Word: seamen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When Wilkinson, 55, retired after 22 nomadic years as an Army chaplain, he remembers thinking "the appropriate thing would be to get settled." Then his Episcopal bishop spotted an ad announcing that the Seamen's Church Institute, which has ministered to ocean mariners for 165 years, was expanding to the nation's towboat fleet. Within months, Wilkinson and his colleague Karen Cox were staring at a pastoral fiefdom encompassing the Ohio River, part of the Cumberland and the Mississippi from Greenville, Miss., up to Lock 27 above St. Louis--1,808 miles as the catfish swims...
...ship was the Endurance, a small, tight, Norwegian-built three-master that was intended to take Sir Ernest Shackleton and a small crew of seamen and scientist, 27 men in all, to the southernmost shore of Antarctica's Weddell Sea. From that point Shackleton proposed to force a passage by dogsled across the continent. The trek was intended to surpass the achievement of Shackleton's great rival, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, who had reached the South Pole early in 1912 (narrowly preceded by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen) but had died with his four companions on the march back...
...with any good marine fiction, the sea itself is background, scene shifter and, from time to storm-lashed time, main character. But the series swims also on an ocean of wondrous language, in which inept seamen, for instance, are not only "sad brutish grobians," but "froward dirty disreputable rough good-for-nothing disorderly ragabashes and raparees." If there is a serious flaw, it is that since the novels are mostly about men, they are probably mostly for men. O'Brian writes good female characters, but mostly they remain ashore (and one of the best, Maturin's flamboyant wife Diana, dies...
...fisherman clinging to a tattered sail searches for a lighthouse amid a storm; in the other, Christ walks on the waters not of the Sea of Galilee but of Peggy's Cove. Thus when a plane--not a ship--went down off the cove last week, the seamen of the area felt the old instincts of rescue stir in their veins. What they found, however, was neither romantic nor miraculous. And what moved in their blood was a chill...
Mahon's former strategic importance is captured in a visually exciting museum in British-built Fort Marlborough, near the harbor mouth. Quieter testimony can be found in the small, peaceful harborside cemetery, whose chipped slate gravestones carry pitifully meager details of the young seamen buried there--all that remains of an early 19th century American naval presence on the island. Elsewhere in the broad sweep of the harbor, several tiny islands, which formerly housed military and quarantine hospitals, highlight Minorca's colorful past...