American Maritime History

Wallis and Edward coming ashore.

Royals in the Collections

During a visit to Nassau in the Bahamas in 1944, Cora Mallory Munson spent time with former King Edward VIII, the Duke of Windsor and his wife, the former Wallis Simpson. Some mementos from the trip are in the manuscript…

Sabino Launch 2020

Get an inside look as we launched the Sabino for the 2020 season at Mystic Seaport Museum. Watch as Vice President of Watercraft, Chris Gasiorek takes us through the process of getting the boat back in the water.

rosenfeld museum at mystic seaport museum

DISCOVER ROSENFELD

The Rosenfeld Collection, acquired in 1984 by Mystic Seaport, is one of the largest archives of maritime photographs in the United States. This Collection contains nearly one million pieces from 1881 to 1992. Images are captured in a variety of formats,…

Telling time by lunar distances, the angle from the Sun to the Moon in the most common case, is an extension of one of the oldest methods of telling time: reading the phase of the Moon. Pre-modern cultures widely used the Moon for dates. In this image, we can tell the order of the images by date. The photos were taken each evening on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. They’re not in the correct order. Which one is Tuesday?

SHOOTING LUNARS AT MYSTIC SEAPORT MUSEUM

By Frank Reed Mystic Seaport Museum offers one of the world’s best classes in both modern and historical celestial navigation. Among the classes is a unique workshop, “Celestial Navigation in the Age of Sail,” which focuses on 19th-century navigation in…