Where in the world ?

[bluemarble]

21 hours ago, Palmeat said:

My thanks to @bluemarble for sensitively covering my embarrassing Patmos oversight and no thanks to @Solent Ɍichard for his clues misdirecting me towards Thiruvananthapuram😀. On the back of such success, here's a 'cruise by' photo of a location not on the list but which I can prove was definitely on a Cunard itinerary.

 

I think this one is the volcanic island of Surtsey, Iceland.

 

If I am correct in that identification, this island is younger than I am by a few years. I remember it making quite an impression on me as a young boy seeing stories about its formation in the news.

[Palmeat]

2 hours ago, bluemarble said:

 

I think this one is the volcanic island of Surtsey, Iceland.

 

If I am correct in that identification, this island is younger than I am by a few years. I remember it making quite an impression on me as a young boy seeing stories about its formation in the news.

Correct @bluemarble ⭐. Well done John, it is indeed Surtsey, taken from a P&O ship in 2010. I was confident it was a Cunard port having viewed this 'Green Goddess' link (hope it works!!) :

https://www.caronia2.info/surtsey.php

[Palmeat]

3 hours ago, sfred said:

Wow! Excellent and interesting stats @sfred. Thank you for compiling. @bluemarble's challenge will be a test - if nothing else, proving how little we have left of the British Empire😀🇬🇧!!

I'm not suggesting you do this (relax!), but it would be fascinating to see how itineraries have changed over the years. What might a similar analysis have looked like say 50/60 years ago? Has Cunard become more or less adventurous? My suspicion is that the majority of the ports we have identified would already have been visited by Cunard ships 50+ years ago with subsequent 'new' ports as the minority? Peter

Edited June 27, 2021 by Palmeat

[sfred]

3 hours ago, bluemarble said:

 

This could get tricky to compile the stats for, but if you're up for a challenge, how about a pie chart counting the number of ports that were ever part of the British Empire at any time in the past versus those that never were? That might be an interesting comparison for a line with the British heritage of Cunard.

 

That wasn't as hard as I initially thought.  I used a Wikipedia list of the countries of the British Empire

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Empire#/media/File:The_British_Empire.png

 

and took a few liberties with modern boundaries.  For example, I've considered all the US part of the Empire, even though technically only the original 13 colonies plus (I think) WA and OR would have been part of the Empire, the remainder of the US having come from France, Spain, Russia (AK) and others (HI).  Similarly I've included all of Canada including Quebec.

 

From there it was simple to create a formula to check whether the Country field of our Cunard port list was included in the list of Empire countries (TRUE) or not (FALSE).  The results are:

 

[sfred]

57 minutes ago, Palmeat said:

Wow! Excellent and interesting stats @sfred. Thank you for compiling. @bluemarble's challenge will be a test - if nothing else, proving how little we have left of the British Empire😀🇬🇧!!

I'm not suggesting you do this (relax!), but it would be fascinating to see how itineraries have changed over the years. What might a similar analysis have looked like say 50/60 years ago? Has Cunard become more or less adventurous? My suspicion is that the majority of the ports we have identified would already have been visited by Cunard ships 50+ years ago with subsequent 'new' ports as the minority? Peter

 

Thanks @Palmeat.  That question - has Cunard become more or less adventurous - is really interesting.  I can guess a few of the factors involved in itineraries today versus 50/60 years or 100 years ago. 

• Shift of ocean journeys from transportation to tourism
• Transition from many, and smaller, Cunard ships to only three much bigger ships
• Some parts of the world becoming more dangerous (Middle East, Turkey, parts of Africa)
• Some parts becoming less dangerous (eastern Europe, parts of South America)
• Increased interest in international cruises from people in countries like China, Japan

Whether the balance is towards more, or less, adventurous I can't say for sure.  I think you are probably correct that new ports are in the minority.  I'll guess that one of the biggest factors is the evolution to only three big ships that go to a lot of the same places each year.

