USS Olympia at the Battle of Manila Bay
On Memorial Day, an updated repost from six years ago about the last mission of the USS Olympia in 1921, when she carried an American unknown soldier killed during World War I from a cemetery in France back to the Washington to be in entombed Arlington National Cemetery. The Olympia was decommissioned the following year.
USS Olympia is the oldest steel-hulled American warship afloat and Commodore George Dewey’s flagship during the Battle of Manila Bay on May 1, 1898. The ship is is now a museum ship at Philadelphia’s Independence Seaport Museum.
Memorial Day: Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery
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After being 
For those near New York harbor, there is a very interesting exhibit opening on the historic 
I first arrived in New York harbor forty years ago, as a freshly minted naval architect working for Moore McCormack. In those days, the Brooklyn docks were crowded with US flag shipping companies, many with their headquarters or sales offices in Lower Manhattan. Just to the north, in the narrow streets of Tribecca and Soho were clusters of little workshops where often elderly craftsmen repaired or calibrated chronometers and sextants, and rebuilt or reconditioned everything from pumps and valves to ship’s order telegraphs to the old tube radar sets. 
For Royal Navy sailors and British soldiers in the West Indies during the 18th century, rum was a refuge for the discomforts of the duties of the day. The rum also may have been killing them. It wasn’t the alcohol, but the way it was distilled that proved deadly.
Yesterday, we posted about signing aboard as trainee crew on the square rigged barque Picton Castle, to sail all or part of the way around the world. But what if you want to sail in a globe girdling ocean race instead of on a beautiful square-rigger? To participate in an around the world ocean race usually requires millions and often tens of millions of dollars, but there is an alternative — the 
Let’s say that you want to circumnavigate the world by sail and yet you don’t necessarily have enough experience or even, for that matter, a boat. All the same, you really want to make a-once-in-a-lifetime voyage where you are more than just a passenger, where you stand your trick at the helm, set and furl sails and watch the sun rise and set on a rolling sea. The good news is that you can do just that, and you even have several options. In the next two posts, we will look at two very different, and yet, in many respects, interestingly similar, ways to take make that epic voyage around all, or part, of the world under sail.