By Corey Sandler
I’ll have more photos and commentary in my blog next month.
But as I look back on 2024 for significant signs, I began to think about auld lang signs, old markers like these from travels past.
By Corey Sandler
After a year that included two long adventures in the frozen north of Norway, Iceland, and Greenland, we just returned from a cautious defrost cycle.
A pair of cruises took us on an unusual itinerary, from Montreal in Quebec to Los Angeles in California. Although it would have been interesting to see how many miles per day we could sail across the dry plains of Manitoba, that was not the course we took.
We stayed on the water: the Saint Lawrence River, then the North Atlantic, into the Caribbean, made a transit through the passage between the seas in Panama, and then hung a right into the North Pacific.
Oh, and along the way we swung wide to safely skirt a hurricane coming at us across lower Florida.
All told, one month at sea on a repositioning cruise that brought Viking Neptune from Europe to Montreal to conclude in San Pedro, part of the port of Los Angeles. The ship was due to continue its peregrinations in the Pacific, heading to Hawaii and the South Pacific. But we flew home in shirtsleeves, carrying a warm coat in preparation for a return to chilly Boston.
For reasons unknown to me, our month-long trip began with a predawn flight from Boston to Montreal. The taxi came at 4 a.m.
After settling in aboard ship we went for a groggy stroll in Montreal, one of our favorite places. We once again discussed plans to come back in the cheery, frigid winter.
Our first port of call was lovely Quebec City, which is in many ways more French than France. They use an old dialect of the mother tongue and hold on to tradition dearly. But there was something new in the old town along the river:
We took a turn to port to sail up the beautify Saguenay Fjord, which heads north toward Quebec’s interior. The sun was low in the sky, lighting up the delightfully named Baie des Ha! Ha!, or Ha! Ha! Bay. (The funny name is derived from an Algonquin term that means, “The Place Where Bark is Exchanged.”
In Saint John, New Brunswick we caught some glimpses of the fall colors. The leaves turn first here in the north and then work their way down the coast of New England. But it’s a fool’s errand to try and predict the best day or best place to see them. And eventually a cold rain will turn the page very quickly from autumn to winter.
After stops in Charlottetown, PEI, Bar Harbor, Maine, and Portland, Maine we made the first of two canal transits on this bicoastal journey: through the Cape Cod Canal that connects Cape Cod Bay to Buzzards Bay at the bottom of the mainland of Massachusetts. The sea-level canal shaves six to eight somewhat difficult hours of sailing below Nantucket Island.
We arrived in New York harbor before noon, and I had the privilege of narrating our entrance from the Navigational Bridge, one of my favorite assignments.
And then we headed out of New York and due south down the coast with the intention of docking at Fort Lauderdale in Florida. Except for this:
I am often asked by cruise-wary travelers about sailing in hurricane season, and the answer I always give is this: if you are in a hotel and hurricane is headed for you, that could be trouble. But on a modern ship, with all of the satellite and radar technology we have, we could see the storm way before it could have been a problem.
Our captain chose to speed up our passage down the east coast so that we could get below the storm before it passed over Florida. We had a few bumps in the night, I am told; we slept through it all. The only effect on us was that Florida closed all of its ports as the storm made landfall, and so we were treated to an extra day at sea making a circle below Key West and above Cuba. And then it was gone, and we were safely at the dock.
A day late, but safe and well-fed, we departed due south across the Caribbean Sea to Cartagena, Colombia, a city whose central core is little changed from Spanish Colonial Times. And they do love to party.
None of that is shocking to us, since we have been to Cartagena La Heroica many times, but the serious heat and humidity set us back on our heels. We sought the cool shade of a small animal preserve.
Our itinerary called for us to end the second cruise in Los Angeles (the Port of San Pedro to be specific) and thus we had to get through the Isthmus of Panama to the Pacific. We spent the night in the industrial port of Colon on the Caribbean side while we waited for our assigned time to enter the Panama Canal.
I went with a group of guests deep into the south-central jungle to visit one of seven nearly untouched communities of indigenous people struggling to hold on to the old culture One of the ways they do that is by welcoming small groups of tourists.
The last leg of our trip to visit Parará Purú, a settlement of the Emberá people, was in a long and narrow dugout canoe, called a piragua, the only way in and out of the community.
Parará Purú is within the Chagres National Park above the banks of the Río Chagres. Further north the Chagres feeds into Lake Gatun, which is both the engine for lifting and lowering vessels and the waterway for passage between the Atlantic and Pacific.
We were told that the small tribe did not make much use of clothing when they are on their own. Alas, they dressed up–a bit–for us, and performed some tribal dances.
The next morning we arrived at the entrance to the Panama Canal, a transit I have made dozens of times and is still one of my favorite experiences. I was up on the Navigational Bridge giving commentary as Viking Neptune was lifted up about 86 feet in three locks.
Later that afternoon, after we passed through the Continental Divide at Culebra Cut (also known as Gaillard Cut after the American engineer in charge of the digging there) we went back down the stairs through three locks. At Miraflores, two grandstands were filled with tourists watching us watch them.
Thrilled with the excitement, we headed north toward our goal at Los Angeles. In celebration, the sunset that night was extraordinary.
At Puntarenas, Costa Rica I visited an animal sanctuary filled with creatures of all sort including speedy birds and jaguars, and very slow sloths, which for some reason reminded me of our children when they were teenagers.
Our final port of call was scheduled to be at Cabo San Lucas, which is a beautiful setting that has been all but completely recast as a tourist resort. When we arrived, though, the sea swells were too high for us to use our ship’s tenders to come to shore and so we had to leave.
