Time, it is often said, changes everything. This is not exactly true. As the following pairs of maritime photographs show, some things change dramatically after the lapse of many years and others, little or not at all. The American-British poet T.S. Eliot was right. “Time the destroyer is time the preserver.” he wrote in The Dry Salvages, the third poem of his famous Four Quartets.
(Click on the images to enlarge them)
Boston Light, Massachusetts
c. 1906
Photo credit: Detroit Publishing Co. / Library of Congress, USA
2012
Photo credit: MBTafan2011 / Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) licence
Whitby, Yorkshire, England
c. 1890
Photo credit: Detroit Publishing Co. / Library of Congress, USA
2011
Photo credit: PJ Marriott / Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) licence
Circular Quay, Sydney, Australia
1871
Photo credit: Charles Percy Pickering / Australian National Maritime Museum on the Commons
2009
Photo credit: WEAZ 73 on Flickr
Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-ND 2.0) licence
New York Harbor ferries
1859
Photo credit: William England / Wikimedia Commons
2014
Photo credit: Pavel Kuritsyn / Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) licence
Port of Hong Kong cargo handling
1890
Photo credit: De Cou / Library of Congress, USA
2009
Photo credit: pete on Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) licence
USS Constitution frigate
1909
Photo credit: National Photo Company Collection, Library of Congress, USA
2006
Photo credit: Dave Kaylor / U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons
Shipwrecks (what else is new?)
1898
Wreck of the Hereward, Maroubra Beach, Australia
Photo credit: William F Hall and William J Hall / Australian National Maritime Museum
2012
Grounding of the Costa Concordia off the coast of Tuscany, Italy
Photo credit: Paolo De Falco / Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) licence
