Word: ship
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...them after a disastrous shipwreck, by a cameraman who had no reasonable expectation of survival. Many of the images, made on glass plates, then spent several months sealed in lead boxes, stored in an ice chest, under freezing water, in the crushed wooden hull of a slowly sinking ship...
...ship was the Endurance, a small, tight, Norwegian-built three-master that was intended to take Sir Ernest Shackleton and a small crew of seamen and scientist, 27 men in all, to the southernmost shore of Antarctica's Weddell Sea. From that point Shackleton proposed to force a passage by dogsled across the continent. The trek was intended to surpass the achievement of Shackleton's great rival, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, who had reached the South Pole early in 1912 (narrowly preceded by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen) but had died with his four companions on the march back...
What did happen became legend. The Endurance was caught in drifting pack ice during the coldest season in memory and, after weeks of trying to follow open-water leads, was frozen in. And there the ship stayed. Shackleton and his men were prepared to winter over, and they did, still fairly confident, killing penguins to stretch out their stores of food. Hurley climbed the yardarms to take photos, and at one point--amazingly, given the equipment he had to work with--lighted the frost-coated ship with 20 synchronized flashes for a dramatic night shot...
...building the fountains of the Alhambra on a dry hillside near Granada 12 centuries ago. Nobody grasps this better than Wynn. To install performing dolphins in huge saltwater tanks in a hotel in the Nevada desert seems, on the face of it, about as rational as filling a cruise ship with sand and camels, but it has its own value as spectacle. And nowhere in Vegas is water as spectacular as at the Bellagio, which rises 36 stories, clean and shiny as a new toy freshly unpacked, from the shore of an eight-acre artificial lake symbolizing Lake Como, complete...
Author O'Brian, who has sailed on square-rigged ships, is a meticulous naval scholar and medical historian. The battles in which Aubrey distinguishes himself and Maturin repairs the wounded are real, borrowed from history (the two are passengers on H.M.S. Java when the U.S.S. Constitution, now a tourist attraction in Boston Harbor, defeats the British ship off Brazil in his sixth novel, The Fortune of War) and retold in language nearly understandable to a landsman ("A burton-tackle to the chesstree. Lead aft to a snatch block fast to the aftermost ringbolts and forward free. Look alive there...