Instead, we added a call at Ensenada, just below the border with the United States at Tijuana. No one could confuse Ensenada with Cabo San Lucas, although I find its gritty reality more interesting.
To bookend our trip which began at dawn in Boston, I was up early to photograph a stunning sunrise at Ensenada.
The next morning we came back down to reality, with a long cross-country flight from Los Angeles to Boston. It’s time now to catch up on some sleep.
All text and photos (except where indicated) are by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you want to obtain a copy of one of my photographs for personal or commercial use, please contact me using the link on this page.
If you’d like to order a copy of my book, “Henry Hudson Dreams and Obsession” you can obtain a Kindle or PDF version by clicking here: HENRY HUDSON DREAMS AND OBSESSION
Or if you would prefer to purchase a printed book in hardcover or paperback (personally autographed if you’d like) please send me an email for details. Click here to contact me.
By Corey Sandler
We’ve made it to August, usually the hottest month of the year in the part of the world we call home base.
But my mind keeps drifting back to mid-June when our ship was swarmed by icebergs in and around Greenland.
Ships and icebergs are not natural buddies. It was, of course, a large chunk of ice–almost certainly moving in the East Greenland Current–that brought about a night to remember for the S.S. Titanic near midnight on April 14, 1912.
Today, modern ships have satellite monitoring, radar, radio reports, and GPS and other technologies that pinpoint location to within a few feet. And in our case, we also brought aboard two Danish ice pilots who knew the local waters like the back of their refrigerator-freezer.
But we’ll get to the icebergs in next month’s blog post. I promise.
First, let’s resume our voyage from the top of the mainland of Norway to the last significant piece of occupied land short of the North Pole.
I know this part of the world pretty well; I spent several years researching my book about the four known voyages of Henry Hudson and in the process I made several voyages–on a much more comfortable vessel than the one captained by Hudson–to the Svalbard archipelago which reaches to 81 degrees North latitude.
My role on this trip was as a featured speaker on a luxury cruise line and one of the talks I gave was about Hudson. At the conclusion of the talk, I told guests I would be heading up to the ship’s navigation bridge to give commentary as we made a sail-by of Bear Island.
When Hudson and the other explorers of the 17th century were headed north to Svalbard in search of a passage to Japan and Asia they were navigating with only the most basic of instruments.
They had a compass which could tell them the direction of the Magnetic North Pole, although the further north they went the less valuable a compass becomes. At the top of the world, every direction becomes north.
Sextants and astrolabes had been in use by mariners for centuries, but there is a huge problem in using them in the summertime of the far north: the sun never sets and the stars are not visible. The Midnight Sun is a very disorienting experience.
GPS? Satellites? Radio? Radar? Nope.
All that Hudson had were some very crude, mostly inaccurate hand-drawn charts and some written orders: sail out of London on the River Thames, cross over to find Norway and then head North from its top. And then: look for the unusual signpost in the middle of the Arctic Sea.
The Dutch explorer Willem Barentsz had noted the island on his voyage in 1596, and now Hudson was in the same waters in 1607.
That signpost is Bear Island, at 74 degrees North. It is a strange place, a big rock in the middle of nowhere with an instantly recognizable feature, a large pointed rock at its bottom like a finger pointed upward.
The Dutch gave it a name: Stappen, (Step) a 625-foot-tall needle that can’t be missed. The instructions: find Bear Island, and then continue north and you’ll arrive at Svalbard.
That’s what I told the guests on Viking Mars before I went to the Bridge.
And this is more-or-less what we saw:
The signpost in the middle of the Arctic Sea was there. We could see it on the ship’s radar, and we could feel its presence. But the fog in June–a combination of cool air over a finger of the warmer Gulf Stream, or warmer air over the still-cold ocean–gave us a complete and total whiteout.
For the record, here is what the island looks like in a photo I took on a previous, luckier voyage:
Two days later we made landfall in Svalbard at the only significant settlement in the islands, Longyearbyen.
The town was given its name by the un-modest American John Munro Longyear, who first visited Svalbard in 1901 aboard one of the first cruise ships. Longyear, already very wealthy from iron ore and other mineral deposits he exploited in the American Midwest, saw industrial-scale whaling stations in Svalbard boiling whale blubber in trypots that were fired by coal.
Longyear returned in 1906 and bought up the majority of the coal mine claims in the islands at the top of the world.
For centuries, Svalbard was Terra Nullius, a no-man’s land. Since the 1920 Treaty of Svalbard, the archipelago has been under the sovereignty of Norway. But any of the signatories of the treaty have the right to send their citizens their and to engage in trade and mining. Russia still maintains several small communities on the main island of Spitsbergen including a few small mines.
The isolation and cold of Svalbard also brought about the establishment of another strange operation: The Global Seed Vault, also known colloquially as The Doomsday Vault.
Contained within an excavated shaft in a mountainside just outside of Longyearbyen, the vault holds millions of seeds sent there by nations around the world. The idea is to preserve plants of all sorts for the future in the event of climatic or other disasters.
Next month: icebergs off Greenland and sunrise over the isle of Manhattan.
All text and photos by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you want to obtain a copy of one of my photographs for personal or commercial use, please contact me using the link on this page.
If you’d like to order a copy of my book, “Henry Hudson Dreams and Obsession” you can obtain a Kindle or PDF version by clicking here: HENRY HUDSON DREAMS AND OBSESSION
Or if you would prefer to purchase a printed book in hardcover or paperback (personally autographed if you’d like) please send me an email for details. Click here to contact me.
By Corey Sandler
Our second cruise of the winter to the top of Norway, some 200 miles into the Arctic Circle, proceeded more or less on schedule.
Don’t blame the cruise line. Don’t blame the captain. Don’t blame me.
