History

I came across this in my history book, and thought it very good, just thought i'd share it with ya'll :)

The Bible teaches that the center focus of God's plan in history is the cross of Christ, all events are moving, not in an endless cycle but in a linear direction from creation to culmination.
Herman Bavinck writes:

...Furthermore, revelation gives us a division of history. There is no history without division of time, without periods, without progress and development.

But now take Christ away.

The thing is impossible, history falls to pieces, for he has lived and died, has risen from the dead, and lives to all eternity;
and these facts cannot be eliminated,- they belong to history, they are the heart of history.

But think Christ away for a moment, with all that he has spoken and done and wrought.

Immediately history falls to pieces.

It has lost its heart, its kernel, and its center, its distribution.
It loses itself in a history of races and nations, of nature and culture-peoples. It becomes chaos, without a center, and therefore without a circumference;
without distribution, and therefore without beginning and end; without principle and goal; a stream rolling down from the mountains, nothing more.

But revelation teaches that as God is Lord of the ages, Christ is the turning point of these ages. And thus it brings into history unity and plan, progress and aim.

This aim is not this or that special idea, not the idea of freedom, or of humanity, or of matierial well-being. But it is the fullness of the Kingdom of God, that all-sided, all-containing dominion of God, which embraces heaven and earth, angels, and men, mind and matter, culus and culture, the specific and the generic;

in a word, all and all.

Robertha Josephine "Bertha" Watt

I decided to post a small saga about Bertha (to bad she didn't have a better name!), this is just a small explaination about her

Miss Robertha Josephine Watt, 12, was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, on 11 September 1899, and was with her mother Bessie Watt on Titanic bound for Portland, Oregon where they were to join her architect father.

They were originally booked on the New York, but because of the coal strike were transferred to the Titanic.

Aboard the ship Bertha befriended an English girl, Marjorie Collyer.

They were rescued in lifeboat 9.

Twelve years old at the time, her most vivid memory was that she was roused from her sleep, and told to say her prayers because the Titanic was in trouble. She wrote about the experience as a student in 1917 for the Jefferson High School newspaper in which she claimed:

To be continued someday...hee, hee, hee!

The Lusitania

The Lusitania was another large ship like the Titanic, and was actually one of the reasons the Titanic was built. The Lusitania and her sister ship were the two biggest and most luxurious ships before the Titanic and her sisters came along. They (the Titanic and the Lusitania) were from two rival ship lines. The Lusitania was very beautiful (But not nearly as much as the Titanic!) but she was sunk by a German submarine’s torpedo on May 7, 1915 a little off the coast of Ireland. This action helped get America into World War I for there were many Americans on board her when she sank. She sank 18 minutes after she was hit, and those 18 minutes were filled with chaos as the 1257 plus people on board tried to get off her, but because the Lusitania was listing to the starboard (right) side so badly, and because she was still moving forward as she sank, it made even the lifeboats unsafe. Because of the angle of the list, the only boats that could be launched were the ones on the starboard side. But even then, they were constantly flipping over, spilling their passengers into the water, then another lifeboat would start to descend, and the lines would break, the lifeboat falling and crushing the occupants of the lifeboat before her. Only a few actually made it safely. The people in the water thought that the Lusitania would flip over onto her side, crushing them. They could look up and see her leaning precariously to her starboard side right above them. The power failed, trapping men and women in the electric elevators. The deck was crowded with people, as it tilted farther and farther, noise was everywhere, screams and shouts of passengers, the noise of wood and metal scraping as the lifeboats were lowered, the calls of the officers, and the cries of babies. People were slipping and sliding along the deck. The ship was filled with passengers, and had a lot of babies and young children on board.
Some mothers tried to give their children to strangers, hoping they could save them. Florence Padley was on the deck when one lady asked her to take her baby, but she couldn’t, because she didn’t have a life jacket. Norah Bretherton grabbed her baby from her play pen, and then asked a man who had frequently played with her young son, Paul, to run down to the cabin and get him. He looked right through her. In desperation she forced the baby into a stranger's arms and ran down and grabbed her son. As she made her way up the crowded stairs, she was horrified by the callousness of fellow passengers, not one man offered to help her in her struggle up the sloping stairs, and she saw one lady with a little baby fall and slide down along the deck, and no one bothered to help her. It was every man for himself. Paul Crompton and his wife were trying desperately to gather up their six children ranging from age five months to fourteen. Anne Williams was in a similar plight with her own six children. Parents ran frantically around the boat searching for lost children, while children screamed for their parents. Baby carriages rolled wildly along the tilting deck, some empty, others not. One man remarked that all he saw in the water were “Children-children were everywhere.” One lady had just laid her eight month old daughter down for a nap when the torpedo hit. She ran back to her cabin, and grabbed the baby. As she started to leave, she remembered her next door neighbor had an eighteen month toddler who was asleep in the cabin right next to her, she could see no sign of the mother, and could not bear to have him stay there. But he was a big child and she could not carry both her baby and the toddler. She had to leave him behind. His little face would haunt her the rest of her life. Many people lost their children; Mabel Henshaw clutched her baby Constance as she jumped into the water, but they both were sucked down, and the force of the water tore Constance from her arms. When Mabel came back to the surface, Constance was gone. Charlotte Pye also jumped in with her baby, Marjorie. “My baby gave a terrible scream and we both sank. When I came up the baby was gone and I was dragged down a second time.” When she came up again, all she could see where dead bodies “and those that were living were screaming and shouting, wanting to be saved.” Charlotte was picked up by a lifeboat, she could do nothing but sit there “Crying and wanting my baby” knowing she would never see her again. The child had met “such a terrible end” and she tormented herself that “she could have taken better care of her” Her will to live was gone. Another woman worked hard to keep her three young children afloat. By the time a lifeboat came to help her, two were already dead. Her third child died moments later. She had to leave them floating in the sea. One woman was in the water with her baby for two hours, and just as some other survivors helped her onto a raft, the baby girl closed its tiny eyes in her arms and died, She had to leave the baby behind in the water. Soren Sorenson (weird name!) watched a mother valiantly try to save her baby by putting it on some wreckage, but it died, and she had to let it go, the little bundle drifting away. A Canadian, Percy Rogers saw a young child wearing a lifejacket and crying for her mother. He could not reach her and had to watch her die.
An Irish couple, Walter and Nettie Moore were holding on to an overturned lifeboat, Walter was trying to hold their baby son out of the water. But as time passed the baby’s skin turned a dark bruised color and froth appeared at his mouth. They realized he was dead. Walter lost consciousness, he said “I can’t hold on any more, Nettie” and slid into the water, still clasping his baby’s lifeless body.
The whole eighteen minutes of sinking was filled with death, chaos, noise, confusion, and fear. The captain of the submarine that fired the torpedo, Scheigner, wrote in his log: “It would have been impossible for me to fire a second torpedo into this crushing crowd of humanity trying to save their lives.” And we are just thankfully that he didn't. Out of the 1,257 registered passengers, the final toll was 1,198 people dead. There was 129 children on board, 94 were killed, and out of the 39 babies on board, 34 died.

Annie Oakley

Phoebe Ann Oakley Moses was born in Darke County, Ohio in 1860 to Quakers Susan and Jacob Moses. Her family already had a somewhat turbulent past, with her father a veteran of the War of 1812 and her family having to move to Ohio from Pennsylvania due to a fire burning down the family business, a tavern.
Jacob Moses died in 1866 from pneumonia, but not before giving his wife six other children. Annie was the fifth in line and had to deal with her father's death at a young age, as well as her mother remarrying and having another child before losing that husband as well.
Due to financial circumstances the young Annie was placed with a local family for a time where she was abused both physically and mentally, reconciling with her family when her mother married a third time. Multiple marriages were not unheard of at this time, when a single mother had very little chance of survival or being able to care for her children.
The young Annie started hunting at the tender age of nine to try and put food on the table for her family, resulting in her becoming quite the expert shot. Her skills brought attention from the public and she began to compete in local shows. At the age of 16 she went to Cincinnati and defeated Frank Butler, a noted marksman who was working with a visiting sideshow. But in the end it was Butler who won, wooing the young Annie and marrying her the same year; adding her to his travelling sideshow. At this point she took on the stage name "Annie Oakley".
At that time travelling sideshows were big entertainment, giving the people a skewed view of the old west with wild displays and exaggerations of how life was in the old west not only for women but for natives and those seeking their fortunes.
The Buffalo Bill Wild West Show was just one example and Butler joined the show in 1885 with his expert shot wife. Annie was advertised as "Little Miss Sure Shot", supposedly a nickname bestowed on her by the famous Native American Sitting Bull.
Her fame became widespread thanks to her expert shooting skills and the showmanship of Buffalo Bill, allowing her to pull off such stunts as shooting the ashes off a cigar held by no other than Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany!
Annie Oakley's skills were known around the world, giving her fame and fortune far beyond what a simple girl from Ohio could have ever expected. When she finally passed away on November 3, 1926 she was one of the most famous women of her time, stepping outside of the barriers that restricted women in society. Indeed, the famous musical "Annie Get Your Gun" is loosely based on her experiences! Even after all these years "Miss Little Sure Shot" can still motivate and encourage young girls to look beyond society's boundaries and go further.

TSMS Lakonia, part 2

Here at last I shall finish about the Lakonia.

...Many of the passengers who had been asleep in their cabins found themselves unable to escape the fire. Some passengers were told to go to the main dining room to await instructions, but most ignored this order, since the dining room lay directly in the path of the fire. At 11:30 p.m., the ship's chief radio officer Antonios Kalogridis sent out the first distress call: "Fire spreading up. Prepare evacuation on ship." At midnight, a second distress call was sent out: "We are leaving the ship. Please immediately give us assistance. Please help us." Kalogridis sent out the last call at 12:22 a.m., just before the wireless room caught fire: "SOS from Lakonia, last time. I cannot stay anymore in the wireless station. We are leaving the ship. Please immediate assistance. Please help." A six-man fire crew attempted to fight the blaze, but the fire spread too quickly to be contained. The pressure boilers began to explode, filling the rooms and hallways with thick, black smoke, and the suffocating passengers were forced on deck. The ship's purser gave the order to abandon ship shortly before 1:00 a.m. Dazed passengers made their way to the lifeboats, some in their pajamas and others still wearing their jewels and eveningwear. A few crew members went below decks to try to save passengers from their burning cabins. The ship's swimming pool attendant and a steward lowered themselves over the side of the ship by rope to pull trapped people from portholes. Evacuation of the ship was extremely difficult. Some lifeboats burned before they could be lowered. Two of the lifeboats were swamped, spilling their occupants into the sea; one when it was lowered only by one end, and the other when its davits broke off. Chains had rusted in many of the davits, making boats difficult or impossible to move. In the end, just over half of the lifeboats made it safely away from the Lakonia, some of them less than half full. Several people who dove overboard struck the side of the ship on the way down, killing them before they hit the water. Passengers were angered when the wireless operator left the ship in a launch with a nurse and two musicians. Kalogridis later testified that he had left to rescue people from the water. He did not return to the ship because the current pushed the launch away, he explained. Passengers also claimed that some of the crewmen took advantage of the chaos to loot staterooms. When all of the boats were away, there were still people adrift in the water and over 100 people left on board the burning ship. The Lakonia continued to burn fiercely and was rocked by violent explosions. Those who remained on board flocked to the glass-enclosed Agora Shopping Center at the stern of the ship. After several hours, the flames closed in on them, and they were forced to descend ropes and rope ladders into the ocean. The port and starboard gangways were lowered as well, and people walked down the gangways single file into the sea. At 3:30 a.m., four hours after the first distress call, the 492-foot Argentinean passenger ship Salta arrived on the scene. The Salta, under the command of Captain José Barrere, had been on its way from Genoa, Italy to Buenos Aires. The 440-foot British tanker Montcalm arrived half an hour later at 4:00 a.m. The majority of the survivors were saved by these two ships. The Salta rescued 475 people and took aboard most of Lakonia's lifeboats. In the hours that followed, the Belgian ship Charlesville, the Brazilian freighter Rio Grande, the British passenger ship Stratheden and the Panamanian freighter Mehdi all arrived to take part in the rescue. Each of the rescue vessels dispatched boats to pluck survivors from the water. Also, four United States Air Force C-54 rescue planes were sent from the Lajes Air Base in the Azores. The planes dropped flares, lifejackets, life rafts and survival kits to people in the water. Rescue efforts were hindered by the fact that the Lakonia drifted for several miles during the evacuation. People in the water were dispersed over a 2 – 3 mile area. Also, rescue ships were reluctant to get too near the Lakonia; there was a constant risk that the ship's 500 tons of fuel oil would explode. A lifeboat was dispatched from the Charlesville shortly after daybreak to rescue Captain Zarbis, who was spotted pacing the decks of the still-burning ship. Zarbis was the last person to leave the Lakonia alive. Most of the survivors were transported to Madeira, while others, including Captain Zarbis, were taken to Casablanca. A total of 128 people died in the Lakonia disaster, of which 95 were passengers and 33 were crew members. Only 53 people were killed in the actual fire. The rest died from exposure, drowning and injuries sustained while diving overboard. Crewmen from the British aircraft carrier HMS Centaur were able to board the Lakonia on December 24, once the flames had died down. Most of the bodies were recovered by the crew of the Centaur. By this time, the Lakonia was a charred, smoking hulk. Her superstructure had partially collapsed amidships, and the bridge and aft decks had caved in. There were holes blasted near the bow, and the ship was listing 10 degrees to starboard. The Norwegian tugboat Herkules attached a tow line to the Lakonia at 5:30 p.m. on December 24. The Herkules, along with the Portuguese tugboat Praia da Adraga and two other tugs, set off for the British base at Gibraltar with the Lakonia in tow. Her list grew more severe each day, and at about 2:00 p.m. on December 29, the Lakonia rolled over onto her starboard side. She sank stern-first in only three minutes. The ship went down 230 miles southwest of Lisbon, Portugal and 250 miles west of Gibraltar.

