Category Archives: History

Lightship “Frying Pan

Frying Pan Lightship and Light Tower

Frying Pan Lightship and Light Tower (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

J. Roald Smeets – Lightship “Frying Pan” is listed on both the New York State and Federal Registers of Historic Places, as it is one of 13 lightships remaining from more than 100 built.  The US Coast Guard used lightships as floating lighthouses to guard other ships from running aground on shoals, or submerged rocks, that were too far from land to be served by a lighthouse on shore.  Many were also used to mark the entrances to harbors.  New Yorkers may be familiar with the Lightship Ambrose, which marked the entrance of New York Harbor, and it is currently docked at the South Street Seaport Museum.

Built in 1929, Lightship #115 “Frying Pan” guarded its namesake, Frying Pan Shoals, 30 miles off of Cape Fear, NC, from 1930 to 1965.  She is 133 feet and 3 inches in length with a 30 foot beam, and she is 632 gross tons.  The unique shape of lightship hulls were designed to withstand the numerous storms and even hurricanes that would send other ships to safer harbors.  15 men lived aboard ship to keep the light atop the mast burning and the foghorn sounding regardless of the weather, season, or time of day.  The crew were stationed aboard ship for three months, followed by two months of shore leave.  It was said to be a job “filled with months of boredom followed by minutes of pure fear”.

Docked at Southport Maritime Museum in Southport, NCLightship Frying Pan has led a remarkable life.  After being abandoned for 10  years while docked at an old oyster cannery in the Chesapeake Bay, we believe she sank due to a broken pipe.  She was underwater for three years before being raised by salvors.  Instead of going to the scrapyard, the ship was sold to its present owners.  After tons of silt and shells were removed from the hull, the ship was outfitted with a new engine and, in 1989, was sailed to New York City.  Frying Pan is now docked at Pier 66 Maritime which is located on Pier 66a in the Hudson River Park at West 26th Street and 12th Ave. in Manhattan, NY.  While the outside of the ship has been restored to her original appearance, the inside retains the barnacle-encrusted, sunken-ship motif that acknowledges her storied past.

Related articles

Pan-African Parliament

Map of African, with African Union member stat...

Map of African, with African Union member states in dark green and states with suspended membership in light green (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Pan-African Parliament was established in March 2004, by Article 17 ofThe Constitutive Act of the African Union, as one of the nine Organs providedfor in the Treaty Establishing the African Economic Community signed in Abuja,Nigeria, in 1991.

The establishment of the Pan-African Parliament is informed by a vision toprovide a common platform for African peoples and their grass-rootsorganizations to be more involved in discussions and decision-making on theproblems and challenges facing the continent.

The seat of the Parliament is in Midrand, South Africa.

The Pan-African Parliamentarians represent all the peoples of Africa. Theultimate aim of the Pan-African Parliament is to evolve into an institutionwith full legislative powers, whose members are elected by universal adultsuffrage.

Related articles

J. Roald Smeets Panegyric

Thucydides. Cast

Thucydides. Cast (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

J. Roald Smeets – A panegyric is a formal public speech, or (in later use) written verse, delivered in high praise of a person or thing, a generally highly studied and discriminating eulogy, not expected to be critical. It is derived from the Greek πανηγυρικός meaning “a speech fit for a general assembly” (panegyris). In Athens such speeches were delivered at national festivals or games, with the object of rousing the citizens to emulate the glorious deeds of their ancestors.

The most famous are the Olympiacus of Gorgias, the Olympiacus of Lysias, and the Panegyricus and Panathenaicus (neither of them, however, actually delivered) of Isocrates. Funeral orations, such as the famous speech put into the mouth of Pericles by Thucydides, also partook of the nature of panegyrics.

The Romans generally confined the panegyric to the living, and reserved the funeral oration exclusively for the dead. The most celebrated example of a Latin panegyric, however, is that delivered by the younger Pliny (AD 100) in the senate on the occasion of his assumption of the consulship, which contained a eulogy of Trajan considered fulsome by some scholars.