The high latitudes near the North Pole (and those near Antarctica at the other end of our planet) are places that are predictably unpredictable. Usually very cold, often very windy, sometimes heavily occluded with heavy clouds.
We were there in hopes of seeing the Northern Lights, something I have enjoyed quite a few times.
So here’s the deal: the Northern Lights–or to use its more formal title, the Aurora Borealis–are present in the earth’s atmosphere nearly all the time. Our planet’s protective magnetic field directs most the sun’s solar particles toward the Arctic Circle or the Antarctic Circle where the magnetism is weaker. (At the equator, the earth’s diameter is much greater than it is at the top or bottom, and so magnetic fields have less effect in the high latitudes.)
The second thing that is needed in order to see the Northern Lights is darkness. Sunlight washes out the diaphanous curtains and swirls. In the Arctic in winter, there is very little sunlight for at least three months of the year, from about December to March. (The Antarctic’s seasons are the opposite of the Arctic, with the dark midwinter on June 21 of each year.)
The third necessary element is a clear sky. The Northern Lights are the result of collisions between solar particles and various atoms in our atmosphere. Most of these collisions occur in the earth’s Thermosphere, the second-highest layer of the atmosphere, about 50 to 440 miles above the planet’s surface. If there is heavy cloud cover overhead, there’s little chance of seeing them. I always tell guests that if you cannot see stars or planets in the sky, there’s little chance of seeing the aurora.
And the fourth element: luck. You can be in the right place at the wrong time, or the wrong place at the right time.
On our long sail from Bergen to the top of mainland Norway we had a few faint sightings of the lights; crew on the navigational bridge alerted passengers. But it wasn’t until we were tied up at the pier in Alta that all four elements: solar particles, darkness, clear skies, and luck aligned.
I headed for the highest deck of the ship with my tripod, full-frame digital camera, thermal underwear, and down-filled mittens. The first glimmer was a claw-like green image on the horizon:
I headed from the stern to the bow of the ship, near the radar and communications equipment and set up again.
Our ship was due to depart Alta about 11pm, and as a group of us waited on the upper deck the navigator set the radar antenna to rotate. We heard the whir and saw the antenna move…and then as if summoned, the Northern Lights came directly over the ship.
On our way down the coast, headed for the port of Tilbury on the Thames River, we made a call at Narvik in Norway. This is a place of great beauty and possessed of a history that still seems to echo through the fjord.
In the 1890s, a combined British and Swedish group engineered a spectacular railway that ran from iron ore mines in landlocked northern Sweden to the port of Narvik where it could be loaded onto ships and taken to steel mills in Europe.
The biggest customer for the Swedish steel coming through the Norwegian port was Germany. And soon after World War II began, Germany invaded and occupied Norway; one of the main reasons was to gain access to Narvik and its railway to neutral Sweden.
One of the largest naval battles of Europe took place within the confines of Narvik, and for a few weeks the British, along with Free French and the Norwegian resistance held off and then ousted the Germans. But the Allied foothold could not be sustained, and they withdrew; German bombers and naval vessels all but leveled Narvik and the export of iron ore from the port was halted.
Up in the hills above the rebuilt town is a private nature preserve called Arctic Park. I went there with some guests, and we clamped ice spikes to our boots to visit large enclosures that were home to Arctic wolves and fox, wolverines, reindeer, and other creatures including several very large lynx, which are known as bobcats in North America.
After Narvik, we set sail for IJmuiden, the port of Amsterdam, which was our last scheduled call before disembarkation at Tilbury on the Thames River in England.
A month before, our ship had been unable to make it to Tilbury because of a massive winter storm along the west coast of Norway; we had to fly from London to begin a re-jiggered cruise.
This time we ran into high winds and rough seas as we sailed toward IJmuiden and eventually it became apparent there was no way to make our call in The Netherlands and then cross over the North Sea to end the cruise in Tilbury at the scheduled hour.
And so we ended with an extra day at sea and a nighttime arrival in the United Kingdom.
And then we flew home, unpacked our bags, and began planning our next voyage, scheduled for the end of May. I’ll see you here with details.
All text and photos by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you want to obtain a copy of one of my photographs for personal or commercial use, please contact me using the link on this page.
By Corey Sandler
I love to fly.
It’s airports I hate. Waiting in line for check-in. Going through customs. Security checkpoints. And then there are the passengers, at least some of them.
I am, for better or worse, old enough to remember when you could drop your bag at the curb and then walk directly to the boarding gate with a paper ticket and expect the plane to be there and ready to leave on time. Hah!
Allow me one more peeve, if you please. Now, once I am seated (by the window, of course) I want to watch the world go by. I have taken thousands of air flights, in all sorts and sizes of plane, all over the world and I still am fascinated by all I see. Please don’t ask me to close my window shade as we soar over Greenland or the Alps or Africa so that someone three seats away can play Sudoku or shoot at aliens on a cell phone.
Photos and text copyright Corey Sandler. To obtain copies or otherwise use images, please contact me through my website at www.coreysandler.com
To see portfolios of some of my travel photos visit www.coreysandler.myportfolio.com or www.coreysandler2.myportfolio.com
By Corey Sandler
My office window overlooks Boston harbor, a bird’s-eye view of an historic patch of the North Atlantic that includes the location of the Boston Tea Party, the remains of the old wharves from which the city built its fame and fortune, and around the corner the permanent dock of the oldest commissioned sailing vessel in the U.S. Navy, the U.S.S. Constitution.
Constitution was launched from a dockyard in 1797 in what is now Boston’s North End, also in view from my window. Mostly constructed of live oak, as much as seven inches thick; Paul Revere made the copper sheathing for the hull and forged copper spikes and bolts to attach her planks.
