“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.
The oil and gas industry, over the past 25 years, has moved from shallow water exploration and production of oil to ever greater depths. Each advance requires new designs to explore and produce hydrocarbon from deep beneath the ocean floor. The marine industry rose to the challenge of lifting, transporting and delivering the diverse structures from shore side construction facilities to on location stations several hundred miles offshore in deep ocean environments
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.
