Creative History

  Noon on the day after Christmas in the year 1900.   The crew of the Irish clipper ship Hesperus reached the coast of the Flannel Isles and prepared to dock alongside the desolate, rocky, archipelago's newly built lighthouse.  Upon arrival, the crew of the Hesperus discover that the lighthouse has no flag flying from its mast and no one greets the newly arrived clipper to welcome them ashore.  The Hesperus’ Captain Jim Harve, blows his ship’s whistle and fires a flare skyward hoping for a response, but the Flannel Isle and its lighthouse remain silent and seemingly abandoned. After a few tense moments a boat is launched from the Hesperus and a sailor named Joseph Moore, who himself is an experienced lighthouse keeper, is sent ashore. Moore arrives at the Flannan Isle Lighthouse and finds the gate closed; the beds unmade and all the clocks not set to the proper time-something very uncommon in the highly disciplined maritime world of the United Kingdom. A search ...

  Philip Spencer is a nineteen year old hard drinking party animal.  He is  a frat boy at sea and a perpetual ne’er do well who has a problem with authority.  He left school as a teenager and ran away from home to find adventure on the high seas, but when his parents caught wind of where he was they quickly had him snatched up and brought back home against his will. Philip’s father told him that if he wanted to go to sea to find adventure he would have to do so as a member of the United States Navy.  Now, in the Autumn of 1842 Philip Spencer finds himself commissioned as an unwilling midshipman in the U.S. Navy aboard the newly launched brigantine the USS Somers .  His father, the man who gave Philip the commission in the United States Navy that he never wanted in the first place, is John Canfield Spencer, a former Congressman from New York and in November of 1842 the current Secretary of War (a position analogous to today’s Secretary of Defense) in the a...

  Famous for its unpredictable high tides and majestic cliffs, Canada’s Bay of Fundy straddles the border between the two northeastern provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.  The world’s fifth largest bay in terms of  square miles, the Bay of Fundy also shares a border with the American state of Maine. The shifting tides in the Bay of Fundy are considered fierce and treacherous by even the most experienced mariners in the world.  And the weather in Nova Scotia, particularly along the shoreline can be fickle and in the winter downright frigid, with large floes and pack ice a not uncommon sight in the open waters of the Bay of Fundy throughout much of the year. On December 16, 1735 residents of the tiny rural fishing village of Chebogue, located along the northern shoreline of the Bay of Fundy, awoke on a cold winter’s morning to see a most unusual, even a haunting sight meet their eyes. Docked in the small harbor of their village that December morning was a t...