The Maritime History Channel By The North American Society For Oceanic History

It is not often that we have both a National Best Seller and the winner of the John Lyman Book Prize for Canadian Maritime and Naval History on the show at the same time, but that is exactly what happened when John MacFarlane joined with us to discuss his book Around the World in a Dugout Canoe.  Think of a sea captain in the image of Russell Crowe, but not Jack Aubrey, but more of a rascal; that is John Voss.    

Anticipating fame and wealth, Captain John Voss set out from Victoria, BC, in 1901, seeking to claim the world record for the smallest vessel ever to circumnavigate the globe. For the journey, he procured an authentic dugout cedar canoe from an Indigenous village on the east coast of Vancouver Island.   

For three years Voss and the Tilikum, aided by a rotating cast of characters, visited Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Brazil and finally England, weathering heavy gales at sea and attracting large crowds of spectators on shore. The austere on-board conditions and simple navigational equipment Voss used throughout the voyage are a testimony to his skill and to the solid construction of the Nuu-Chah-Nulth vessel.   

Both Voss and his original mate, newspaperman N.K. Luxton, later wrote about their journey in accounts compromised by poor memories, brazen egos and outright lies. Stories of murder, cannibalism and high-seas terror have been repeated elsewhere without any regard to the truth. Now, over a century later, a full and fair account of the voyage—and the magnitude of Voss’s accomplishment—is at last fully detailed.   

In this groundbreaking work, marine historians John MacFarlane and Lynn Salmon sift fact from fiction, critically examining the claims of Voss’s and Luxton’s manuscripts against research from libraries, archives, museums and primary sources around the world. Including unpublished photographs, letters and ephemera from the voyage, Around the World in a Dugout Canoe tells the real story of a little-understood character and his cedar canoe. It is an enduring story of courage, adventure, sheer luck and at times tragedy.

Around the World in a Dugout Canoe

The Maritime Museum of British Columbia  

The Nauticapedia-Maritime Heritage

The accepted narrative of the interwar U.S. Navy is one of transformation from a battle-centric force into a force that could fight on the “three planes” of war: in the skies, on the water, and under the waves. The political and cultural tumult that accompanied this transformation is another story. Ryan D. Wadle’s Selling Sea Power explores this little-known but critically important aspect of naval history.  

After World War I, the U.S. Navy faced numerous challenges: a call for naval arms limitation, the ascendancy of air power, and budgetary constraints exacerbated by the Great Depression. Selling Sea Power tells the story of how the navy met these challenges by engaging in protracted public relations campaigns at a time when the means and methods of reaching the American public were undergoing dramatic shifts. While printed media continued to thrive, the rapidly growing film and radio industries presented new means by which the navy could connect with politicians and the public. Deftly capturing the institutional nuances and the personalities in play, Wadle tracks the U.S. Navy’s at first awkward but ultimately successful manipulation of mass media. At the same time, he analyzes what the public could actually see of the service in the variety of media available to them, including visual examples from progressively more sophisticated—and effective—public relations campaigns.  

Integrating military policy and strategy with the history of American culture and politics, Selling Sea Power offers a unique look at the complex links between the evolution of the art and industry of persuasion and the growth of the modern U.S. Navy, as well as the connections between the workings of communications and public relations and the command of military and political power.  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ryan D. Wadle is an Associate Professor of Comparative Military Studies at the eSchool of Graduate Professional Military Education, Air University, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama.  

Selling Sea Power: Public Relations and the U.S. Navy, 1917-1941

Graduate Student Jessica Rudo joined the North American Society for Oceanic History Video/Podcast to discuss her research into, "Fortifying the Gulf Coast: How the Military Shaped the Maritime Landscape with Slave Rentals."  She examines the constructions of Fort Morgan in Mobile, Fort Pickens and the Navy Yard in Pensacola, Fort Taylor in Key West and Fort Jefferson at Dry Tortugas.    

The use of slave labor was not unusual in the construction of facilities but largely overlooked where the arrangements and businesses that oversaw the leases of the slaves to the US Government.  The beginning of the military-industrial complex can be seen in these large fortifications and we get a glimpse of the lives of the slaves and soldiers in these areas.    

