Simon Bolivar – Liberator of Venezuela
One thousand men of the Irish Legion landed on Venezuela's Margarita Island in August 1819, after a 4,500-mile sea voyage from Dublin. These soldiers of fortune, many of them recently…
John Richardson Wigham
A great inventor and businessman. Actually born in Scotland, he was accused of being Irish, which he never denied. When he was 15 years old he left Scotland for Dublin…
John DeLap – Imperial Russian Navy
John DeLap of the Imperial Russian Navy, credited with saving the life of Peter the Great
Robert Gibbings, Underwater Artist
Robert Gibbings, An Irish Artist Underwater By Cormac F. LowthFirst published in SUBSEA, the quarterly journal of the Irish Underwater Council, Autumn 2007. Nowadays we tend to take the imagery…
Francis Beaufort (Wind Scale)
We are all used to hearing weather forecasts on radio or television predicting ‘Wind Force So-and- So’. How many realise that the inventor of the Wind-Scale was born and brought…
MV Kerlogue
The Kerlogue is seen as exemplar of neutral Irish ships during World War II. She was very small. She was attacked by both sides and rescued both sides. The Wild…
Rochdale and Prince of Wales
These troop ships were lost on their way to the Napoleonic Wars. Over 400 bodies washed up on an urban shore. Allegations that they were trapped below while the crew…
The Vasa, 50 years later
2011 is the fiftieth anniversary of the successful raising of the almost intact early seventeenth- century Swedish warship Vasa from the mud at the bottom of Stockholm Harbour. It represents…
The wanderer at Kingstown and John Masefield
The Poet Laureate John Masefield was essentially a sea poet; the sea was what he knew and wrote about best. He we discuss his relationship with the Wander and that…