Forty years ago, on July 5th, 100,000 people lined the banks of the River Avon to witness the return of the SS Great Britain, or what was left of her. After spending 37 years on the seabed in the Falklands, she was a rusting hulk. In 1843, she was Isambard Kingdom Brunel‘s masterpiece, the world’s first iron-hulled screw-driven passenger liner. She has now been restored to her former glory. As a museum she has been toured by over 5 million people. She may be a model or at least a source inspiration for what can be done in the restoration and preservation of historic ships.
SS Great Britain: From seabed to national treasure
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We have fallen way behind in our book reviews. Until we catch up, here is a review of Julian Stockwin’s new novel, 
After a season’s delay due to lack of access to icebreakers, Parks Canada is renewing its search for Franklin’s ship’s 
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We are five days late but nevertheless would like to wish 
Two species of Asian carp, the bighead and the silver, were imported in the US in the 1970s by catfish farmers to eat algae in ponds. In flood in the 1990s, Asian trout escaped in the Mississippi River basin have been multiplying wildly and heading north. A few days ago an 20 pound Asian bighead carp was caught by a fisherman in Illinois’s Lake Calumet, on the South Side of Chicago. That is north of the electric fences installed to stop the carp and only six miles from Lake Michigan.
In 1898, the