Lectures

This month’s lecture covers the exploits of the self-taught shipbuilders, Noah and Adam Brown, who over the course of the war of 1812 built everything from gunboats to ships of the line with nothing but hand-powered tools.

Pete Hames discusses his research on T2 tankers that helped win World War II.

Houston was founded along Buffalo Bayou, where cotton traders believed they could establish a port to move cotton in and out of Texas faster and more efficiently.

Lecture topic TBD. Additional details will be available soon.

TopGun Navy Training Program

Learn about Darwin’s experiences on the Beagle as he traveled around the world and conducted his legendary research on the finches of the Galapagos.

Camp Logan: A World War I Training Camp in Houston. Saboteurs, Strikes, and Surveillance: Texas Shipbuilding during the Great War. WWI Shipwreck Archaeology: Abandonment of the U.S. Shipping Board Vessels in East Texas.

Born in the late 1700s, Jean Lafitte created a profitable smuggling operation in the Gulf of Mexico with his brother, Pierre. The pair then moved to Galveston Island where they developed the colony of Campeche. For such an enigmatic character, much is still unknown, or misinterpreted, about his life.

Tanker surfing has been practiced in Texas for the last 50 years. In the 60’s and 70’s, the sport occurred not in open waters like today, but along the shorelines of two islands in Galveston Bay: Redfish Island and Atkinson Island. During this time, ships were less frequent and much smaller, but they still created waves.

Doris Miller, the son of an impoverished sharecropper, was born in McLennan County, Texas. During the Depression, he took the only job that he could find: the Navy. There, in common with all black recruits, he was assigned to the messman branch, making the beds, shining the shoes, and serving the meals of white officers.

The Japanese surrender in World War II occurred on August 14, 1945. On that afternoon, photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt took to the streets of New York City to capture the country’s jubilation. He shot the iconic V-J Day in Times Square scene that appeared in Life Magazine and forever became a favorite snapshot of victory.

In a city that is visually dominated by automobiles and freeways, very few Houstonians realize that the reason for their city’s existence and prosperity is the waterway of Buffalo Bayou. Houston truly is “the town which built the port which built the city.” We live at a time when Houstonians are actively developing an appreciation of the bayou upon which their city was founded, an appreciation that can be greatly enhanced by looking at Buffalo Bayou in a historical context.

The Coast Guard Auxiliary was created by Congress in 1939 to provide a uniformed volunteer force to support the United States Coast Guard. During World War II, Auxiliarists used their own boats to protect our ports and patrol our coasts from the German submarine threat.

The Texas City disaster occurred on April 16, 1947 in Texas City, Texas and was the worst industrial accident in United States history. The explosion, originating as a fire on the SS Grandcamp that quickly spread, killed 581 people and injured thousands more.

What is the story behind the sea monsters seen on so many early European maps? Their first appearance can be traced back to 10th century mappaemundi and continue through the end of the 1500s. They are depicted in various forms – swimming vigorously, gamboling amid the waves, or attacking ships – and are one of the most visually engaging elements on these maps.

The Highest Degree Tragic; The Sacrifice of the US Asiatic Fleet in the East Indies during World War II.

On December 7, 1941, Japan infamously coordinated an attack of Pearl Harbor. The next day newspapers from all across the country reported that the United States was officially at war. The allied powers ultimately claimed victory, a victory that may have not seemed possible during the first few months of 1942.

This powerful presentation takes place in the throes of the Texas Revolution, as the provisional government of Texas scrambled to put together a naval force to wreak havoc upon the Mexican supply lines. Having first resorted to the use of privateers (state sponsored pirates), Texas was able to borrow money in New Orleans in early 1836, to secure the warships Liberty, Invincible, Independence, and Brutus.

USS Westfield belonged to an unusual class of civilian vessels that the Navy converted during the American Civil War to serve in the Union’s blockade of Confederate southern ports. Originally built and operated as a double-ended ferryboat, the vessel was purchased by the Navy from the New York Staten Island ferry service. Westfield served as the flagship for the West Gulf Blockading Squadron’s operations along the Texas Gulf Coast.

William Geroux’s book tells the largely forgotten story of the US Merchant Marine in World War II through the adventures of merchant mariners from Mathews County, Virginia. Mathews, a rural outpost on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay, has been a cradle of merchant sea captains and mariners for centuries.

Sam Houston will always be remembered for his influence on Texas history, but he was also a frontiersman and an important American political figure in the 19th century. This captivating lecture by the creator of the EMMY Award winning documentary Sam Houston: American, Statesman, Soldier, and Pioneer, will detail Sam Houston’s remarkable life including his rebellious teenage years when he ran away to live with a local Cherokee tribe, his later struggles with marriage and sobriety, and much more.

Join Chase Untermeyer as he discusses his book inside Reagan’s Navy for an engaging, up-close narrative of Untermeyer’s experiences in the Pentagon. The work is interwoven with descriptions of events and people, humorous anecdotes, and telling quotations. In March 1983, President Reagan offered Untermeyer an appointment as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy.

Join us to uncover the story of Ernest Shackleton’s attempt to be the first to cross Antarctica. Shackleton and his crew left in 1914 and would not return until two years later, having never set foot on the continent. What the crew achieved during the voyage is an extraordinary tale of survival and endurance.