National Park Service - Forts:  

Coast Defense Study Group  

Roger Bailey, doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland and this year's winner of the Clark G. Reynolds Prize for the best Graduate Paper at the North American Society for Oceanic History annual conference, joined the NASOH Video/Podcast.  We discussed his paper, "Free Republic Like Our Own: The United States Navy and the Colonization Movement in the Public Discourse, 1819-1860.   

During our discussion we discussed the American Colonization Society, the role of the US Navy and several key officers - such as Matthew Fontaine Maury and Matthew Perry - and the establishment of the different colonial entities along the West African coast.    

Roger Bailey:  

Roger Bailey's earlier talk on Preble Hall Podcast:

NASOH's Clark Reynolds Prize:  

The Gulf of Mexico presents a compelling, salt-streaked narrative of the earth's tenth largest body of water. In this beautifully written and illustrated volume, John S. Sledge explores the people, ships, and cities that have made the Gulf's human history and culture so rich. Many famous figures who sailed the Gulf's viridian waters are highlighted, including Ponce de León, Robert Cavelier de La Salle, Francis Drake, Elizabeth Agassiz, Ernest Hemingway, and Charles Dwight Sigsbee at the helm of the doomed Maine. Sledge also introduces a fascinating array of people connected to maritime life in the Gulf, among them Maya priests, French pirates, African American stevedores, and Greek sponge divers.  

Gulf events of global historical importance are detailed, such as the only defeat of armed and armored steamships by wooden sailing vessels, the first accurate deep-sea survey and bathymetric map of any ocean basin, the development of shipping containers by a former truck driver frustrated with antiquated loading practices, and the worst environmental disaster in American annals.  

Occasionally shifting focus ashore, Sledge explains how people representing a gumbo of ethnicities built some of the world's most exotic cities—Havana, way station for conquistadores and treasure-filled galleons; New Orleans, the Big Easy, famous for its beautiful French Quarter, Mardi Gras, and relaxed morals; and oft-besieged Veracruz, Mexico's oldest city, founded in 1519 by Hernán Cortés. Throughout history the residents of these cities and their neighbors along the littoral have struggled with challenges both natural and human-induced—devastating hurricanes, frightening epidemics, catastrophic oil spills, and conflicts ranging from dockside brawls to pirate raids, foreign invasion, civil war, and revolution. In the modern era the Gulf has become critical to energy production, fisheries, tourism, and international trade, even as it is threatened by pollution and climate change. The Gulf of Mexico: A Maritime History is a work of verve and sweep that illuminates both the risks of life on the water and the riches that come from its bounty.  

John S. Sledge is senior architectural historian for the Mobile Historic Development Commission and a member of the National Book Critics Circle. He holds a bachelor's degree in history and Spanish from Auburn University and a master's in historic preservation from Middle Tennessee State University. Sledge is the author of six previous books, including Southern Bound: A Gulf Coast Journalist on Books, Writers, and Literary Pilgrimages of the Heart; The Mobile River; and These Rugged Days: Alabama in the Civil War.  

The Gulf of Mexico: A Maritime History

These Rugged Days: Alabama in the Civil War

The Mobile River

Southern Bound: A Gulf Coast Journalist on Books, Writers, and Literary Pilgrimages of the Heart

The Pillared City: Greek Revival Mobile

An Ornament to the City: Old Mobile Ironwork

Two centuries before the daring exploits of Navy SEALs and Marine Raiders captured the public imagination, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps were already engaged in similarly perilous missions: raiding pirate camps, attacking enemy ships in the dark of night, and striking enemy facilities and resources on shore. Even John Paul Jones, father of the American navy, saw such irregular operations as critical to naval warfare. With Jones’s own experience as a starting point, Benjamin Armstrong sets out to take irregular naval warfare out of the shadow of the blue-water battles that dominate naval history. This book, the first historical study of its kind, makes a compelling case for raiding and irregular naval warfare as key elements in the story of American sea power.

