Saturday, March 17, 2018

Today I Learned about St. Patrick's Day

Posted by Dani


Hello everyone! Today is St. Patrick's Day so we going to learn about what St. Patrick did and why has a holiday! St. Patrick was born in England and brought to Ireland by slavers. He was a slave in Ireland for six years before he was able to return to his family. When he was leaving Ireland, he knew one day he would go back there.

St. Patrick was ordained a priest after spending a long time in monasteries. Pope Celestine himself told St. Patrick to go to Ireland and spread the Catholic church to the pagan Irish. When Patrick got there he ran into a good deal of trouble trying to convert the Irish.

The druids especially didn't want to give up their religion and Patrick and his church was a frightening. The Irish king never would convert to the church, although most of his family members did. Slowy but surely, the old pagan ways began to fade away.

Patrick would go all over Ireland removing idols and temples and built cathedrals and churches. He built the first cathedral in Armagh in 444 AD. He baptized, confirmed and ordained new priests to help him spread the religion. He built catholic schools and monasteries.

Patrick got all this done in less than thirty years, at which point all of Ireland was converted. He wrote a book called Confessions, which told his story. He died March 17th, 461 of natural causes. A man called Luke Wadding who was a scholar in Waterford living in 1588, is responsible for St. Patrick's death day to be a holy feast day.

Now St. Patrick's Day is a national holiday for Northern and Southen Ireland. People use the day to celebrate being Irish and have traditional dishes such as Irish brown bread, corned beef and cabbage, beef and guiness pie, Irish cream chocolate mousse cake, Irish coffee, Irish potato champs, Irish stew or Irish potato soup.

Aside from the good food, some more religious people may make a pilgrimage to St. Patrick's Purgatroy, a place for penance and spiritual healing. This is found on Station Island in the County Donegal. This place is where St. Patrick had a vision that anyone who would come to thata place would receive pardon for their sins.

 Sources: 
St. Patrick's Day 
https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/common/st-patrick-day

 Who is St. Patrick and Why do We Celebrate St. Patrick's Day?http://www.dummies.com/religion/christianity/catholicism/who-is-st-patrick-and-why-do-we-celebrate-st-patricks-day/


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Thursday, March 8, 2018

Today I Learned about Mary Patten, First Commander of a Commercial Ship

Posted by Dani


Happy International Woman's Day! I have finally remembered to continue my blog. Today we're learning about an exceedingly impressive woman! She was the first woman to sail a commercial ship and at the time she was nineteen and pregnant!

Her name was Mary Patten and she grew up in a family of mariners which she would later marry into when she married Joshua Patten, captain of the ship Neptune's Car. They had one sucessful and uneventful journey with the ship. Because in 1856, woman were considered bad luck on a ship but Joshua didn't want to leave behind his young wife, he got permission to let her aboard as well.

The ship and five others had entered in a contest of between some shipping companies on which of their ships would arrive in San Fransico after making the same route to get there. And if they made a speedier delivery, they got a pay bonus as well. So when they began the immediate incompetence of the first mate William Keeler.

Keeler would sleep on his shifts, refuse to put out the sails or something stupid like setting course through coral reef beds. He wasn't a useful guy. So, Joshua had the man shackled and isolated to his cabin.

In the absence of a first mate, Joshua was worked to the bone, his second mate couldn't navigate and his third mate was illiterate, so with no one to help him, he had to do both shifts, always awake.



He began to rely on his wife Mary to help him to navigate the ship. Due to his stress, lakc of sleep and undiagnosed turberculosis on top of the pneumonia he just got, he collapsed and was taken below deck. Mary was now doing everything. She read medical books, trying to learn how to help her ailing husband.

She also took control of steering the ship, with help from the second mate to dock the ship to stay out of a very dangerous storm. Mary's husband was not doing well. The fever had reached his brain and he was partially blinded and deaf as well as incoherent.

On top of all the trials Mary was dealing with, first mate Keeler tried to get the crew to mutiny, but luckily the crew was smart enough not to go for his silly idea. Joshua continued doing poorly and Mary continued to show her steel. She steered the ship though dangerous waters with glaciers falling apart, sheer piles of ice and incredibly bad weather.

Joshua's fever broke and in a poor choice of judgenment despite apparently being lucid at the time, gave controls of the ship to the sneaky, and useless first mate. During the time Keeler was in charge, he wouldn't let Mary above deck, thinking she wouldn't know now that they were going off course. He had wildly underestimated Mary's abilities. She had made herself a compass from parts in the Captain's room and she told the captain about this, which led to Keeler being back in chains in his cabin and Mary back in charge where she belonged.

At this point, Joshua relapsed and was completely deaf and blind for twenty-five days. Mary was now six months pregnant and she took complete control of the ship. They made it to their destination on November 15, 1856, a full 137 days after starting. Mary had captained for 56 of these days, in the terrible weather and without changing clothes for two months.

And guess what? Their ship still beat all but one of the four boats they were in the friendly bet against to the port. With their arrival, Mary became quite the local celebrity, with many newspapers writing about her excapades. The ship's owners Foster & Nickerson refused to pay the captain's wages.

All they received for their troubles and Mary's efforts to save cargo worth $350,000 was an insurance company giving Mary $1,000. But because she was a nice woman, she actually wrote them to thank them.

There would be no happy ending for Joshua and Mary. Mary gave birth to her son Joshua Jr and was forced to put her husband in an asylum because he was doing so poorly. He would die there. And Mary herself would join him soon after. She had also contracted turberculosis and she died at the young age of twenty-three.

Mary was buried next to her husband with a small bit of her story on her headstone. Though her name lives on through the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in King's Point, NY when they opened a hospital. It was called Patten Hospital in memory of a woman whose strength and courage they wanted to continue to share.

Sources: 
Mary Patten: The First Woman to Command a Ship http://www.rejectedprincesses.com/princesses/mary-patten
The Story of Mary Patten https://www.nshof.org/sailing-an-american-experience/women-in-sailing/80-stories/women-in-sailing/359-the-story-of-mary-patten.html
Mary Patten, 19 and Preganant, Takes Command of a Clipper Ship in 1856

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