The sea voyage is one of the earliest metaphors about the meaning of life. This lecture looks at how that metaphor works. First, we examine a short poem by Walt Whitman that seems to be about a merchant vessel. Next, we examine the story told in four nineteenth-century oil paintings by Thomas Cole, the Dean of the so-called Hudson River School of artists.

“The Battle of the Atlantic was the dominating factor all through the war. Never for one moment could we forget that everything happening elsewhere, on land, at sea or in the air depended ultimately on its outcome.” – Winston Churchill.

The Texas coastline and offshore waters are flat, shallow, featureless, filled with shoals and subject to extreme weather including hurricanes and nor’easter gales. Throw in two centuries of naval warfare in Texas waters and you get a recipe for shipwrecks.

December 2015 marked the fifteenth anniversary of the Houston Maritime Museum. As the Museum begins the process of moving to a larger facility on the Turning Basin, we look back on our beginnings as the brainchild of founder James L. Manzolillo. This lecture looks back at the life and passion of Jim Manzolillo as the inspiration for the museum we know today as well as fifteen years of concerted efforts to take the institution to the Port.

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.

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.

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.”

Can history help us forecast America’s future? Which are the patterns and leveraging powers that determine a nation’s global leadership? Since their inception millennia ago, sea transport and logistics practices have shaped the history of mankind, via the global exchange of commodities and the use of technologies, military strategies, sciences, languages, cultures and rules

The challenges of man and machines operating in the harsh arctic winter environment have led to progressively more sophisticated marine vessels and machinery. The evaluation of arctic environmental conditions both weather and topography have challenged naval architects to continuously seek unique solutions to navigation and indeed vessel survival.

The USS Westfield wreckage lay in the murky waters of the Texas City ship channel until 2009, when the disarticulated artifact debris field was recovered by Atkins Global (formerly PBS&J) during a dredging operation organized and orchestrated by the U.S. Corp of Engineers, making this Texas’ largest marine archaeology rescue project to date.

James Dunwoody Bulloch’s central place in history has always rested on his Civil War era achievements as a secret agent of the Confederate States Navy in Europe. He gained fame for having brought into being the Confederate States cruisers Florida, Alabama and Shenandoah. Less well known are his illustrious Georgia ancestors, who were so firmly entwined with the earliest American colonial experience, and his prominent family connections—he was the uncle of the 26th President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt

To reach the Port of Houston’s Turning Basin, a ship must travel 50 miles along a narrow and twisting channel that passes through Galveston, the San Jacinto River, and Buffalo Bayou. Despite this improbable location, Houston has the world’s largest landlocked port. The Port of Houston is cited as “irreplaceable,” by Colliers International, as “the defining engine of our economy and culture,” by Cite magazine, and as the generator of more than one million jobs and $180 billion of regional economic activity by Marin Associates.

The Vietnam War was the longest in American history, and challenged naval aviation not only on carrier decks, but along the coasts and rivers as well. Captain T.J. Brown will take a candid look at U.S. naval airpower in Southeast Asia from his adventures as an attack pilot on the USS Hancock from 1971 to 1974 and later experiences on the USS Enterprise and USS Constellation.

Harrisburg, TX brought many firsts to the region: the 1st colonists, the 1st schooner exporting Texas cotton, the 1st steam sawmill, the 1st steamships and the 1st railroad. In 1823, Stephen F. Austin persuaded the Mexican government to name him empresario to promote development of maritime trade in Texas through colonization and the development of ports along the northern coast of Mexico.

The models on display at the Houston Maritime Museum never fail to enlighten, educate and entertain our visitors. These models continue to appeal to both children and adults as they bring maritime history to life by conjuring thoughts of the romance of the high seas in the days of the sailing ship, stirring reflections on the exploits of famous warships and highlighting the skills of the model builders who spent countless hours perfecting their every detail.

The SS Ohio was an oil tanker built for the Texas Oil Company, (now Texaco). The ship was launched on 20 April 1940, and was later requisitioned by allied forces to re-supply the island fortress of Malta, during the Second World War.

The Civil War history of Galveston is one of the last untold stories from America’s bloodiest war, despite the fact that Galveston was a focal point of hostilities throughout the conflict. As other Southern ports fell to the Union, Galveston emerged as one of the Confederacy’s only lifelines to the outside world.

Loren Steffy is an acclaimed author and the business columnist for the Houston Chronicle. His latest book, “The Man Who Though Like a Ship,” commemorates his father, J. Richard “Dick” Steffy’s amazing contribution to the field of maritime archaeology. Dick Steffy, an electrician in a small, land-locked town in Pennsylvania armed only with a self taught understanding of ships volunteered for the job of piecing together 6,000 ancient sunken ship fragments

Warships powered by the wind roamed the oceans during the “Golden Age of Sail,” from the Spanish Armada (1588) to the Battle of Trafalgar (1805). Initially troop transports commanded by army officers, warships evolved into vessels designed to conduct battles at sea. In the 16th Century, the sailing warship replaced the cathedral as the most complicated human creation the world had ever seen.