Several times a year Constitution is brought out from her berth and taken on a tour of the harbor, usually stopping to let loose a ceremonial salvo at Fort Independence on Castle Island at the outside of the harbor and again in front of the Coast Guard station in Boston near where she was constructed.
As I began writing this blog, I looked up and spotted her passing through the harbor once again.
Today she relies mostly on assistance from tugboats, last moving under sail in August 2012 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of her victory over Guerriere during the War of 1812. It was during that successful battle off the coast of Halifax, Nova Scotia where she earned her nickname “Old Ironsides” after her sturdy oak planking withstood cannonballs from the British vessel.
Constitution saw service against the Barbary pirates of North Africa, the War of 1812, and as a training vessel and ambassador ship including a circumnavigation of the planet in the 1840s and a three-year 90-port tour of the United States in 1934 after a decades-long fundraising effort that mostly collected coins from schoolchildren to pay for upkeep and restoration.
It is still a thrill to see the majestic three-masted heavy frigate, 304 feet in length from bowsprit to spanker, her mainmast standing 220 feet tall. I walk over to visit every few weeks to Charlestown to see her at the dock,.
Constitution is crewed by U.S. Navy personnel and is used for training and exhibition.
But a few weeks ago I caught glimpse of another large sailing vessel moving through the harbor, also flying the American flag.
The Coast Guard Cutter Eagle sailed into the harbor, below my window, stopping to salute the Coast Guard station, and then continued to Charlestown where she tied up at the end of the same pier that is home to her older cousin Constitution.
USCGC Eagle is a training vessel for the Coast Guard, carrying cadets and officer candidates from that branch’s academy. Eagle is just slightly smaller than her much older cousin; 295 feet long from stem to stern, with her foremast and mainmast standing 147 feet tall with a slightly shorter mizzenmast aft of the main.
Eagle has a steel (not iron, not oak) hull and was launched in 1936 as a German naval training vessel; it came into American hands as part of World War II reparations.
This year, for the first time, both ships are under command of a female officer.
About 15 years ago we forged our own connection to USCGC Eagle when we sailed in the Caribbean aboard another venerable ship, Sea Cloud. She is larger than the two old naval ships in this post: 360 feet in length.
Sea Cloud was built for Marjorie Merriweather Post in 1931, at one point serving as the unofficial residence of Post and her husband Joseph E. Davies, the second American ambassador to the Soviet Union. The ship was tied up in the River Neva in St. Petersburg in part because Post preferred its luxuries to those of Soviet Moscow.
During World War II, Post allowed the U.S. Navy to charter the ship for $1 per year and it served as a U.S. Coast Guard Cutter weather observation ship, home-based here in Boston. Today Sea Cloud is back in private hands, carrying cruise guests mostly in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean.
It was on one of those voyages that we spent some time with Sea Cloud‘s captain, Richard “Red” Shannon. We learned that he had retired from a career in the Coast Guard, and that one of his postings had been as sailing master of the Coast Guard Cutter Eagle.
On that voyage we met up with the very modern sailing vessel Wind Surf, part of the Windstar cruise fleet. The world’s largest passenger-ship sailing vessel at 617 feet including bowsprit, it has five aluminum masts and a computer-controlled mechanism to raise, lower, or furl its high-tech sails. Below decks there is also an engine to drive a propeller when that was needed or desirable; to be fair, both the Eagle and Sea Cloud have a similar arrangement.
I asked Captain Shannon what he thought of the fancy Windstar vessel.
With a practiced pause, he said, “Well, I expect the sails don’t slow her down much.”
Photos and text copyright Corey Sandler. To obtain copies or otherwise use images, please contact me through my website at www.coreysandler.com
By Corey Sandler
Some of us yearn for the simple days, way back when Delta was the variant of concern. Delta is the fourth letter in the ancient Greek alphabet, the one used by virologists earlier in 2021 to give a name to the latest twist and turn.
If only certain people and certain governments were more willing to use all of the tools available to us in our modern medical armamentarium we might not have to consider Omicron–the 15th letter out of 24 for the Greeks–as we enter into the third year of the pandemic.
Here’s hoping we run out of variants before we run out of letters of the alphabet. Hoping 2022 turns out better than 2021 ended.
By Corey Sandler
So, as John Lennon once cribbed: Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.
First came Covid and disease, then came vaccines.
Earlier this year, for those of us with common sense, came cautious steps toward a resumption of Life Before the Pandemic.
And now with a fourth more invasive wave, something wicked this way comes.
So while we were busy making plans, life happened.
For reasons more personal than I care to share on the internet, we’re going to wait a few more months before we head out to sea. Watch this space for details.
Helsingin päärautatieasema, Helsinki Central Station. Corey Sandler, 2010
All text and photos copyright 2021 by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved.
By Corey Sandler
A journey of a thousand miles (or more…) begins with a single step.
So says an ancient Chinese proverb, perhaps uttered by Laozi in the 6th century B.C.E.
I imagine Laozi or Lao-tzu was preparing for a long walk, or perhaps a ride by water buffalo from one part of the vast lands of the Qin Dynasty to another.
I’m pretty sure it did not involve taking a taxi to the airport, boarding a jumbo jet, landing at a far distant airport, and then being handed a flute of champagne at the gangway of a sleek luxury cruise ship. And I’m certain it did not include more than a year in near-quarantine, two jabs of a preventative vaccine, and infrared temperature monitors at the borders.
But listen, I’m not complaining. We’re starting to get ready to begin to initiate new travels.
With thanks to the doctors and scientists and certain politicians, we’re grateful. We have begun moving about in our own country, and we look forward–fingers crossed–to heading out to sea In August. soon.
