Ron Howard directs the true story of the whaling disaster that inspired Moby-Dick The Mystic Seaport Museum recently revealed that filming for the motion picture adaptation of In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex is underway in London. Oscar-winning director Ron Howard (Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, Frost/Nixon) is helming …
Read more ““In the Heart of the Sea” Becomes a Heart-Pounding Film”
In honor of National Lead Poisoning Prevention Week, I can’t help but revisit one of the most infamous cases of lead poisoning in history—the Franklin Expedition disaster. In 1845, Royal Navy commander Sir John Franklin led two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, on a quest for the Northwest Passage. The expedition had been organized …
I love it when my worlds collide in stories like this. The National Park Service announced today that it will protect an 18th-century British warship that sank near present-day Miami, under the terms of an international memorandum signed with the Royal Navy. HMS Fowey, a frigate carrying 20 guns, launched from the British port of …
Read more “National Park Service and Royal Navy Agree to Protect 18th-Century Shipwreck”
Attention maritime history nerds: my new article on the historic relaunch of the Charles W. Morgan, America’s oldest commercial vessel still afloat, is posted at CoastalCommons.net. This story encompasses two spheres near to my heart, whaling history and environmental conservation, and proves that they aren’t mutually exclusive. Though I couldn’t attend the relaunch ceremony at …
Now that I’m on the EPA’s local media mailing list, I noticed a blog post from the EPA regional team managing the Hudson River dredging project, a five-year initiative to remove “2.65 million cubic yards of PCB-contaminated sediment from a 40-mile stretch of the upper Hudson.” More than one million cubic yards have been removed …