 

Of course, for the next couple of years in a Covid virus world, I imagine Cunard will be much much less adventurous, going only where they are allowed to go, and where customers are comfortable going to.

 

Edited June 27, 2021 by sfred

[bluemarble]

6 hours ago, Palmeat said:

Correct @bluemarble ⭐. Well done John, it is indeed Surtsey, taken from a P&O ship in 2010. I was confident it was a Cunard port having viewed this 'Green Goddess' link (hope it works!!) :

https://www.caronia2.info/surtsey.php

 

Ah yes, that "RMS Caronia Timeline" site is where I was also able to confirm Surtsey as a cruise-by call for a Cunard ship. That's a very interesting site I had forgotten about. It came up during a discussion on another thread here this past December which I participated in after we discovered these message boards were censoring the term "caronia2". Thankfully after working with the site admins, that issue was resolved. But I digress.

 

Having rediscovered that "RMS Caronia Timeline" site yesterday, I took a look at its list of ports. Here is what I've came up with for ports where RMS Caronia called that haven't yet made our Cunard ports lists.

 

Balestrand/Balholm, Norway
Bangor, Northern Ireland
Ciudad Trujillo, Santo Domingo
Diego Suarez/Antsiranana, Madagascar
East London, South Africa
Glengarriff, Ireland
Lyngseidet, Norway
Mas a Tierra/Robinson Crusoe Island, Chile
Norheimsund, Norway
Port Sudan, Sudan
Santa Marta, Colombia
Sopot, Poland
Talcahuano, Chile
Toamasina/Tamatave, Madagascar
Vava'u, Tonga
Workington, England
Ytterdal/Eidsdal, Norway

 

I'll add them to the next version of our unseen ports list. These are mostly pretty obscure ports but perhaps someone here has photos of some of them.

 

As a bonus, Tristan da Cunha shows up as a full-fledged port of call for RMS Caronia, so I'll remove the "(sail-by)" designation for that port in our unseen ports list.

Edited June 27, 2021 by bluemarble

[bluemarble]

Here's an image of a location on our unseen ports list. This is another scan of a non-digital photo I found in my archives that was not taken during a cruise.

 

[Palmeat]

5 hours ago, bluemarble said:

 

Ah yes, that "RMS Caronia Timeline" site is where I was also able to confirm Surtsey as a cruise-by call for a Cunard ship. That's a very interesting site I had forgotten about. It came up during a discussion on another thread here this past December which I participated in after we discovered these message boards were censoring the term "caronia2". Thankfully after working with the site admins, that issue was resolved. But I digress.

 

Having rediscovered that "RMS Caronia Timeline" site yesterday, I took a look at its list of ports. Here is what I've came up with for ports where RMS Caronia called that haven't yet made our Cunard ports lists.

 

Balestrand/Balholm, Norway
Bangor, Northern Ireland
Ciudad Trujillo, Santo Domingo
Diego Suarez/Antsiranana, Madagascar
East London, South Africa
Glengarriff, Ireland
Lyngseidet, Norway
Mas a Tierra/Robinson Crusoe Island, Chile
Norheimsund, Norway
Port Sudan, Sudan
Santa Marta, Colombia
Sopot, Poland
Talcahuano, Chile
Toamasina/Tamatave, Madagascar
Vava'u, Tonga
Workington, England
Ytterdal/Eidsdal, Norway

 

I'll add them to the next version of our unseen ports list. These are mostly pretty obscure ports but perhaps someone here has photos of some of them.

 

As a bonus, Tristan da Cunha shows up as a full-fledged port of call for RMS Caronia, so I'll remove the "(sail-by)" designation for that port in our unseen ports list.

Thanks @bluemarble. As you say, some more obscure ports here which if anything add fuel to our earlier discussion regarding how more or less adventurous Cunard has been in its choice of itineraries in recent years (and thank you @sfred for your comments on this subject which make a lot of sense).  That said, I have visited one these 'new' ports. Couple of photos follow.