You can check on our intended schedule in the section of this blog called, “Where in the World is Corey Sandler?” I check it often whenever I lose track of where I am.
So I’ve been thinking:
And In Other News
Meanwhile, although Boston’s Black Falcon cruise terminal has not welcomed a passenger ship since the fall of 2019, there was a notable arrival just recently.
On June 22, the massive special purpose heavy haul cargo ship Zhen Hua 15 eased her way into the Reserved Channel in Boston’s seaport, carrying three gigantic cranes that will be installed across the water from the cruise terminal to allow loading and unloading of some of the largest container ships in use today.
Zhen Hua 15 took a 10-week trip from Shanghai, down and around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa and then across the Atlantic to Boston to deliver a pair of 205-foot-tall heavy lift cranes and a third crane of merely 145 feet in height. (Why the relatively smaller one? As anyone who has ever sailed into Boston knows, the cruise and cargo terminals are very close to one of the main runways of Logan Airport and all construction has to harmonize with overhead airplanes. In addition, when certain very large cruise or cargo ships come in to port, the air traffic controllers at Logan temporarily shut down the north-south runway for safety.)
I made a visit to see the cranes, still mounted on the ship while final preparations were underway to install them ashore.
By Corey Sandler
Sometimes it feels like a murky haze, a fever dream.
From sketchy news reports in December of 2019 to a warning at the start of 2020 to a full-blown global pandemic.
Here we are a year-and-a-half later, and in some parts of the globe we can see the edge of the woods. The problem remains: those billions of people who are not yet able to get a vaccine, and those millions of people who deny science and fact.
I’ll step down from my soapbox with one sigh of exasperation: This is getting old.
That’s what I was thinking on my morning constitutional as I experimented with a new art tool I have added to my state-of-the-art digital camera; a digital filter that all but travels back in time a century or so. All of these pictures are new versions with an old electronic eye:
And this just in: fingers crossed, we expect to return to something close to normal cruising soon. It’s still a moving target, as we hope that the virus is driven into obscurity by vaccines, science, and good manners.
See the page on this website, “Where in the World is Corey Sandler?” for my upcoming schedule which is beginning to fill out for this year and beyond.
Here’s wishing us all fair winds, following seas, and perfect health.
All photos and text copyright 2021 by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you would like to obtain or use a copy of any photo, please contact me.
By Corey Sandler
Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality. So said Nikos Kazantzakis, author of Zorba the Greek.
We’re working (some of us, to be precise) to change our present reality to something close to our past reality. I am hopeful we will eventually get beyond the know-nothings and the do-nothings.
But as of the moment, we’re not yet out of the woods.
Or to be more precise, in our case, seven or so months into this pandemic we’re not yet into the city or out on the open ocean.
We live along the water and Boston is still something close to a ghost town; the morning after a zombie apocalypse with just a handful of (mostly) masked people scurrying about. On my early-morning power walks there are days when I am the only one crossing the street in Downtown Crossing and Boston Common is rarely shared.
The Black Falcon cruise terminal in Boston has not had a cruise ship make a call since late in 2019 and probably will go this entire year without a visit. Across the harbor Logan International Airport is open but nearly empty, with a nearly total stoppage to international flights and a minimal amount of domestic traffic.
I am sure there are still places worthy of a photograph and I am always ready, but I have mostly been working on developing my editing skills and thinking about new ways to see old places.
One more quote, from the visionary cynic Mark Twain: You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
In that spirit, here are some photos from my collection that I have revisited with new eyes and a refocused imagination.
By Corey Sandler
The great Bard Jimmy Buffett wrote, “Changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes. Nothing remains quite the same.”
This past December we flew to Valparaiso, Chile at 33⁰ South Latitude, about 2,285 miles below the Equator, to begin a cruise.
When we stepped off the ship in Los Angeles, California in January we had no idea our aqueous journeys were headed for suspension.
We spent mid-January to mid-February on an extended winter holiday in glorious Montreal, 5,435 miles away at 45⁰ North Latitude.
For the past two decades or so, we have been spending about six months of each year aboard ship. By this time–as I write these words in August–we had been scheduled to sail the west coast of South America, then from Iceland over to circle the United Kingdom and on to Norway and next the Baltic Sea. The fall was going to take us to the Greek Isles and Israel.
Instead, 2020 has become The Year on Dry Land, with no certain change in sight.
Cruising will resume, in some form, sometime and we intend to be on board, somewhere.
NEW PHOTOS BY COREY SANDLER. CLICK HERE
As an author, I can write anywhere. As a photographer, I see the world through my lenses.
But without changes in in latitude, I’ve been making some changes in creative attitude.
Firmly ensconced on the penultimate floor of a condo tower in Boston’s Seaport, I’ve embarked on a project documenting the changing light of the big city and the harbor.
With my travel circumscribed by the invisible fence of the microscopic virus, I’m exploring artistic enhancements to photos: drawing with light, which is the literal meaning of the word photograph.
All of the images in today’s post are photographs I have taken. When I first took up a camera, we would retreat to the darkroom to dodge, burn, filter, and perform other techniques to find new ways to view the image. Today, digital photography gives us amazing tools to make new versions.
Someone out there is sure to be thinking, “These images are not real.” That is correct.
But I would point out that no photograph is real. The photographer chooses what to include and exclude before the shutter button is pressed. Settings on a lens select short or deep fields of sharpness. The shutter speed determines whether a dancer’s foot is frozen as if not moving, or blurred in action. And today’s advanced digital cameras can literally see in the dark, capturing details not discernible to the human eye.
Here are some of my interpretations of recent photos and a few older images from my back pages.
All photos by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. If you would like to obtain a print or otherwise make use of an image, please contact me.
By Corey Sandler
When Shakespeare wrote of the “winter of our discontent” in Richard III, he was alluding to a hope for the end of unhappiness.
Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke with less sanguinity in 1963 referencing a “summer of legitimate discontent.”
Shakespeare lived through two outbreaks of the plague. And Dr. King dreamed hewing out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.
Does it sound like I have been spending too much time in quarantine?
Without a doubt.
By this time in 2020 we had been scheduled to be in South America, then Iceland and a circle of the British Isles, and then off to the Baltic.
Instead, we make early morning masked forays into nearly deserted Boston, and I conduct late-night photo sessions from our veranda–not on a ship but 200 feet up in the air in a waterfront tower.
We’re waiting for the best of times to return.
Here are some recent photos:
By Corey Sandler
There are many places to make a grand arrival, but not many that can truly compete with a sail-in to New York in the early morning.
Before dawn, we sailed along the coast of Long Island and past the sleeping beach communities and the famous amusement park of Coney Island in Brooklyn. Then we moved toward the lights of the massive Verrazzano Bridge and beneath.
At that point, the harbor of New York lay before us: Staten Island, the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and lower Manhattan.
I’ve sailed into New York many times, and it is still one of the most thrilling places to arrive by sea.
We have spent most of the last four months aboard Silver Wind, visiting Norway, circling the United Kingdom, crossing over for a circle of Iceland, back to London and the U.K., and finally coming across to Iceland and then up the Saint Lawrence River to Quebec City and Montreal. This final leg took us down the coast and then up the river to New York.
I hope to see you here soon.
All photos and text Copyright 2019 by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. See more photos on my website at http://www.coreysandler.com
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO PURCHASE ANY PHOTO OR AN AUTOGRAPHED COPY OF ONE OF MY BOOKS, PLEASE CONTACT ME.
SEE THE “How to Order a Photo or Autographed Book” TAB ON THIS PAGE FOR INSTRUCTIONS
Now available, the revised Second Edition of “Henry Hudson Dreams and Obsession” by Corey Sandler, for the Amazon Kindle. You can read the book on a Kindle device, or in a Kindle App on your computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone.
Here’s where to order an electronic copy for immediate delivery:
By Corey Sandler
We are almost at the end of this particular odyssey, one that began in Reykjavik, crossed east to the UK, made a circle of the British Isles, then crossed the pond westward to Iceland and the Atlantic Provinces of Canada. Tonight we will head to New York. For us, it is time to head home for a while.
Our penultimate port of call was on a glorious autumn day at Martha’s Vineyard.
Martha’s Vineyard is famous for being famous. This beautiful island in the North Atlantic is large enough to have hills and valleys and harbors and lakes. It’s also close enough to the mainland of Cape Cod in Massachusetts to be relatively easy to get to.
And because of some peculiarities of location, economy, and religion Martha’s Vineyard has a somewhat unusual history. It does not have the same back-story as Cape Cod, mainland ports of New England, or of the farther-away neighboring island of Nantucket.
Oak Bluffs, population about 4,000…plus however many tens of thousands of summer people are hanging around—was the only one of the six towns on the island to be planned, and the only one developed specifically with tourism in mind.
Some of the earliest visitors to the area that became Cottage City and later Oak Bluffs were Methodists who gathered in the oak grove each summer for multi-day religious “camp meetings” held under large tents or in the open air.
From that base came tourism of all sorts. In the late 1880s, the church tent was replaced by the Tabernacle, an open-sided pavilion with a metal roof supported by wrought iron columns.
In 1884, the Flying Horses Carousel was brought to Oak Bluffs from Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York and installed a few blocks inland from the ocean.
Built in 1876, it is the oldest platform carousel still in operation.
All photos and text Copyright 2019 by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. See more photos on my website at http://www.coreysandler.com
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO PURCHASE ANY PHOTO OR AN AUTOGRAPHED COPY OF ONE OF MY BOOKS, PLEASE CONTACT ME.
SEE THE “How to Order a Photo or Autographed Book” TAB ON THIS PAGE FOR INSTRUCTIONS
Now available, the revised Second Edition of “Henry Hudson Dreams and Obsession” by Corey Sandler, for the Amazon Kindle. You can read the book on a Kindle device, or in a Kindle App on your computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone.
Here’s where to order an electronic copy for immediate delivery:
By Corey Sandler
Salem, on the North Shore of Massachusetts, was one of the most significant seaports in Puritan American history.
It is an interesting small place worth exploring. And by the luck of the draw, the cruise terminal in Boston, about 18 miles southwest, is filled with three large ships on the day of our visit.
By 1790, Salem was the sixth largest city in the United States, and a world-famous seaport—particularly in the China Trade, sugar and molasses from the West Indies, and Sumatran pepper. From Salem codfish was exported to Europe and the West Indies. Salem ships also visited Africa, Russia, Japan, and Australia.
The trade moved on to Boston and New York, although a fair amount of the riches of trade can still be seen in Salem.
Riches…and witches.
Most of us will agree that witches exist only in fiction.
J.K. Rowling became a billionaire promoting the idea that witches and wizards are amongst us. Harry Potter and Hermione Granger and Hagrid and Weasley and Dumbledore.
But hundreds if not thousands of people were accused and many of them convicted of being witches in Europe, Asia, and later the American Colonies. The penalty was usually torture or death, or both.
The period of witch-hunts in Modern Europe and then Colonial North America took place from about 1450 to 1750, spanning the upheavals of the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War. By some estimates, 35,000 to 100,000 people were executed, the vast majority of them in Europe.
