This lecture is inspired by a fascination with the Mexican government’s vision and the leadership of a handful of Texans that led to the transformation of a bay and a bayou to create a key engine of prosperity, the Port of Houston. The success of the Port has resulted from efforts made by these visionaries working through varied political systems, worldviews, and cultural differences.
In 1684, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, set sail on the La Belle to establish a French colony at the mouth of the Mississippi River. The story of this ill-fated expedition and recent discovery of the 300 year old wreck is an epic tale of adventure, exploration, international intrigue and death. This history, now told through the conservation of its recovered 1.5 million artifacts, has enough bizarre twists and turns to satisfy maritime novelists like C.S. Forester and Patrick O’Brien.
Richard S. Hall, Ph.D., award-winning author/artist/illustrator, native Texan, graduate of The University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas, and Texas A&M University, will be discussing the variety of lighthouse and lightship designs, from coastal lights to major beacons, that once graced the Gulf Coast.
Within days of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, artists and writers of all levels drew inspiration from the seemingly unreal and inherently symbolic nature of the disaster, and a new cultural industry of Titanic myth-making was born.
In the following presentation TITAN Salvage’s Director of Business Development, Lindsay Malen, will focus on the technical challenges of wreck removal and the intersection with protection of the environment in the case of the COSTA CONCORDIA. The COSTA CONCORDIA is considered to be the largest most complicated wreck removal in history.
Press Gangs have long been regarded as the principal recruitment tool of the Admiralty for seamen of all skill levels in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Based on original research on over 27,000 men in the British Royal Navy between 1793 and 1802, it has been determined that four out of five men onboard Royal Navy warships were there of their own free will and that the severity of conditions within the British Navy has been vastly exaggerated, demonstrating that much of what has been written about naval manning has been based on conjecture rather than fact.
How do street names tell the history of a city? After whom is Brady’s Landing and Barbour’s Cut named? Why was German Street changed to Canal and from where did the name Pasadena come? And why were elephants used to construct Spencer Highway? Houston historian Marks Hinton will share the history of the Houston Ship Channel and Port of Houston by exploring the history of street and location names. In this talk, Hinton will discuss our leaders and heroes, share myths and legends, and describe the humor and tragedies that are part of Houston’s history.
Governments have had a conflicting and complicated relationship with piracy through the centuries. When pirates attacked a rival nation’s merchant or naval fleets, governments turned a blind eye.
In the last months of the American Civil War, the upper Texas coast became a hive of blockade running. Though Texas was often considered an isolated backwater in the conflict, the Union’s pervasive and systematic seizure of southern ports left Galveston as one of the only strongholds of foreign imports in the anemic supply chain to embattled Confederate forces.
USS Tang was a Balao Class submarine commissioned in October 1943, and served in the Pacific Theater of operations during World War II. Her gifted and aggressive skipper, commander Richard O’Kane, was a man after the heart of Britain’s ghost admiral, Horatio Nelson, whose advice to any English Navy Captain during the Napoleonic War was, “To hell with manuveurs! Go straight at ’em.”
