More accurate? Really?
On Christmas Day in 1776, George Washington led what was left of his army across the Delaware River in the middle of a blizzard to attack a Hessian outpost in Trenton, NJ. In one bold stroke, he turned almost certain defeat into at the least the promise of eventual victory. Washington’s crossing was immortalized in the painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware, by Emanuel Leutze in 1851. Everyone agrees that while Emanuel Leutze’s painting is dramatic, it has a number of historical inaccuracies, including the width of the river, the time of day, the weather and the design of the boats used in the crossing.
The New York Times recently featured an article, Crossing the Delaware, More Accurately, describing the work of modern painter, Mort Künstler, who has painted what he claims is a more accurate representation of Washington making the crossing. His painting shows Washington on a flat bottomed ferry connected to both shores by a rope cable. While I make no claim to expertise on Washington’s crossing, it looks to me that Künstler’s version ignores the historical record just as Emanuel Leutze’s painting does.
Continue reading
I love walking the beach in the wintertime, though I would be surprised to come across a 100 foot long Santa Claus. In 2008, sand artist 
The maxi-trimaran 
The 
Laura Dekker, the 16 year old solo sailor, is on the last leg of her voyage around the world. She is bound not for Europe but back to Sint Maarten in the Caribbean, from which she sailed on January 5, 2011. On her arrival, she will be the youngest ever to circumnavigate the globe alone. As she noted on her blog yesterday, with typical understated good humor, “ Now I only have some 4800 nautical miles to go until I reach the Caribbean and finish my circumnavigation of the world. That sounds so incredibly close in view of all the miles Guppy already has under the keel, but at the same time it seems quite far away for I am still in the southern hemisphere. ..”
The
The Russian fishing vessel 
The Russian jack-up drilling rig, 
Japan’s whaling authorities are suing the