Although Salem was only 18 miles from Boston, it was pretty isolated. As happens in many small towns, conflicts arose amongst small factions. And the most common sources of friction were money, religion, and sex.
The bottom line is that hundreds of people were accused, dozens were put on trial, and 20 people were executed; 19 by hanging and one by being pressed to death. Fourteen of the twenty were women.
The trials began in 1692, and were said to have arisen after some young girls were playing with what was called a “Venus glass”; we call that a mirror today.
Today Salem, Massachusetts is an attractive distant suburb of Boston. I am certain many of the 41,000 residents wished it was known for its harbor, its world-class art museum, or its historic buildings.
But instead Salem adopted a nickname that has proven hard to shed: Witch City. Police cars have witch logos. A public elementary school known as Witchcraft Heights, sits below Gallows Hill. The Salem High School athletic teams are called the Witches, and the school’s newspaper is the “Witches’ Brew.”
The city could just as easily lay claim to a title related to Fine Art or Architecture. The city is home to the House of Seven Gables, the Salem Maritime National Historic Site, and the amazing Peabody Essex Museum.
Oh, and also the Salem Witch Museum, which is—in my opinion—somewhere between Madame Tussaud’s or Disneyland, and a real museum. The museum is—and I am choosing my words carefully here—fact-based.
You might learn something. And there’s a gift shop.
Right in the heart of town is the Peabody Essex Museum, which dates to 1799 when the East India Marine Society was founded, by a group of Salem-based captains and supercargoes, representatives of ship owners.
The society’s charter required members to collect “natural and artificial curiosities” from beyond the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn. To be eligible they also had to circumnavigate the globe, and share navigational discoveries with other members.
In the two centuries since, the society’s collection merged with the former Peabody Museum of Salem and the Essex Institute, allowing a claim as the oldest continuously operating museum in the country.
The museum includes more than 1.8 million pieces.
The Peabody-Essex has one of the major collections of Asian art in the United States, dating from the time Salem ships traded with the Far East. It also has Yin Yu Tang, the only complete Qing Dynasty house outside China.
The museum’s maritime art collection is one of the finest in the world.
And it is about to become considerably larger, with a 40,000-square-foot addition due to open two days after our visit, on September 28.
All photos and text Copyright 2019 by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. See more photos on my website at http://www.coreysandler.com
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO PURCHASE ANY PHOTO OR AN AUTOGRAPHED COPY OF ONE OF MY BOOKS, PLEASE CONTACT ME.
SEE THE “How to Order a Photo or Autographed Book” TAB ON THIS PAGE FOR INSTRUCTIONS
Now available, the revised Second Edition of “Henry Hudson Dreams and Obsession” by Corey Sandler, for the Amazon Kindle. You can read the book on a Kindle device, or in a Kindle App on your computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone.
Here’s where to order an electronic copy for immediate delivery:
By Corey Sandler
Bar Harbor is one of the prettiest places in one of the prettiest regions of the world and this is (usually) the prettiest time of year to visit.
Fall in New England is an extraordinary experience, and we are hoping for brilliant foliage, clear skies, and a relative reduction in the number of tourists who come to Bar Harbor to see all of the above.
The town of Bar Harbor has lured artists and vacationers since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, and some of the gilded visitors helped fund the acquisition of land that led to the marvelous Acadia National Park.
In the heart of summer, Bar Harbor can be a very busy place. In late September cruise ships going “up” to Boston (I know it is to the south, but to old salts that meant sailing upwind) or down east to Canada (downwind, but I’m sure you figured that out) bring a a few thousand at a time for a day’s visit.
All photos and text Copyright 2019 by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. See more photos on my website at http://www.coreysandler.com
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO PURCHASE ANY PHOTO OR AN AUTOGRAPHED COPY OF ONE OF MY BOOKS, PLEASE CONTACT ME.
SEE THE “How to Order a Photo or Autographed Book” TAB ON THIS PAGE FOR INSTRUCTIONS
Now available, the revised Second Edition of “Henry Hudson Dreams and Obsession” by Corey Sandler, for the Amazon Kindle. You can read the book on a Kindle device, or in a Kindle App on your computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone.
Here’s where to order an electronic copy for immediate delivery:
By Corey Sandler
Through the many entries in this blog, you can read about the great harbor of Halifax, and about the terrible explosion during World War I that killed and injured thousands. Today Halifax is booming in a good way, with waterfront condominiums and office towers and its cruise port is sometimes home to four or five ships at a time.
Halifax remains one of our favorite places to wander. A block or two in from the harbor shows the trading heart of the port and up on the hill is the old British Citadel. There’s also the lively student-city-within-a-city of Dalhousie University, and nearby to that the lovely old-fashioned Public Gardens, now shifted to fall colors.
And an easy drive across the island province of Nova Scotia brings you to the beauty and wonder of the Bay of Fundy, home to some of the highest tidal variations in the world.
Variety is a good thing.
Today the schooner Bluenose II was in port. The original Bluenose was launched on 1921 as a coastal fishing vessel and quickly became an unofficial symbol of the Canadian Maritimes. It foundered in 1946, but a replica took to the seas in 1963 and today serves as a grand ambassador of the region and indeed, the nation. I carry a portrait of her in my pocket… on the front of the Canadian dime.
All photos and text Copyright 2019 by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. See more photos on my website at http://www.coreysandler.com
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO PURCHASE ANY PHOTO OR AN AUTOGRAPHED COPY OF ONE OF MY BOOKS, PLEASE CONTACT ME.
SEE THE “How to Order a Photo or Autographed Book” TAB ON THIS PAGE FOR INSTRUCTIONS
Now available, the revised Second Edition of “Henry Hudson Dreams and Obsession” by Corey Sandler, for the Amazon Kindle. You can read the book on a Kindle device, or in a Kindle App on your computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone.
