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NATIONAL MARITIME HISTORICAL SOCIETY
PU BLISH ER'S C IRC LE: Peter D onald McG raw, W illiam H. W hite
Aro n,
OF FICERS & TRU STEES: Chairman, Walter R. Brown ; Vice Chairman, Ri chardo R. Lopes; Executive Vice President, Burchenal G ree n; Treasurer, Ronald L. O swald; Secretary, M arshall Streibert; Trustees, Paul F. Balse r, D onald M . Birney, 'Thomas F. D aly, D avid S. Fowler, V irginia Steele G rubb, Rodn ey N . H ough to n, Steven W. Jones, Ri chard M. Larrabee, Warren Leback, G uy E. C. M airland, Karen Markoe, Michael McKay, Jam es J. M cNamara, Howard Slotni ck, Bradford D. Smith, Philip ]. Webster, Willi am H. White; Chairmen Emeriti, Al an G. C hoate, Guy E. C. M aitl and , C raig A. C. Reynolds, Howard Slotnick; President Emeritus, Peter Stanford FO U N D ER: Karl Kortum (1 917- 1996) O VERSEERS: Chairman, RADM D avid C. Brow n; Walter C ronkite, C live C uss ler, Alan D. Hutchison, Jakob Isbrandtsen, Jo hn Lehm an , Warren Marr, IT , Brian A. McAllister, John Stobart, W illiam G. W interer N MHS ADVISORS: Co-Chairmen, Fra nk 0. Braynard, Melbourne Smith; D . K. Abbass, G eorge F. Bass , Fran cis E . Bowker, O swald L. Brett, RADM Joseph F. Callo, Francis J. Duffy, John W Ewald, Tim othy Foote, William G ilkerso n, Thom as G illmer, Walter J. Handelman, Steve n A. H yman , H ajo Knurtel, Gunnar Lundeberg, Joseph A. Maggio, Conrad Milster, W illi am G. Mull er, David E. Perkins, Nancy Hughes Ri chard son, Shannon J. Wall
SEA HIS TORY EDIT ORIAL ADVISORY BOARD: Chairman, T im oth y J . Run yan; N orman J . Brouwer, Robert Brownin g, W illi am S. Dudley, D aniel Fina mo re, Kevin Foster, John 0. Jense n, Josep h F. M eany, Lisa Norling, Walter Rybka, Quin te n Snediker, William H. W hite NMHS STAFF: Executive Director, Burchenal Green; M em bership Director, Nancy Schnaa rs; Accounting, Jill Ro meo; Executive A ssistant, Jan et Mill er; Membership Assistant, Jane M aurice
SEA HIS TORY: Editor, D eird re E. O 'Regan; D irector of Advertising, Steve Lovass-Nagy; Sea History for Kids Editor, Myka-Lynne Sokoloff; Editor-at-Large, Peter Stanford
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ship. The notice also states that D es Moines is in dry-dock. I believe it is tied up to the sam e pier where it has been for a number of years, very much aflo at. Because there are no longer any active battleships o r heavy cruisers, the use of state and city names appears to have shifted to submarines. Subs were once named for fish, but now place names, and even nam es of people, are applied to them. During WWII, the Navy apparently started to run o ut of fish nam es for the hundreds of submarines being commissioned. It appears that they m anaged to create names fo r subspecies of fish so that submarines could continue the traditio n of using fi sh names. The shift to names of people and places seems to have occurred while Admiral Rickover was in charge of the N avy's nuclear program. If you're interested in seeing, firsthand, the difference berween battleships and heavy cruisers, the battleship New j ersey is open to the public in Camden, New Jersey, as is the only heavy cruiser o n public display, USS Salem, at the U nited States Naval Shipbuilding Museum in Q uincy, Massachusetts. The other surviving bat tleships USS Salem
are M assachusetts, N orth Carolina, A labama, Texas-all in their "hom e" states, the rwo previously mentioned, and the most fam ous of them all, Missouri, at Pearl Harbor. O ther countries that owned battleships either lost them all in or after WWII or scrapped them . (Possible exception, a pre- 1900 ship, ostensibly a battleship, but quite small, berthed in concrete somewhere in Japan.) MARK L AN D ER
O ld Lyme, Connecticut
Piri Reis Map The Reis M ap may be a hoax, but no one can explain how a certified skin m ap shows something no one knew about until radar m apping of the terrain under the ice sheet was completed. The problem most critics
of the map face is that, even if it isn't as old as it appears to be, it was still created befo re our current technology was available to do the same imaging. Aside from the mys tery of how som eone knew the terrain under the An tarctic ice sheet long before we developed the technology to learn the same inform ation is the question of how the m ap was stored since 1513. What do we have today in our modern electronic media storage that will las t, and be readable, after 490-some years? According to some reports, early NASA data has been lost because eith er the tape storage deteriorated or the m achines to read the data on the tape have been upgraded to the point that the tapes can no lo nger be read at all. H ow many of yo u, readers, have information o n the older diskettes (8" or 5.25") that yo u cannot read because there is no disc drive available or the sofrware now used will no t recognize the storage format on the diskettes?
c. H ENRY D EPEW
Tallahassee, Florida C ommon sense finds fa tal Baws in any talk of ancient m ariners with knowledge of the rocky coas t of Antarctica. H ere's one example: says Vin cent Pica (Sea H istory l l 0, Spring 200 5): "Further studies have proven that the las t ice-free period in the Antarctic ended about 6,000 yea rs ago." The Antarcti c is well kn own to be drier than the Sahara. The ice is tho usands of fee t thick, and the deeper yo u get, the more compressed the snow. That size of an ice cap can only develop afte r fa r m ore than a mere 6,000 years of snowfall. Furtherm ore, if the Antarctic ice cap were to melt, sea levels wo uld rise by 500 feet or m ore, altering coastlines so dram atically that the map wo uld no t correspond any more. Piri Reis map believers can't have it both ways. Either the coastlines on the m ap are accurate, which wo uld equate current sea levels with ancient sea levels, and the An tarctic was covered by pre tty much its current ice cap or the Antarctic was icefree, the sea level was 500 feet higher, and coastlines were co nsiderably different from what we have today. FELIX FINCH
Durch Flat, California SEA HISTORY 111 , SU MMER 2005