Commander Benjamin "BJ" Armstrong is a Permanent Military Professor and former Search & Rescue and Special Warfare helicopter pilot who has deployed to the 4th, 5th, and 6th Fleet in support of multiple Amphibious Ready Groups, Marine Air Ground Task Forces, and global operations. Ashore he flew as an Advanced Flight Instructor and served in the Pentagon as a strategist and a staff officer in the Office of the Secretary of the Navy. He joined the faculty of the Naval Academy History Department during the fall term of 2016. In addition to his teaching and scholarship, CDR Armstrong serves as the Faculty Representative to the Mens Swimming and Diving team and Director of the McMullen Naval History Symposium (2019).

BJ Armstrong Biography:

James Bradford, "John Paul Jones and Guerre de Razzia,"

Nimitz Library:

On January 30, 1975, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) designated the wreck of the USS Monitor as the nation's first national marine sanctuary. Over 45 years later, Monitor National Marine Sanctuary continues to protect this famed Civil War ironclad.  

With over four decades of protecting and preserving our nation's maritime heritage, Monitor National Marine Sanctuary and partners began in 2008 to document and survey the many World War II shipwrecks surrounding the sanctuary. Currently, NOAA is reviewing the sanctuary's boundaries and considering an expansion to protect these wrecks.  

Off the coast of North Carolina lies the remains of a forgotten World War II battlefield that serves as the final resting place for nearly 1,700 men lost during the Battle of The Atlantic.  From January through July of 1942, German U-boats sank ships off the American east coast with relative impunity. This American Theater of World War II was the closest area of conflict to the Continental United States. This complex naval battlefield stretched from New England into the Gulf of Mexico, but the area off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, emerged as a strategic hotspot for this activity and the resulting concentration of shipwrecks is unparalleled in the nation.  

From this activity, the waters off North Carolina are recognized as the area that best represents this World War II history as a battlefield in the United States. In just three years, from 1942 to 1945, 90 ships were lost off North Carolina alone as a result of this action. The result is an amazing collection of 78 merchant tankers and freighters, eight Allied warships, and four German U-boats resting on the seabed as a memorial to this history and to the sacrifice of Allied servicemen and the U.S. Merchant Marine in World War II. Monitor National Marine Sanctuary's proposed expansion boundaries contain the most publicly accessible collection of World War II shipwrecks near America's shore and would constitute the largest area designated as a World War II battlefield anywhere in the United States.  

This area is also significant to our national story as it contains other shipwrecks as well, some dating from the Age of North American Exploration to present day. While North Carolina has a rich and diverse maritime heritage, NOAA's primary focus for expanding the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary boundary is centered on North Carolina's collection of shipwrecks from World War II's Battle of the Atlantic.  

Tane Casserley joined the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries in the spring of 2001. As the Resource Protection and Permit Coordinator for the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, Tane is responsible for the development of policies and programs to address commercial and recreational uses and impacts in and around the Sanctuary. Tane’s specialties include interagency communications, public outreach and exhibit design, as well as 19th-century warships and deep-water archaeology. Tane holds a graduate certificate in maritime archaeology from the University of Hawaii and a master's degree from the Program in Maritime Studies at East Carolina University. 

NOAA Monitor Sanctuary:  

Tane Casserley's Biography:  

NOAA Monitor Sanctuary Proposed Expansion:

Resources for Educators:  

Living Shipwrecks 3D

The Mariner's Museum

NOAA Monitor Merchant Mariners

The University of West Florida archaeology program identified the archaeological site of the Luna settlement – the first multi-year European settlement in the United States – in a developed neighborhood in Pensacola. The artifacts discovered are evidence of the Spanish settlement by Tristán de Luna y Arellano from 1559 to 1561, the earliest multi-year European colonial settlement ever archaeologically identified in the United States.  

