Very shippy
of the River Clyde is the tall ship Glenlee,
free to enter. Other maritime museums
in Scotland are Trinity House Maritime
Museum, The Scottish Maritime Museum
and Maggie Law Maritime Museum.
Two non-nautical notes: Opening in
2018, The Victoria and Albert Museum of
Design Dundee will be the first museum
The tall ship Glenlee at Glasgow’s
Riverside Museum
While not actual ships, a boatload of
member museums are ship-related in
obvious ways.
“Scotland is home to hundreds of
brilliant museums, from tiny heritage
museums set in traditional crofting
homes to facilities with enough room to
house a Concorde airplane,” says Maggie
Anderson of VisitScotland. “And several
have a special connection to ships or to
maritime memorabilia.”
One of those is Riverside Museum,
Glasgow’s museum of transportation
that was named European Museum of
the Year in 2013. Berthed outside the
striking building that’s set on the banks
in Scotland dedicated to design and the
only V&A museum in the world located
outside of London. And because of inter-
est in the Jacobite story spurred by the
“Outlander” TV series, the Prestonpans
Battlefield Museum has opened so that
visitors can learn about Bonnie Prince
Charles’ first victory, in 1745.
Another museum that presents a
nation’s past is the Canadian Museum of
History, which includes a strong current
of ships, says Stephanie Fortin, the attrac-
tion’s tourism and marketing officer.
“The museum tells 15,000 years of
history on this land, and exploration by
rivers and using boats is intertwined
throughout,” she says. “The First Peoples
used boats for transportation, fish-
ing and defense. Later, Vikings and
Europeans arrived by ship, and when
the Europeans settled, they travelled by
canoes and boats to further explore and
to trade with First Nations people.”
On July 1, the museum, in Gatineau,
Québec, opened the Canadian History
Hall, which explores the country’s his-
tory through the perspectives of the
diverse people who laid the foundation
and who led contemporary struggles
that enabled Canada to emerge as a
prosperous and independent country.
Groups are learning about a narrower
but enormously significant time by vis-
iting the National World War II Museum
in New Orleans. Because the war was
waged on all the Earth’s oceans, there
are seafaring stories depicted through-
out the museum, including exhibits and
NTAonline.com
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