Towards the end of the 3rd and during the 4th century, as a result of the orientalizing of the Imperial court by Diocletian, it became customary to celebrate as a matter of course the superhuman virtues and achievements of the reigning emperor, in a formally staged literary event. In 336, Eusebius of Caesarea gave a panegyric of Constantine the Great on the 30th year of his reign, in which he broke from tradition by celebrating the piety of the emperor, rather than his secular achievements. A well-delivered, elegant and witty panegyric became a vehicle for an educated but inexperienced young man to attract desirable attention in a competitive sphere. The poet Claudian came to Rome from Alexandria before about 395 and made his first reputation with a panegyric; he became court poet to Stilicho.

Cassiodorus the courtier and magister of Theodoric the Great and his successors, left a book of panegyrics, his Laudes. As his biographer O’Donnell has said of the genre “It was to be expected that the praise contained in the speech would be excessive; the intellectual point of the exercise (and very likely an important criterion in judging it) was to see how excessive the praise could be made while remaining within boundaries of decorum and restraint, how much high praise could be made to seem the grudging testimony of simple honesty.”

Related articles

Pan God

NAMA Pan

NAMA Pan (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Pan (Greek: Πᾶν, Pān), in Greek religion and mythology, is the god of the wild, shepherds and flocks, nature, of mountain wilds, hunting and rustic music, as well as the companion of the nymphs.[1] His name originates within the Ancient Greek language, from the word paein (πάειν), meaning “to pasture.” He has the hindquarters, legs, and horns of a goat, in the same manner as a faun or satyr. With his homeland in rustic Arcadia, he is recognized as the god of fields, groves, and wooded glens; because of this, Pan is connected to fertility and the season of spring. The ancient Greeks also considered Pan to be the god of theatrical criticism.

In Roman religion and myth, Pan’s counterpart was Faunus, a nature god who was the father of Bona Dea, sometimes identified as Fauna. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Pan became a significant figure in the Romantic movement of western Europe, and also in the 20th-century Neopagan movement.

In his earliest appearance in literature, Pindar’s Pythian Ode iii. 78, Pan is associated with a mother goddess, perhaps Rhea or Cybele; Pindar refers to virgins worshipping Cybele and Pan near the poet’s house in Boeotia.

The parentage of Pan is unclear; in some myths he is the son of Zeus, though generally he is the son of Hermes or Dionysus, with whom his mother is said to be a nymph, sometimes Dryope or, in Nonnus, Dionysiaca (14.92), Penelope of Mantineia in Arcadia. This nymph at some point in the tradition became conflated with Penelope, the wife of Odysseus. Pausanias 8.12.5 records the story that Penelope had in fact been unfaithful to her husband, who banished her to Mantineia upon his return. Other sources (Duris of Samos; the Vergilian commentator Servius) report that Penelope slept with all 108 suitors in Odysseus’ absence, and gave birth to Pan as a result. This myth reflects the folk etymology that equates Pan’s name (Πάν) with the Greek word for “all” (πᾶν). It is more likely to be cognate with paein, “to pasture”, and to share an origin with the modern English word “pasture”. In 1924, Hermann Collitz suggested that Greek Pan and Indic Pushan might have a common Indo-European origin. In the Mystery cults of the highly syncretic Hellenistic era Pan is made cognate with Phanes/Protogonos, Zeus, Dionysus and Eros.

The Roman Faunus, a god of Indo-European origin, was equated with Pan. However, accounts of Pan’s genealogy are so varied that it must lie buried deep in mythic time. Like other nature spirits, Pan appears to be older than the Olympians, if it is true that he gave Artemis her hunting dogs and taught the secret of prophecy to Apollo. Pan might be multiplied as the Panes (Burkert 1985, III.3.2; Ruck and Staples 1994 p 132) or the Paniskoi. Kerenyi (1951 p 174) notes from scholia that Aeschylus in Rhesus distinguished between two Pans, one the son of Zeus and twin of Arcas, and one a son of Cronus. “In the retinue of Dionysos, or in depictions of wild landscapes, there appeared not only a great Pan, but also little Pans, Paniskoi, who played the same part as the Satyrs”.  J. Roald Smeets

Related articles