The ISLANDER, a ferry in Los Angeles Harbor

The ISLANDER making its way across the Main Channel in Los Angeles Harbor, about 1957.

Did you know that 70 years ago, a round-trip ferry boat ride in Southern California was worth just 10 cents? This year, 2011, is the seventieth anniversary of the Los Angeles Municipal Ferry Service. Its ferries carried people and cars from the city of San Pedro to Terminal Island, a piece of land that connects together the maritime industries of Los Angeles and Long Beach along a shared waterfront. The ferry began its cross-channel trips in 1941 and made its last trip in 1963 when a brand-new route opened, The Vincent Thomas Bridge, which spanned the waters of the channel and relegated its ferry service to the historical background. Today, ferries are not well-known in this city, but you can still see and ride ferries in other cities in California, as well as in Oregon and Washington, and other states around the U.S.

"Channel Crossings: Work, School and Play"--a new exhibit on the history of the Los Angeles Municipal Ferry Service.

Los Angeles Maritime Museum Curator Emma Lang in front of panels in the new exhibit.

Emma recounts the social history behind the exhibit:

"When I was hired as the new curator I was given the task of developing an exhibit about our building—the former Municipal Ferry Terminal—and history of the ferries who crossed the Main Channel of LA Harbor prior to the building of the Vincent Thomas Bridge. I quickly discovered that other than the building itself we have very few objects in our collection from the ferries or the building’s early days. How could I make an exhibit that was not dominated by images with so few objects to choose from? I went back to my training as a social historian and focused in on the people. Who walked through our doors? Who took the ferry? Where were they going? What were they talking about? What did they carry as they went to work? From those questions I developed the main cases of the exhibit which tell the story of Terminal Island and people who lived and worked there. There are still many images in the exhibit showing the evolution of the ferry service and our building but there is also a yearbook open to a page full of students who took the ferry to school, a pay stub that was carried by a cannery worker home from work on the ferry and a longshoreman’s hook used on the docks on Terminal Island. These objects are as much the story of the ferry services as the life ring from the ferry ISLANDER and the building itself."

Visit the Los Angeles Maritime Museum to see more on the ISLANDER and our ferry service as it once was.

After Columbus, who seized the treasures?

The History of Pirates. / By Angus Konstam. Published by The Lyons Press, 2002 (c1999). In Association with the Mariners’ Museum, Virginia; Introduction by David Cordingly. 192 pages, color illustrations, index.

After Columbus’s ships besieged the islands of the Caribbean Ocean as early as 1492, North America became the new found conquest and source of gold. It was a time when three European nations fought each other on the seas, on rivers, in bays and inlets, all scrambling for riches they’d carried off from less savvy peoples, natives of foreign lands of North America, Southeast Asia and the Far East.

Piracy, the act of capturing and pillaging merchant ships, was one of the causes of success for the English and French as they vied for lands and treasure in the waters around the New World between 1500 and 1700AD.

Would you like to know more about how the underworld of this embezzlement ran? Konstam has gathered a collection of well-known accounts and illustrations of the pirates, timelines and maps. His book covers, albeit romantically, piratical history from ancient and medieval times to the Barbary Coast on the Mediterranean Sea: the first three chapters of this book are a backdrop to the torrid story of daring, violence and conspiracy that are hallmarks of the trade. And in the chapters from the Barbary Pirates and The Spanish Main forward to the Golden Age of Piracy (1690-1730), author Angus Konstam delivers mini biographical sketches of these most in-famous, terrifying and inscrutable bandits of the seas. See the last four chapters for calamitous misfortunes of maritime merchant traders in the Indian ocean and Asia as well as the effects of privateers on major sea battles.

From the Wikipedia article, “Pirates fight over treasure in a Howard Pyle illustration”.

One of the illustrators featured in The History of Pirates is Howard Pyle, considered to be an excellent illuminator of past times. In his illustration, “Which shall be Captain”, the sword fight determines the one who’ll claim the title “captain” and become leader of the band of marauders then known as pirates, buccaneers, or corsairs or freebooters.

Read more about pirates in books from the Los Angeles Maritime Museum Research Library. If you’re a Museum Member, you can borrow books for up to three weeks. If you’re looking for more information, click here for our online catalog.