Bob:

We spent the entire day in the new Maritime Museum in the newly-rebuilt "Harbor City" area of Hamburg.

Monika:

Bob:

9 floors of exhibits! Monika was exhausted by the 4th floor, and I was exhausted by the 7th floor, so we didn't get to focus too well on floors 8 and 9. As usual in a good museum, I learned a lot of new things.

Monika:

Bob:

Some of these new nuggets of knowledge were quite surprising. Did you know, for example, that some elements of German fleet had essentially mutinied in 1918 at the end of WWI when the German High Command had thought to send them out to sea to fight the British fleet strictly for the sake of "honor"? Somehow I couldn't blame the German sailors who didn't want to throw away their lives for the perceived honor of their commanding officers. That did, however, contrast with the behavior of the Japanese sailors in WWII when the Japanese High Command sent the Yamato out to see for one last desperate mission against the U.S. Navy. That was essentially a suicide mission, but the Japanese sailors went willingly enough, as far as I have ever been able to learn, just as their brothers-in-arms in the Japanese Air Force quite willingly went on their final Kamikaze missions.

Speaking of the Yamato, that museum had the largest and most diverse collection of model ships that I have ever seen in one building. I would hazard a guess that it is the largest display of ship models in the world, and it will continue to expand as they have a craftsman still making ship models in the back area of one of the floors. (There we also saw a maybe 15-foot long model of the Queen Elizabeth II cruise ship made entirely from Lego building blocks!) The scale models of the Yamato, Bismarck, and many other German, English and American capital ships were large and exquisitely detailed. One curious fact was that in Nelson's time, the cost of the ship models made for the commanders often approached that of the cost of the ship itself, something I find hard to believe.

Speaking of Nelson, the curators not only presented a nice capsule history of his exploits in English, they also had beautiful dioramas depicting the crucial moments of Nelson's victories at Copenhagen, the Nile, and Trafalgar. Each diorama had perfect tiny replicas of each ship carefully positioned on a simulated blue sea, and the accompanying explanations described the action and the result. The text for those dioramas as well as for all the major displays was in both German and English, but the text for many of the minor displays was in German only, which slowed me down a bit but certainly didn't stop me from reading whatever really caught my attention.

One display that really caught my attention was a working example of a completely new concept in ship's rudders. Essentially the rudder was a combination of an airplane's stabilizer-elevator system added onto a full-flying or pivoting stabilizer. That is, the rudder was shaped like a wing with the pivot point being just forward of the center of pressure. At the trailing edge of that main wing was a second hinged flap or elevator-like surface that was geared to pivot either left or right as the main rudder wing was moved either left or right. The gearing of the elevator section was such that a small deflection of the main rudder either to the right or to the left caused a larger deflection of the elevator in the same direction. The net effect of the combined surfaces was to create a "C"-shaped airfoil (waterfoil?) either to the right or to the left with very little force on the tiller. On a ship I would expect that type of rudder to work as well as side thrusters at the stern, but without any of the expense or complexity of installing a separate thruster system. Pondering the system's effectiveness for small craft, I also hit on the idea of installing such a rudder on my upcoming airship as a way to increase its maneuverability, an idea that definitely bears more consideration.

Monika:

Bob:

Well, they finally chased us out of the museum when it closed at 6 p.m., but the gift store was still open so we quickly perused its contents to see if we could find any of replicas of the old maps that we had seen. We were particularly interested in finding a copy of the 1620 map of Bermuda originally drafted by Sir George Sommers, the man who founded the British settlement on Bermuda after originally being shipwrecked there, because I was just amazed at the precision, accuracy, and quality of the depiction the landmass and the shoreline of the island. I also coveted a similarly gorgeous and accurate map of Denmark in 1630 because it accurately showed the old shoreline of the islands in the North Sea on the West coast just offshore of Husum, which I knew from our visit there during Wanderung 2 had been eroded by several major storms since then. Unfortunately we didn't find either of those maps, but I did find a small, pocket-sized songbook containing German and English sea songs for only 10 Euro and I was very happy to purchase that.

On our way back to the U-bahn we took the long way around and walked around the construction sites for the new harbor city area. The cruise ship terminal was complete but didn't really look functional yet, and many of the other buildings around it were still just skeletons or big holes in the ground. The ultimate plan is to have at least 20,000 full-time residents and businesses that employ at least 38,000 people in this riverfront area just south of downtown Hamburg, which would be far more than were employed in the old warehouses and shipyards that previously occupied the space. Not all the old warehouses had been torn down, however. Some of the more historic and picturesque warehouses had been converted to shops or other small businesses, and curiously every store at street level for almost one entire block were stores selling Persian rugs. The only exception was the Spice Museum that we had visited on a previous trip to Germany (Wanderung 2).

Monika:

Bob:

By the time we circled back to the U-Bahn station at Baumwall, we were grateful to settle into some seats and rest during the ride back to Barmbek, where we caught a #7 bus back home for the evening. After a light supper, we shared a bottle of "new wine", a freshly-fermented, low-alcohol version of grape juice, essentially. Heinke lit the candles in the candelabra in the living room and Gustl put on a record of German wandering or travel songs. Heinke, Monika, and I knew some of them well enough to sing along, and fortunately Gustl was using his earphones so he didn't have to listen to us! And so to bed.

Monika: