Courier August/September Courier | Page 29

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 27