[Palmeat]

3 hours ago, bluemarble said:

Here's an image of a location on our unseen ports list. This is another scan of a non-digital photo I found in my archives that was not taken during a cruise.

 

My guessing record has been generally poor. That said, this is definitely not Thiruvananthapuram and most certainly northern hemisphere and a tad closer to home for me - and I've found a photo which matches! So I'll go for Galway, Ireland.

[bluemarble]

4 minutes ago, Palmeat said:

My guessing record has been generally poor. That said, this is definitely not Thiruvananthapuram and most certainly northern hemisphere and a tad closer to home for me - and I've found a photo which matches! So I'll go for Galway, Ireland.

 

Yes indeed, that's Galway. Well done. While researching the precise location of that photo prior to posting it, I learned that distinctive row of buildings in the background is found along what's called "The Long Walk" in Galway.

[sfred]

Thinking about it some more overnight, and recalling @bluemarble's original challenge to count the number of ports that were ever part of the British Empire at any time in the past, I decided my lazy shortcut of classifying all US ports as Empire was probably too lazy.  It is hard to argue that Kodiak or Honolulu were ever part of the Empire.

 

So, before I have to get stuck into boring real work today, I added a "state" field to the dataset, and reclassified ports in the US states of FL, LA, TX, CA, AK, and HI to non-Empire.  I kept WA and OR as Empire because they were once part of the British northwest before being ceded to the US in 1846.

 

This reduces the number of Empire ports from 38% of total to 32%.  The new pie chart is:

 

 

By the way, I also added Galway and Surtsey to the dataset, as Empire and Non-Empire, respectively.

[bluemarble]

29 minutes ago, sfred said:

Thinking about it some more overnight, and recalling @bluemarble's original challenge to count the number of ports that were ever part of the British Empire at any time in the past, I decided my lazy shortcut of classifying all US ports as Empire was probably too lazy.  It is hard to argue that Kodiak or Honolulu were ever part of the Empire.

 

So, before I have to get stuck into boring real work today, I added a "state" field to the dataset, and reclassified ports in the US states of FL, LA, TX, CA, AK, and HI to non-Empire.  I kept WA and OR as Empire because they were once part of the British northwest before being ceded to the US in 1846.

 

This reduces the number of Empire ports from 38% of total to 32%.  The new pie chart is:

 

 

By the way, I also added Galway and Surtsey to the dataset, as Empire and Non-Empire, respectively.

 

@sfred, I really like what you've done to graph various aspects of our Cunard port data. Very impressive! And your refinements to the algorithm for the British Empire chart I requested are a worthwhile improvement.

 

I'm not sure you have the complete list of all the Cunard ports we've identified so far though. By my count, the latest file I posted (named "Where in the World 2021-06-25") has 466 port names in it. I'm also seeing "0 downloads" for that file indicating no one has downloaded it yet. It looks to me like the counts from your charts are a bit short of that total.

 

I figured you had been working with a previous version of the data for your first version of the charts and of course that's perfectly fine. But when you just mentioned you had added Galway and Surtsey to the British Empire chart, I figured you were trying to keep the totals as up-to-date as possible.

 

Keep up the good work!

[sfred]

14 minutes ago, bluemarble said:

 

@sfred, I really like what you've done to graph various aspects of our Cunard port data. Very impressive! And your refinements to the algorithm for the British Empire chart I requested are a worthwhile improvement.

 

I'm not sure you have the complete list of all the Cunard ports we've identified so far though. By my count, the latest file I posted (named "Where in the World 2021-06-25") has 466 port names in it. I'm also seeing "0 downloads" for that file indicating no one has downloaded it yet. It looks to me like the counts from your charts are a bit short of that total.

 

I figured you had been working with a previous version of the data for your first version of the charts and of course that's perfectly fine. But when you just mentioned you had added Galway and Surtsey to the British Empire chart, I figured you were trying to keep the totals as up-to-date as possible.