Here’s where to order an electronic copy for immediate delivery:
By Corey Sandler
Louisbourg is about 20 miles southeast of Sydney, on what was once a particularly lonely piece of coastline in Nova Scotia.
The times we have visited—even in summer—it has often been shrouded in fog and mist, sometimes nearly wintry. Today was reasonably temperate, but very windy; we were lucky to be able to anchor the ship and get ashore.
Here’s our ship at anchor:
The principal attraction here is the Fortress of Louisbourg, a partial reconstruction of the 18th century fortress. The French named the port Havre Louisbourg after King Louis XIV. And the Fortress of Louisbourg was made the capital of the colony of Ile-Royale.
The location on the southernmost point of the Atlantic coast of Cape Breton Island was chosen because it was easy to defend against British ships attempting to attack Quebec City. The fort was also built to protect France’s hold on one of the richest fishing grounds in the world, the Grand Banks.
South of the fort, a reef provided a natural barrier, while a large island provided a good location for a battery. These defenses forced attacking ships to enter the harbor via a five hundred foot channel.
It was given the nicknames ‘Gibraltar of the North’ or the ‘Dunkirk of America.’
The original fortress, constructed between 1720 and 1740, was one of the most extensive (and expensive) European fortifications in North America.
The expense was so great that King Louis XV was said to have joked that he should be able to see the buildings from his Palace in Versailles.
Louisbourg was a large enough city to have a commercial district, a residential district, military arenas, marketplaces, inns, taverns and suburbs, as well as skilled laborers to fill all of these establishments.
For the French, it was the second most important stronghold and commercial city in New France, behind only Quebec City. In 1719, the fort was home to 823 people. The population would eventually reach more than four thousand.
The fort was surrounded by two and a half miles of wall. On the western side of the fort, the walls were thirty feet high, and thirty-six feet across. On the eastern side of the fort, fifteen guns pointed out to the harbor.
That said, it had a fatal flaw: its design was based on protecting against assaults from the sea. The back door, the defenses facing toward the land were relatively weak. And that, of course, was where the principal attack occurred.
The British would go on to advance into the Saint Lawrence River valley to take Quebec City and displace the French from New France.
The British ended up destroying the fortress and it lay in ruins for two centuries. In the 1960s, the Nova Scotia and Canadian governments helped pay for a massive reconstruction based on the original plans, creating a tourist attraction and providing much-needed jobs for unemployed coal and steel workers in the region.
Today dozens of locals work as interpreters.
All photos and text Copyright 2019 by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. See more photos on my website at http://www.coreysandler.com
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO PURCHASE ANY PHOTO OR AN AUTOGRAPHED COPY OF ONE OF MY BOOKS, PLEASE CONTACT ME.
SEE THE “How to Order a Photo or Autographed Book” TAB ON THIS PAGE FOR INSTRUCTIONS
Now available, the revised Second Edition of “Henry Hudson Dreams and Obsession” by Corey Sandler, for the Amazon Kindle. You can read the book on a Kindle device, or in a Kindle App on your computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone.
Here’s where to order an electronic copy for immediate delivery:
By Corey Sandler
Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine are an offshore part of the French Canadian province of Quebec.
The small archipelago, with a total land area of about 79 square miles or 206 square kilometers, includes eight major islands: Amherst, Grande Entrée, Grindstone, Grosse-Île, House Harbour, Pointe-Aux-Loups, Entry Island and Brion. All except Brion are inhabited.
The total population of Madelinot, as they call themselves, is about 13,000.
The islands today are primarily French-speaking, although they include some of Quebec’s oldest English-speaking settlements in places like Old Harry, Grosse-Ile, and Entry Island.
Most place names have a French and English version. Cap-aux-Meules or Grindstone. Île d’Entrée or Entry Island.
The first to visit and inhabit the islands were Basque fishermen in the 1600s. By 1765, the islands were inhabited by 22 French-speaking Acadians and their families, who were hunting walrus and working for a British trader. There were also Portuguese, Basque, and British.
Today, many Madelinots fly the Acadian flag and identify as both Acadian and Québécois.
The islands—though they sit in a very prominent place at the outer reaches of the Saint Lawrence—were never a hotly contested territory between the French and British, or the British and the Americans. They were just too small, and too difficult to sustain and defend.
Local lore says that some of the population are descendants of survivors of perhaps 500 to 1,000 shipwrecks on and around the islands, most of them occurring in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The Church of Saint Pierre in La Vernière, built in 1876, is by some accountings the second largest wooden church in North America. (The largest is not all that far away, Saint-Marie Church in Nova Scotia.)
Saint Pierre was built mostly out of wood salvaged from shipwrecks—specially blessed before being recycled, which apparently did not prevent it from being struck numerous times by lightning.
One modern small industry is a glass-blowing workshop, La Méduse, which as its name suggests in French, specializes in glass representations of jellyfish.
All photos and text Copyright 2019 by Corey Sandler, all rights reserved. See more photos on my website at http://www.coreysandler.com
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO PURCHASE ANY PHOTO OR AN AUTOGRAPHED COPY OF ONE OF MY BOOKS, PLEASE CONTACT ME.
SEE THE “How to Order a Photo or Autographed Book” TAB ON THIS PAGE FOR INSTRUCTIONS
Now available, the revised Second Edition of “Henry Hudson Dreams and Obsession” by Corey Sandler, for the Amazon Kindle. You can read the book on a Kindle device, or in a Kindle App on your computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone.
Here’s where to order an electronic copy for immediate delivery: