|
Port-Christmas
Port-Christmas is a natural and historical site on the Kerguelen Islands, located at the northern tip of the main island, on the east coast of the Loranchet Peninsula. It covers the bottom of ''Baie de l'Oiseau'', the first shelter for sailors approaching the archipelago from the north, and is easily identifiable by the presence at the entrance of a natural arch, now collapsed, known as the Kerguelen Arch. It was here, in 1774, that the explorer Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen-Trémarec, Yves Joseph de Kerguelen de Trémarec took possession of the island on behalf of Louis XV, King Louis XV of France. However, the name of the island, Christmas Harbour, was given by James Cook, whose ships anchored in the bay on Christmas Day back in 1776, during his Third voyage of James Cook, third circumnavigation. The name appears in some French translations or fictional works such as le Havre de Noël or Port-Noël. Considered to be a safe haven, in the 19th century it regularly welcomed the ships of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Baie De L'Oiseau
Baie de l'Oiseau is a natural harbour in the Loranchet Peninsula, in the North-Western part of the island Grande Terre, part of the Kerguelen Islands. It was the landing site of the expedition under Yves de Kerguelen in 1772, and later of the expedition under James Cook in 1776. The site of Port-Christmas is part of the bay. Geography The bay is located at the extreme North of the Kerguelen archipelago, and open towards the East, between Cap Français at the North, and the cape of Kerguelen Arch which closes it on the South, and distinguishes it from the neighbouring Baie de la Dauphine. It is 3.8 km long and 2.1 km wide at its largest. The 552-metre Mont Havergal dominates the site and shelters it from the wind. In the 19th century, it was used as a haven for whaling and seal hunting ships. Discovery Kerguelen could see the side during his first voyage in February 1772, but could not land, and anchored at the South, in Baie du Lion-Marin, where he claimed t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
French Ship Eure (1886)
''Eure'' was a ''Meurthe''-class aviso of the French Navy. She was launched in 1886. She is notable as having claimed territories of the Southern Indian Ocean for France, including the Kerguelen Islands in 1893. She continued to serve in the Pacific until 1901. Career Construction of ''Eure'' began in 1886 at the Ateliers et chantiers du Havre. She was part of a 1885 order comprising six other avisos of the same class (''Meurthe'', ''Drôme'', ''Aube'', ''Durance'', ''Rance'' and ''Manche''), designed as mixed sail and steam ships. ''Eure'' was launched on 5 April 1886, and commissioned on 14 August 1890 at Rochefort, where she was based. President Sadi Carnot sent ''Eure'' on a mission to claim the French Southern and Antarctic Lands for France. On 1 January 1893, ''Eure'' entered Baie de l'Oiseau, North of Kerguelen Islands. Commander Lieutard, the commanding officer, held a ceremony at Port-Christmas the next day, where a copper plaque inscribed « EURE - 1893 » was s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kerguelen Arch
The Kerguelen Arch is a former natural arch on the island of Grande Terre in the Kerguelen Islands of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands, an archipelago in the southern Indian Ocean. Although the arch collapsed sometime between 1908 and 1913, the remaining pillars can be found on the littoral zone of the cape between Baie de l'Oiseau and Baie de la Dauphine, north of the Loranchet Peninsula. It is one of the best-known structures of the area, and its twin pillars are depicted on numerous postage stamps of the TAAF. In literature Jean-Paul Kauffmann wrote a book about the search for the Kerguelen Arch and Port-Christmas after he returned from a three-year captivity during the Lebanon hostage crisis.''L'Arche des Kerguelen, Voyage aux îles de la Désolation'', Jean-Paul Kauffmann, éditions Flammarion, 1992, . The sixth volume of the comic ''Prométhée'', by Christophe Bec and Stefano Raffaele Stefano Raffaele (born March 15, 1970) is an Italian comics book artist. Biog ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Cook
James Cook (7 November 1728Old Style date: 27 October – 14 February 1779) was a British explorer, navigator, cartographer, and captain in the British Royal Navy, famous for his three voyages between 1768 and 1779 in the Pacific Ocean and to New Zealand and Australia in particular. He made detailed maps of Newfoundland prior to making three voyages to the Pacific, during which he achieved the first recorded European contact with the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands, and the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand. Cook joined the British merchant navy as a teenager and joined the Royal Navy in 1755. He saw action in the Seven Years' War and subsequently surveyed and mapped much of the entrance to the St. Lawrence River during the siege of Quebec, which brought him to the attention of the Admiralty and the Royal Society. This acclaim came at a crucial moment for the direction of British overseas exploration, and it led to his commission in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Drainage Tunnel
A drainage tunnel, called an emissary in ancient contexts, is a tunnel or channel created to drain water, often from a stagnant or variable-depth body of water. It typically leads to a lower stream or river, or to a location where a pumping station can be economically run. Drainage tunnels have frequently been constructed to drain mining districts or to serve drainage districts. Etymology Emissary comes from Latin ''emissarium'', from ''ex'' and ''mittere'' 'to send out'. Ancient world The most remarkable emissaries carry off the waters of lakes surrounded by hills. In ancient Greece, the waters of Lake Copais were drained into the Cephisus; they were partly natural and partly artificial. In 480 BC, Phaeax built drains at Agrigentum in Sicily: they were admired for their sheer size, although the workmanship was crude. The ancient Romans excelled in the construction of emissaries, as in all their hydraulic works, and remains are extant showing that lakes Trasimeno, Albano ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Basalt
Basalt (; ) is an aphanitic (fine-grained) extrusive igneous rock formed from the rapid cooling of low-viscosity lava rich in magnesium and iron (mafic lava) exposed at or very near the surface of a rocky planet or moon. More than 90% of all volcanic rock on Earth is basalt. Rapid-cooling, fine-grained basalt is chemically equivalent to slow-cooling, coarse-grained gabbro. The eruption of basalt lava is observed by geologists at about 20 volcanoes per year. Basalt is also an important rock type on other planetary bodies in the Solar System. For example, the bulk of the plains of Venus, which cover ~80% of the surface, are basaltic; the lunar maria are plains of flood-basaltic lava flows; and basalt is a common rock on the surface of Mars. Molten basalt lava has a low viscosity due to its relatively low silica content (between 45% and 52%), resulting in rapidly moving lava flows that can spread over great areas before cooling and solidifying. Flood basalts are thick sequence ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Erosion
Erosion is the action of surface processes (such as water flow or wind) that removes soil, rock, or dissolved material from one location on the Earth's crust, and then transports it to another location where it is deposited. Erosion is distinct from weathering which involves no movement. Removal of rock or soil as clastic sediment is referred to as ''physical'' or ''mechanical'' erosion; this contrasts with ''chemical'' erosion, where soil or rock material is removed from an area by dissolution. Eroded sediment or solutes may be transported just a few millimetres, or for thousands of kilometres. Agents of erosion include rainfall; bedrock wear in rivers; coastal erosion by the sea and waves; glacial plucking, abrasion, and scour; areal flooding; wind abrasion; groundwater processes; and mass movement processes in steep landscapes like landslides and debris flows. The rates at which such processes act control how fast a surface is eroded. Typically, physical ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nautical Mile
A nautical mile is a unit of length used in air, marine, and space navigation, and for the definition of territorial waters. Historically, it was defined as the meridian arc length corresponding to one minute ( of a degree) of latitude. Today the international nautical mile is defined as exactly . The derived unit of speed is the knot, one nautical mile per hour. Unit symbol There is no single internationally agreed symbol, with several symbols in use. * M is used as the abbreviation for the nautical mile by the International Hydrographic Organization. * NM is used by the International Civil Aviation Organization. * nmi is used by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the United States Government Publishing Office. * nm is a non-standard abbreviation used in many maritime applications and texts, including U.S. Government Coast Pilots and Sailing Directions. It conflicts with the SI symbol for nanometre. History The word mile is from the Latin word for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Port-aux-Français
Port-aux-Français is the main settlement of the Kerguelen Islands, and French Southern and Antarctic Lands, in the south Indian Ocean. Occupancy The settlement is located on the shore of the Gulf of Morbihan. About 45 residents spend the winter there; the group can reach over 120 people in summer. The place was chosen in 1949 by the head of mission Pierre Sicaud because of its sheltered location which was suitable for the construction of an air runway, though this was never built. From 1955 to 1957, a French slaughterhouse company, SIDAP, built an elephant seal processing plant equipped with Australian machinery. The factory opened its doors just after the wedding of the director, Marc Péchenart, and Martine Raulin on 16 December 1957. This was the first marriage ever celebrated on the islands. The factory closed in 1960, and the equipment was sent to Réunion in 2005. Port-aux-Français has a shallow seaport which allows the unloading of supply ships (usually the '' Mari ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Christmas Habour Map 1777
Christmas is an annual festival commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, observed primarily on December 25 as a religious and cultural celebration among billions of people around the world. A feast central to the Christian liturgical year, it is preceded by the season of Advent or the Nativity Fast and initiates the season of Christmastide, which historically in the West lasts twelve days and culminates on Twelfth Night. Christmas Day is a public holiday in many countries, is celebrated religiously by a majority of Christians, as well as culturally by many non-Christians, and forms an integral part of the holiday season organized around it. The traditional Christmas narrative recounted in the New Testament, known as the Nativity of Jesus, says that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, in accordance with messianic prophecies. When Joseph and Mary arrived in the city, the inn had no room and so they were offered a stable where the Christ Child was soon born, with angels proclaiming ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Francize
Francization (in American English, Canadian English, and Oxford English) or Francisation (in other British English), Frenchification, or Gallicization is the expansion of French language use—either through willful adoption or coercion—by more and more social groups who had not before used the language as a common means of expression in daily life. As a linguistic concept, known usually as gallicization, it is the practice of modifying foreign words, names, and phrases to make them easier to spell, pronounce, or understand in French. According to the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF), the figure of 220 million Francophones (French-language speakers) is (under-evaluated) because it only counts people who can write, understand and speak French fluently, thus excluding a majority of African French-speaking people, who do not know how to write. The French ''Conseil économique, social et environnemental'' estimate that were they included, the total number of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
.jpg "Click for more on -> Christmas Habour Map 1777")