UWF archaeologists recovered numerous sherds of broken 16th century Spanish ceramics found undisturbed beneath the ground surface. The artifacts were linked to the Spanish expedition led by Luna, who brought 1,500 soldiers, colonists, slaves and Aztec Indians in 11 ships from Veracruz, Mexico, to Pensacola to begin the Spanish colonization of the northern Gulf Coast in 1559. The Luna settlement inhabited Pensacola from 1559 to 1561, which predates the Spanish settlement in St. Augustine, Florida, by six years, and the English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, by 48 years.  

Dr. John Bratten, chair and associate professor of anthropology, teaches archaeology, maritime studies, shipwreck archaeology and artifact conservation.    

Bratten was always fascinated by stories of arctic explorers and shipwrecks. But reading the book, “The Sea Remembers: Shipwrecks and Archaeology,” inspired him to switch careers midstream – from teaching science to studying maritime archaeology.  

As co-principal investigator of the Emanuel Point II shipwreck, Bratten combines his passion for science and archeology by overseeing the excavation and artifact conservation of the second vessel from Tristán de Luna’s 1559 colonization fleet. He utilizes a state-of-the-art freeze-dryer provided by the Archaeology Institute to stabilize and maintain diagnostic information from artifacts that have been submerged in water for more than 400 years.   

Bratten wrote, “The Gondola Philadelphia and the Battle of Lake Champlain,” a comprehensive analysis of the oldest intact warship and the associated artifacts that were recovered from the bottom of Lake Champlain. In addition to his manuscript publication, he has written numerous journal articles, lay publications and technical reports. He was also board member of the CSS Alabama Project and the Pensacola Archaeological Society. Before joining UWF in 1996, he was a conservator for Florida’s Bureau of Archaeological Research.  

Dr. John Bratten, University of West Florida Faculty Page:  

The Discovery and Exploration of Tristán de Luna’s 1559-1561 Settlement on Pensacola Bay https://pages.uwf.edu/jworth/Worth%20et%20al%202017_FAS.pdf  

Luna Settlement:  

Luna Media Kit:  

Florida's Lost Galleon: The Emanuel Point Shipwreck https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36796623-florida-s-lost-galleon  Archaeology Institute https://uwf.edu/cassh/community-outreach/archaeology-institute/  

FLORIDA FRONTIERS: The Luna Settlement Excavation

Rich Hendren is thirty-year veteran of the United States Navy and spent most of his career in the Submarine Service. After retiring from the Navy, he spent the next ten years working in maritime, petroleum, and hydrographic industries. In 2016, he dropped out of work and went to Texas A&M University (TAMU) to begin graduate studies in the Anthropology Department’s Nautical Archaeology Program.  Advised by Dr. Kevin Crisman, he is researching the American submarine USS H1.  

H1 was launched in 1913 and represents a transition in early submarine construction. Designed as the most heavily armed US submarine of her day, the sub carried eight torpedoes and was also equipped with state-of-the-art reversing diesel engines.  She was the first boat of the most prolific class of allied submarine deployed in the First World War era. H1 herself would not see combat and spent the war years on the East Coast serving primarily as a training platform.  

On the return voyage to her homeport of San Pedro, California, H1 ran aground on the night of 12 March 1920 off Isla Margarita, Baja California Sur, Mexico. Lieutenant Commander James Webb, H1‘s commanding officer, ordered his 24-man crew to abandon ship and swim ashore.  Webb and three others drowned, although the rest of the sailors reached safety. The navy sent the salvage ship USS Vestal to recover the sub. Vestal pulled H1 into deeper water, but heavy weather had already beaten her hull to the point where it was no longer watertight, and she sank in 15m of water.  

Rich Hendren's research focuses on the innovational aspects of H1 and the class of boats that followed her. He hopes to visit H1’s wreck site this winter at the kind invitation of Dr. Roberto Junco Sanchez of Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia and with the funding generously provided by the Institute of Nautical Archaeology and the Anthropology Department of TAMU. Dr. George Schwartz, of the Naval History and Heritage Command’s Underwater Archaeology Branch, has graciously provided technical documentation and guidance. The goals of the initial visit were to gain an understanding of the site and the condition of the wreck.  

Rich Hendren:  

PigBoats.Com provided some of the photos:  

Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships:  

Clip from John Greene's Crash Course: