Severn
The United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, just a few meters off of Peregrinus's stern, as it lays this afternoon on a mooring buoy on the Severn river.
Annapolis, founded 1649, was known earlier as Anne Arundel Towne, after the wife of the 2nd Lord Baltimore, and daughter of Thomas Arundell, 1st Baron Arundell of Wardour, by King James, and Count (Reichsgraf) of the Holy Roman Empire, by Emperor Rudolf II.
Amel Rendezvous
A bunch of Amel sailors decided to meet up this weekend in Saint Michaels. A variety of models are represented, from Amel Sharki to Amel Santorin to Super Maramu. We had an impromptu party at Peregrinus from 11am to 5pm, and afterwards the crew of Brevis had us over for a gracious dinner.
The town began as St. Michael's parish in 1677. It is now a very picturesque village full of little family owned stores and popular in Maryland as a wedding and honeymoon destination.
A raft-up of three Amels. Foreground, Aletes (with Mike waving), followed by Peregrinus and Fiasco. July 12.
Things you come across on a Tuesday morning on the Chesapeake
The Pride of Baltimore II, a topsail schooner built in 1988 by the state of Maryland, and then given away to a non-for profit.
That's the flag of Maryland on the foremast, the arms of the 2nd Baron Baltimore, founder and Propietary Owner of the colony. The colony remained a Calvert possession until 1776; not coincidentally, the cliffs on the of the picture are the Calvert cliffs, now home to an LPG terminal and a nuclear power plant.
Click on the photo to see more.
"Lift yourself up, pay attention to the horizon, so that you may go forth to the sky... alive among the stars"
---Hieroglyphs inscribed on an Egytian sarcophagus from 2,600 years ago, Chrysler Museum, Norfolk.
Great museum, well worth visiting.
Note the reflection of the mast lights on the water. Corrotoman river, 9:04 pm, 5 July 2014. iPhone 4S.
Lancaster County
We left the Elizabeth on July the 2nd to go to a "hurricane hole", i.e., a place where Peregrinus would be protected from the approaching storm. The Admiral had identified nice broad basin at the mouth of Bells Creek, upriver on the East Corrotoman, which is a tributary of the Rappahonnock; the nearly round haven, which has a diameter of 1/2 mile, proved to be ideal, and the approach from the mouth of the Rappahonnock extremely beautiful to boot. We found remarkable the high proportion (over 30%?) of sailboats vs. powerboats docked in front of people's homes.
This morning we went for a hearthy Southern breakfast at Yankee Point Marina, a family-owned operation on the grounds of a property purchased in December 1664 by some of the earliest settlers of Lancaster County, Major Edward Dale and his wife Diana Skipwith.
A hawk (or is it a falcon?) taking off from its nest on Yankee Point, Myer Creek, Corrotoman River, 7:59am 5 July 2014. The Corrotoman is home to the peregrine falcon. Nearly every navigation marker in this river is home to a predator nest such as this. iPhone 4S.