 

Keep up the good work!

 

 Thanks!  I've been updating a local copy on my PC of the unseen and seen ports list, using one of your earlier postings from several months ago, and I thought I had captured all/most of the changes when pictures were submitted and identified.  My "seen" list has 456 ports, so I must have missed some updates.  I'll do a cross-check when I next have a chance. 

[bluemarble]

1 hour ago, sfred said:

Thanks!  I've been updating a local copy on my PC of the unseen and seen ports list, using one of your earlier postings from several months ago, and I thought I had captured all/most of the changes when pictures were submitted and identified.  My "seen" list has 456 ports, so I must have missed some updates.  I'll do a cross-check when I next have a chance. 

 

Sounds good. For comparison, the total number of "seen" ports I have at the moment (not counting Palmeat's latest photo which is yet to be identified) is 470. That's 466 ports from my "Where in the World 2021-06-25.txt" file plus the 4 ports identified since then (Beirut, Nordkapp, Surtsey and Galway).

Edited June 28, 2021 by bluemarble

[sfred]

I've fixed my text analytics dataset to align with the 470 "seen" ports in @bluemarble's list.  Some of the differences were ports I neglected to update, and others were the asterix "unconfirmed" ports that were in @bluemarble's list but not mine.  Everything aligns now.  Updated bar and pie charts are in the next post.

[sfred]

 

 

 

 

[Essiesmom]

I tried to download the not seen ports list, and McAfee would not let me.  I might try on my laptop later, or my iPad.  EM

[bluemarble]

7 minutes ago, Essiesmom said:

I tried to download the not seen ports list, and McAfee would not let me.  I might try on my laptop later, or my iPad.  EM

 

Sounds like McAfee is being a bit overly protective for you since that list is a standard plain-vanilla text file. But then I can't blame anyone/any software for being cautious about downloading attachments in general. I just tested the download of that attachment myself to make sure it isn't some new issue with this website. I happen to use Norton though rather than McAfee.

[bluemarble]

1 hour ago, sfred said:

I've fixed my text analytics dataset to align with the 470 "seen" ports in @bluemarble's list.  Some of the differences were ports I neglected to update, and others were the asterix "unconfirmed" ports that were in @bluemarble's list but not mine.  Everything aligns now.  Updated bar and pie charts are in the next post.

 

Oh yeah, that was perfectly valid for you to remove the unconfirmed (asterisk) ports from an analysis of Cunard ports. But either way, I think we're all good now. I appreciate your efforts to create those charts.

[sfred]

11 hours ago, Palmeat said:

Thanks @bluemarble. As you say, some more obscure ports here which if anything add fuel to our earlier discussion regarding how more or less adventurous Cunard has been in its choice of itineraries in recent years (and thank you @sfred for your comments on this subject which make a lot of sense).  That said, I have visited one these 'new' ports. Couple of photos follow.

 

This is East London, South Africa.  The building is the Customs House by the shipping pier on the Buffalo River. 

[Palmeat]

29 minutes ago, sfred said:

 

This is East London, South Africa.  The building is the Customs House by the shipping pier on the Buffalo River. 

Well done @sfred ⭐ - it is indeed East London, SA. Another one bites the dust!

[sfred]

I think we're out of port pictures again, so here's a public domain photo from another old driving trip (not the 1996 WA one).

 

[ExArkie]

3 hours ago, sfred said:

I think we're out of port pictures again, so here's a public domain photo from another old driving trip (not the 1996 WA one).

 

Looks very much like the Penguin Parade on Phillip Island (Victoria). If that isn't the location, it's certainly the same penguin species.

[bluemarble]

Here's one more photo of mine I'll contribute today from a location on the unseen ports list. I don't expect this will be too taxing.

 

[North West Newbie]

1 hour ago, bluemarble said:

Here's one more photo of mine I'll contribute today from a location on the unseen ports list. I don't expect this will be too taxing.

 

 

That looks like Donegal Town.