Monday, January 23, 2023 – Photo of the Day – Crusing the Pacific

Terry Bishop | Featured Lecturer

The Great Pacific Explorers – Francis Drake – ‘El Draco’

Hero or Devil? Explorer, navigator, warrior and pirate?

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.

Sir Francis Drake – to the Spanish, a wayward pirate; to the English, a hero. He could be considered a morally dubious hero in many ways, perhaps even a villain, but was still incredibly influential in Tudor times.

Sir Francis Drake (c. 1540 – 28 January 1596) was an English explorer and privateer best known for his circumnavigation of the world in a single expedition between 1577 and 1580. This was the first English circumnavigation, and the third circumnavigation overall. He is also known for participating in the early English slaving voyages of his cousin, Sir John Hawkins.

In 1572, he set sail on his first independent mission, privateering along the Spanish Main. Drake’s circumnavigation began on 15 December 1577. He crossed the Pacific Ocean, until then an area of exclusive Spanish interest, and laid claim to New Albion, plundering coastal towns and ships for treasure and supplies as he went. He arrived back in England on 26 September 1580.

James Grant-Peterkin | Featured Lecturer

Easter Island: Collapse?

Discover how this once mighty civilization comes to a crashing end.

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.

Rapa Nui is often seen as a cautionary example of societal collapse. In this story, made popular by geographer Jared Diamond’s bestselling book Collapse, the Indigenous people of the island, the Rapanui, so destroyed their environment that, by around 1600, their society fell into a downward spiral of warfare, cannibalism, and population decline. These catastrophes, the collapse narrative explains, resulted in the destruction of the social and political structures that were in place during precolonial times, though the people of Rapa Nui survive and persist on the island to the present day.