National Maritime Museum

I don't know what accounts for my interest in maritime matters. Between my proneness to seasickness and my mal de debarquement syndrome, you'd think I would avoid maritime museums. I probably watched too many episodes of Victory at Sea as a child (it was the music, I insist), read Alfred Thayer Mahan's The Influence of Seapower on History in high school, and am probably one of five persons, authors and editors not included, to have read all 15 volumes (including appendices) of Samuel Eliot Morison's History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. I've also read his Admiral of the Ocean Sea. And much, much more, now that I think of it, generally naval stuff or exploration stuff, most recently Captain Cook's voyages. I've toured a dozen historic ships and toured navy bases. I'm even fascinated by container ships. This is probably the eighth or tenth maritime museum we've visited since retiring--Stockholm, Rotterdam, Barcelona, Wellington, Dubrovnik, Bodrum--Vicki usually sits quietly and patiently in the museum lobby, as she did this time. I've cut the number of pix way down. Nevertheless...

Main entrance

The place is hardly dumbed-down, but there is much for kids
to enjoy

Prince Frederick's Thames barge; built 1732, last used by Prince
Albert in 1849

Assorted figureheads

In a big room devoted to Turner's Trafalgar painting: his only
royal commission, but rejected probably for being insufficiently
patriotic and glorious

Better photo, off the web: rather than the heroics of Nelson, and
national glory, it depicted the calamity and suffering of war

The Baltic Exchange Memorial Glass, from a 20th century 

building in London that survived the Blitz but not the IRA's

bombs; painstakingly repaired and reassembled here, it

memorializes members of the Exchange killed in WWI, but

also exults the national, the seafaring, and the commercial; one

of the largest stained glass works we have seen

In a large hall devoted to a variety of miscellaneous seafaring
devices, accoutrements, and stuff

Ditto

South Seas dress

Many south sea islanders do not regard the British

fondly nor think of the (European) age of exploration

as glorious; the Brits are way ahead of some other 

nations in recognizing the errors of their ways in former

times...

Johann Zoffany, Death of Captain James Cook, 1798; killed

by Hawaiians who finally figured out he wasn't a god

Cooks's anchorage at Tahiti, to observe the transit of Venus; the
description speaks of the "warm" welcome by the Tahitians;
"warm" indeed, inasmuch as the crew got VD, transmitted from 
the French who had preceded them

Hodges' famous portrait of of Cook

The upper floor of the great building is given to the Great Map,
essentially a play/exercise area for the kiddies

Among the many things that fascinate me are the ship-building
efforts that must have occupied the Brits from Elizabethan times
onward into the age of discovery and imperialism...here William
Daniell, The Mast House and Brunswick Dock at Blackwall, 1803

Some of the goodies brought back from the "new" world and

the Pacific

As one might expect, the place is loaded with ship models...

Bust of John Paul Jones...what he's doing here is
a mystery; he went to sea at the age of 13, worked
on slave ships, quit in revulsion and emigrated to
the Colonies; was their naval hero in the American
revolution

Francis Holman, Blackwall Yard from the Thames, 1784; private
ship-building yard

Nicholas Pocock, Plymouth Dockyard, 1798; ship-building on
a mammoth scale (for then); even larger was the yard at Portsmouth

John Clevely the Elder, The Royal George at Deptford Showing
the Launch of the Cambridge in 1755, 1757; I guess I am not the
only person fascinated by the ship-building

Not as Hollywood has portrayed it...

Oops! I uncharacteristically forgot to note the titles and painters
for these two battle scenes

Naval battles in these times were as much about guns, knives,

hand-to-hand stuff as cannons; Nelson said the best a captain could

do was to get his ship alongside his foe; Errol Flynn said "It's

cutlasses now, lads!"

Nevertheless, the things fired from cannons were pretty nasty...

He really liked his medals and "did not fear to show
them to the enemy," which made him an easy target
for the French sharpshooters at Trafalgar; another Abbot
portrait of Nelson

Portrait of Nelson after the battle of the Nile, 
attributed to Guy Head, c. 1800

Nelson's combination fork and knife

Elizabeth's chief privateers/swashbucklers: Cavendish, Drake, and
Hawkins; pirates to their victims, heroes back home; not pictured:
Captain Geoffrey Thorpe...