TSMS Lakonia, part 1

As many of you know, I love all ships (well, at least all passenger liners. No war ships for me!), so here is another bit about one of my many favorites. Though it was not that long ago, I still find it absolutely fascinating, and just so you don't get totally confused, the Lakonia was previously the Johan von Oldenbarnevelt.

The Johan van Oldenbarnevelt was refitted again in 1958 at a cost of AU$800,000. The refitting was carried out by the Amsterdam Dry Dock Company and took three months to complete. Accommodation was reduced to 1,210 passengers. Three luxury suites were added, as well as a nightclub, cinema, gift shop, promenade lounge and second swimming pool. All public rooms were refinished and restored. The main mast was relocated to atop the bridge, and the decks were extended aft. Her funnels were heightened, given rounded tops and painted yellow and black. Her black hull was re-painted gray.
The ship was assigned to her new port, Southampton, England, on April 2, 1959. She offered round-the-world service, making stops in Australia, New Zealand, Bermuda and New York City. She was now marketed as a cruise ship, instead of a passenger liner.
The Johan van Oldenbarnevelt left on her last round-the-world voyage for the Netherland Line on June 30, 1962. She arrived in Sydney, Australia on February 3, 1963 and was decommissioned by the Netherland Line that day, ending a 33-year career for that shipping line. She then sailed for Genoa, Italy, and arrived on March 7, 1963.
On March 8, 1963, the Johan van Oldenbarnevelt was sold to the General Steam Navigation Company. Her decks and public rooms were re-named and the aft swimming pool was enlarged. Twelve additional cabins were built, and air conditioning was installed throughout the ship. Her hull was painted white, and her weight grew to 20,314 tons. Most importantly, the ship's name was changed to TSMS Lakonia.

The ship was operated by the Ormos Shipping Company (also known as the Greek Line) and offered service from Southampton to the Canary Islands. She departed Southampton on her first voyage as Lakonia on April 24, 1963. She proved immensely popular, and the Greek Line planned 27 cruises for 1964. From December 9 to December 13, 1963, she underwent another minor upgrade. A new pneumatic fuel injection system was installed. Cabins were redecorated, and the kitchen and pantry were completely remodeled.
The Lakonia was outfitted with a number of safety features. She carried 24 lifeboats capable of holding 1,455 people. The ship had an automatic fire alarm system and two fire stations with specialized firefighting equipment. There were lifejackets for every person on board and an extra 400 stowed on deck.
In addition to Lakonia, the Greek Line also operated the larger Arkadia and Olympia.

The Lakonia departed Southampton on December 19, 1963 for an 11-day "Christmas Cruise" of the Canary Islands. Her first scheduled stop was to be the island of Madeira. There were 646 passengers and 376 crewmen on board: a total of 1,022 people. All but 21 of the passengers were British citizens, and the crew members were mostly Greek and German. The captain of the Lakonia was 53-year-old Mathios Zarbis.
The crew had conducted a boat drill a week before, and the ship passed a safety inspection by the British Ministry of Transport 24 hours prior to sailing. The ship carried a Greek certificate of seaworthiness. Passengers participated in a boat drill on December 20.
The first three days of the cruise were uneventful. Passengers played shuffleboard and deck tennis by day and enjoyed banquets and dances by night. The cruise brochure promised "absolute freedom from worry and responsibility."
At around 11:00 p.m. on December 22, a steward noticed thick smoke seeping under the door of the ship's hairdressing salon. Upon opening the door, he found the room completely ablaze, and the fire rushed into the hallway toward the staterooms. He and another steward attempted to fight the flames with fire extinguishers, but the fire was spreading too fast to be contained. One of the men ran to notify the ship's purser, Antonio Bogetti.
Fire alarms sounded, but too softly to be heard by most passengers. "The fire alarm bell was so weak that it sounded like someone calling the waiter to ask for tea," one survivor later told reporters. An alarm went off on the bridge, pinpointing the fire’s location. The ship was 180 miles north of Madeira and 550 miles northwest of Casablanca, Morocco.
At the time the blaze was discovered, most of the passengers were in the ship's ballroom, called the Lakonia Room, dancing at the "Tropical Tramps' Ball." Passengers began to notice the smell of smoke, but most dismissed it as strong cigar smoke. Captain Zarbis, who had been notified of the fire, attempted to make an announcement on the ship's intercom system, but it had been disabled by the blaze. As smoke began to fill the ballroom at about 11:30, the band stopped playing and cruise director George Herbert ushered the frightened passengers to the boat deck. The upper deck was ablaze within 10 minutes.

More soon...