19th of October there will be new exhibition opening ” Famous sea voyages. The broadening horizons of Europeans”.
The new exhibition at the Seaplane Harbour transports visitors back to an era when the great powers of Europe were in a race to discover the last ‘blind spots’ on the planet.
With copious illustrations, maps, and items, the exhibition tells the story of the great expansion of the geographical view of the world that took place from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, spurred on by the rapid development of technology, cartography, and the natural sciences.
The expeditions continued even after the end of a sea voyage, because all of the explorers published their travel journals – the leading scientific works of the era. Explorers from what is now Estonia were key figures at the time. Adam Johann von Krusenstern’s atlas of the Pacific ocean, one of the best in all of Europe when it was published, was a remarkable contribution to the history of exploration. The exhibition takes the visitor to Krusenstern’s workshop, presenting his scientific accomplishments and highlighting the importance of the international network in the work of a cartographer.
However, the legacy of those voyages of discovery, which were worthwhile in terms of research, is in many ways problematic today, and the sensitive issues of colonialism and imperialism are also analysed in the exhibition.
This grand exhibition at the Seaplane Harbour includes historical artefacts on display from memory institutions in France, the Netherlands, England, Finland, Sweden, and Estonia. The National Maritime Museum of the UK has provided navigational instruments belonging to British explorers, the best of their time. The pride and joy of artefacts from the Musée National de la Marine in France is the Lionne (later renamed Astrolabe), a recently refurbished ship model from the Trianon collection commissioned by the French Emperor Napoleon. A highlight exhibit from the Amsterdam Maritime Museum will be a chronometer belonging to Krusenstern, which he also used on his circumnavigation of the globe.
Visitors of the exhibition can experience the more exciting parts of the life of a ship’s crew. A ship’s mast stands tall at the exhibition, along which you can climb up beneath the domes of the hangars of the Seaplane Harbour. The most daring can also put themselves to the test by free jumping from the top of the mast!
A trail of ship rats hidden in the corners of the exhibition introduces the work done on a ship and the everyday life of the time to younger visitors.
Let’s hoist our sails and venture out into the unknown!