Friday, January 20, 2023 – Photo of the Day – Cruising The Pacific Ocean

James Grant-Peterkin | Featured Lecturer

An Introduction to Polynesia.

Discover the largest ocean on our planet and how it was populated.

James Grant-Peterkin is a Cambridge University graduate and the British Honorary Consul on Easter Island. He has been studying Polynesian culture, linguistics, and archaeology for over 20 years, most of those while living on Easter Island, and is the author of the guidebook “A Companion to Easter Island”. He has lectured extensively on Eastern Polynesia on cruise ships and at educational institutions worldwide.

James presented how early populations moved from the Middle East to Southeast Asia across the South Pacific over millennia.

Terry Bishop | Featured Lecturer

The Wolf of the Seas – Thomas Cochrane

The people;s popular naval rebel in the Pacific and beyond.

Terry Bishop was raised and educated in the west of England. For 35 years he was a psychiatric nurse, a child protection social worker, and a senior manager in Youth Justice and Child Care.

Terry has led groups of walkers/explorers across many of the battlefields of Europe and has explored historic sites in the USA, Africa, and beyond. He has trekked the foothills of the Himalayas, ventured across the Namib Desert, and driven relief supplies from England to Belarus post-Chornobyl.

A real-life Troubadour, he seeks to inform and entertain, incorporating humor, music, and song. Terry is also an accomplished folk musician and has produced two films on social issues.

He and his wife Julie share their time when not cruising between homes in Rochester, England, and Andalusia, Southern Spain.

Thomas Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald GCB (14 December 1775 – 31 October 1860), was a Scottish naval officer, peer, mercenary, and politician. Serving during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in the Royal Navy, his naval successes led Napoleon to nickname him le Loup des Mers (the Sea Wolf).

Cochrane was dismissed from the Royal Navy in 1814 after a controversial conviction for fraud on the London Stock Exchange. Traveling to South America, he helped organize and lead the revolutionary navies of Chile and Brazil during their respective wars of independence during the 1820s. While commanding the Chilean Navy, Cochrane contributed to Peruvian independence by participating in the Liberating Expedition of Peru. He was also hired to help the Greek Revolutionary Navy during the Greek War of Independence but ultimately had little impact.

In 1832, Cochrane was pardoned by the Crown and reinstated in the Royal Navy with the rank of Rear-Admiral of the Blue. After several more promotions, he died in 1860 with the rank of Admiral of the Red and the honorary title of Rear-Admiral of the United Kingdom. Cochrane’s life and exploits inspired the naval fiction of 19th and 20th-century novelists, particularly the fictional characters C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower and Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey.