Whitby

Whitby is a town near the north sea. This town has a lot of history.

 

Whitby Abbey

The Abbey was founded in 657 by St. Hilda on the site of what may have previously been a Roman coastal fort. St. Hilda's reputation attracted monks and nuns, including the poet Caedmon, and Whitby was soon famous throughout Europe. The synod of 664 was held there and the two branches of early English Christianity, the Celtic and Roman churches, met to discuss the date of Easter. The synod decided in favour of the Roman tradition.

Whitby Abbey was destroyed during a Viking invasion in 867. It was restored by one of William the Conqueror's knights in the late 1070s. By 1220, the Norman church was too small for the many piligrims who visited it and rebuilding began.

After its dissolution in 1538, Whitby Abbey passed to the Cholmley family, who built a big house out of materials stolen from the monastery.

In 1997, excavations revealed a major seventeenth-century garden in front of Cholmley House, which was now been restored. Two years later, a cemetery was uncovered on the south side of the site.

 

A new visitor centre was built within the walls of the old mansion in 1998. It houses archaeological material excavated at Whitby.

Things from the Anglo-Saxon and medieval abbeys are exhibited together with objects relating to the Cholmley family. Audio-visual displays recreate the medieval abbey and the seventeenth-century house, its interiors and gardens. Visitors can also learn about the people who lived in Whitby, from St. Hilda to Bram Stocker, author of Dracula.

The founder of the original abbey, St. Hilda, never left. Her ghost, covered in a shroud, frequently appears in one of the abbey's highest windows. Also, a great coach guided by a headless driver has been seen racing along the cliff near the Abbey.

Perhaps the most troubled ghost of all those said to inhabit the Abbey ruins is that of Constance de Beverley, a young nun who broke her sacred vows for the love of a brave but false knight named Marmion. As punishment, she was bricked up alive in a dungeon in Whitby Abbey. Her ghost has allegedly been seen on the winding stairway leading from the dungeon, beginning to be released.
 

 

James Cook

James Cook was born on October 27, 1728.

He was born in a village called Marton in North Yorkshire. Cook attended the village school; he went to work in a fishing village. The village was called Staithes. When he was 17, Cook went to Whitby to become a sailor.

In Whitby, he learnt a lot about navigation and mathematics. In 1755 Cook joined the Royal Navy. Cook`s first job was to make a map of the St. Lawrence River. Cook returned to England in 1762 and married Elisabeth Batts. They had six children.

In 1768 he was made captain of The Endeavour. There were a lot of scientists on the ship. their job was to help calculate the distance from the earth to the Sun. To do this they had to sail to Tahiti. The Endeavour returned to England on July 13, 1771.

 
He was given a new ship called "Resolution". Cook planned to circumnavigate the world and look for new countries. He set sail from Plymouth in July 1775. His second voyage had lasted three years and eighteen days. In the summer of 1776, Cook sailed again. Cook made his usual stops at New Zealand and Tahiti. From Tahiti he sailed north, discovering the Cook Islands. Later Cook sailed to Hawaii. Soon after, he was killed in an argument with one of the local chiefs.

 

Abraham Bram Stoker

Bram Stoker was born near Dublin on November 8, 1847, the third of seven children. An unidentified illness kept him virtually bedridden until age seven. Although he remained shy and bookish, in his adolescence Bram Stoker was anything but sickly. Perhaps to make amends for his earlier frailty, he was by this time developing into a fine athlete. At Trinity College, Dublin, he would conquer his shyness and be named University Athlete.

Young Bram had always dreamed of becoming a writer, but his father had safer plans. Yielding to the father's wishes, Bram followed him into a career as a civil servant in Dublin Castle. While climbing the civil service ladder, he wrote a dry tome entitled Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland. This book of rules, however, would not be published until 1879, by which time Stoker would be married, living in another country, and immersed in a new career.
During his eight-year stint in the civil service, Stoker continued to write stories, the first of which, a dream fantasy entitled "The Crystal Cup" (1872), was published by The London Society. A serialized four-part horror piece, entitled "The Chain of Destiny" followed three years later in the The Shamrock. He also found time to take unpaid positions as theatrical critic for Dublin's Evening Mail and, later, as editor of The Irish Echo.
In 1878, Henry Irving offered Stoker the job of actor-manager at London's Lyceum Theatre. Stoker promptly resigned the civil service, married Florence Balcombe and set off for his new life in London. Within a year, Florence had given birth to their only child, a son, Noel, but Stoker and his wife, though continuing to keep up appearances, are said to have become estranged.
Despite his heavy professional duties, Stoker somehow found the time to write fiction. His first book, Under the Sunset (1882), consisted of eight eerie fairy tales for children. His first full-length novel, The Snake's Pass, was published in 1890. That same year marks the beginning of Stoker's research for his masterwork, Dracula, which, would be published in 1897 to world-wide acclaim. Stoker wrote several short stories, novels and essays but his name is inextricably linked with Dracula.
Stoker continued to pursue a writing career until his death on April 20, 1912.

 

Whale bones

Between the years 1753 and 1833. 55 sailing ships from Whitby were engaged in whaling. Many Whitby men were killed, boats overturned and ships crushed.

Slender whale boats were lowered from the sailing ships, each manned by a crew of six. These crew men would kill the whales with hand thrown harpoons.

During this period over 25.000 seals 55 polar bears and 2.761 whales were brought back to Whitby.
When the time drew near for the return of a whaling ship to Whitby close watch was kept for the sign of the masthead appearing over the horizon. If a pair of whale jaw bones were triced up to the mast then the waiting wives of Whitby knew that the ship was full.

Little is now left to remind us of these prosperous days, other than this pair of whale jaw bones. To perpetuate the memory of these hard times, Thor of Norway presented this whale jaw bone arch to Whitby in 1963.