If you can’t get sailors to church, bring the church to the sailors. That was the strategy used in 1844 by the Protestant Church Missionary Society for Seamen, which was renamed the Seamen’s Church Institute. As they celebrate their 175th anniversary, it is a good time to remember the Floating Chapels of the Seamen’s Church Institute.
The Floating Chapel of our Savior for Seamen was built on the hull of a ferry boat. Originally moored at Whitehall Slip, it soon was moved to Pike Street on the East River in New York City. Services were held there from 1844 to 1866 when the chapel was deemed unseaworthy and replaced with another. The second chapel remained at Pike Street until 1910 when it was moved to Staten Island and taken ashore to become the All Saints Episcopal Church where it remained in use until it burned down the day after Christmas in 1958.
In 1846, only two years after the construction of the Floating Chapel on Pike Street, the Floating Chapel of the Holy Comforter was built and moored at the end of Dey Street where it remained until 1868.
The Seamen’s Church Institute of Philadelphia built its own Floating Church in 1848, the Floating Church of the Redeemer, which was in use for roughly ten years.
Today there are 1.6 million or so residents on the island of Manhattan. How things have changed. Four hundred years ago on September 12th, 1609, when Henry Hudson first stepped onto the island, there were roughly 600 Lenape Indians living there. The natives called the island Manna-hata, as recorded in the 1609 logbook of Robert Juet, an officer on Hudson’s ship, Half Moon. Manna-hata is translated from the Lenape to mean the “island of many hills.”
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In the aftermath of the fire in 1934 on the passenger liner Morro Castle, in which 135 passengers and crew died, there was considerable blame to be shared. The ship’s safety equipment was poorly maintained, the crew poorly trained and the ship’s officers made several questionable decisions which may have contributed to the rapid spread of the fire. How the fire started has never been determined. One man, George White Rogers, a radio officer, would be held up as hero. He stayed at his station transmitting “SOS” despite intense heat and smoke in the radio room.
Thanks to Dave Shirlaw on MARHST-L for pointing out a fascinating vessel for sale on E-Bay. The vessel is a steel tug, ST 893, built by JK Welding of Brooklyn, NY in 1945. The tug is said to have served in Normandy, the South Pacific, Korea, and Vietnam, and has been converted to a live-aboard yacht. As of this writing , there are no bids.
An interesting article from 
Which would you prefer to order from the menu – slimehead or orange roughy? Antarctic toothfish or Chilean sea bass? Slimehead and orange roughy are the same fish, just as the Chilean sea bass is the Antarctic toothfish with a new name. Orange roughy just sounds so much better on the menu or in the supermarket than slimehead. The same goes with Chilean sea bass, which doesn’t happen to be related to sea bass at all, but the name is appealing.