In remembrance of the wreck of the Whydah Galley today

Remembering the pirates and prisoners who died in the shipwreck off Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

You can also check out this post from the Whydah Pirate Museum:

Whydah Pirate Museum

Just before midnight on April 26th, 1717, the pirate flagship Whydah wrecked on the Cape Cod coastline during a powerful nor’easter. The coveted treasure aboard sometimes upstages the 144 men who lost their lives that night. Although outlaws, their untimely death was no less tragic than any other sailor who braved the sea. As we show reverence for their passing, we at the Whydah Pirate Museum are equally grateful that the artifacts they left behind can teach future generations about the daring exploits and democratic ideals of ordinary men.
Join us at the museum and learn more.

I remembered this song while watching a special on the Galveston hurricane a couple of weeks ago. Since it was originally sung by French fisherman from an unknown date, it is not unreasonable to expect that some Frenchman among the pirate crews might have know this song.

You can go to the web site here:

Queen of the Waves

Queen of the Waves

Queen of the Waves is a French hymn (author unknown) sung by French fishermen seeking protection from storms.
In the United States, it became well known as a result of the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. The nuns of the St. Mary's Orphan Asylum had the orphans sing this song (in English) in order to calm them. Of the 93 children and 10 sisters in the orphanage, only three teenage boys survived.
As a result of this event, the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word across the world sing this song every year on September 8, and remember the sisters and orphans that died that day.
The Sisters of Charity created an audio CD titled Queen of the Waves: Centennial Remembrance of The Great Storm of 1900, and MP3 audio files are available from the official 1900 Storm Remembrance Site. This CD tells the story of the Saint Mary's Orphanage during the 1900 Storm and includes the song Queen of the Waves.
Also, Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim across the English Channel in 1926 was popularly known in the press as "Queen of the Waves."

Lyrics

From north to south, from east to stormy west,

See how the waters with tumultuous motion

Rise up and foam without a pause or rest.

Thou art our Mother and thy little Child

Is the All Merciful, our loving Brother

God of the sea and of the tempest wild.

By thy seven griefs, in pity Lady save;

Think of the Babe that slept within the manger

And help us now, dear Lady of the Wave.

Thy votive lamp sheds down on us afar; 

Light of our eyes, oh let it ne'er grow dimmer,

Till in the sky we hail the morning star.

And grateful psalms re-echo down the nave;

Never our faith in thy sweet power can falter,

Mother of God, our Lady of the Wave.

Here is a slightly different version of the hymn:

Queen of the Waves, look forth across the ocean

From north to south, from east to stormy west,

See how the waters with tumultuous motion

Rise up and foam without a pause or rest.

But fear we not, tho' storm clouds round us gather,

Thou art our Mother and thy little Child

Is the All Merciful, our loving Brother

God of the sea and of the tempest wild.

Help, then sweet Queen, in our exceeding danger,

By thy seven griefs, in pity Lady save;

Think of the Babe that slept within the manger

And help us now, dear Lady of the Wave.

Up to thy shrine we look and see the glimmer

Thy votive lamp sheds down on us afar;

Light of our eyes, oh let it ne'er grow dimmer,

Till in the sky we hail the morning star.

Then joyful hearts shall kneel around thine altar

And grateful psalms re-echo down the nave;

Never our faith in thy sweet power can falter,

Mother of God, our Lady of the Wave.

 

Birthday of the man who helped solve the longitude problem

John Harrison, the man who helped solve the problem of determining longitude.

Read the article here:

The Man who helped solve the longitude problem

John Harrison’s super-accurate clock helped solve the longitude puzzle

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Developed over decades in the 1700s, Harrison’s clocks were major steps toward a reliable way of calculating longitude at sea

 

Today’s Google Doodle celebrates clockmaker John Harrison, whose efforts to calculate longitude helped people figure out their place in the world — literally.

Harrison was born 325 years ago in Yorkshire, England, and he grew up to become a clockmaker. Before he died in 1776, he developed a series of increasingly accurate clocks that could be used to determine a ship’s position on the globe’s east-west axis, also known as its longitude.

Seamen had long used the position of the sun or North Star in the sky to figure out latitude— that is, the distance from the equator in the north-south direction, according to The Conversation. But calculating longitude was much trickier, leading to deadly navigational errors. In 1707, for example, a five-ship pile-up off the Cornish coast killed 1,400 people. So in 1714, the British Board of Longitude announced a competition: £20,000 (or £1.5m in today’s currency, The Conversation reports) would be awarded to whoever developed the most accurate way to calculate longitude at sea. One way to do that, at least in theory, was to use time.

Since the Earth rotates 360 degrees in 24 hours, that means it rotates 15 degrees each hour. So if you know the time where you are and the time at zero-degrees longitude (which is arbitrarily set in Greenwich, England) you should be able to calculate your longitude, the Australian National Maritime Museum explains. So Harrison entered the competition with a hand-crafted clock that could accurately keep time even at sea. Over the next 40 years, he perfected the technology. But he didn’t win the £20,000 — at least not at first.

In 1765, his son, William Harrison, took the fourth-generation clock — called H4, or the sea watch — for a test voyage to Jamaica. The sea watch passed the test, according to the Royal Museums Greenwich. But still, the Board of Longitude wasn’t ready to call him a winner and ordered another test run — this time to Barbados, against two teams using methods that relied on astronomy rather than timepieces.

The watch was accurate, but what the Board of Longitude really wanted was a “practical solution,” according to an Oxford University Press blog post by science historian Jim Bennett. That meant scaling up production of the watch, which would be challenging with such a carefully crafted device. So the Board agreed to award Harrison a partial prize of £10,000. He only received the full amount after King George III insisted, according to Smithsonian’s Time and Navigation series.

A compelling version of the narrative is that John Harrison solved the longitude problem, but was slighted by the scientific establishment, Bennett writes in a blog post for Oxford University Press. That version of the story ignores the contributions of other clockmakers in the UK and in France who also were making progress toward developing reliable chronometers. “It is difficult to claim without important qualification that Harrison solved the longitude problem in a practical sense,” he says. Harrison’s work showed that it was truly possible.