All hands on deck! It is time to go to the Maritime Museum of New Caledonia! For a small island in the Pacific Ocean, waves, ships, and other marine things are a very important topic.
Do not rush to come in. The shape of the museum can make you think. It looks like a graphic wave or a stem. It is a symbol of the movement, overcoming distances and obstacles.
Entering the museum, you get to a new world. Take a step, and that is it. The flow of information, artifacts, illustrations immediately trap you, surprising more and more with every second. There are thousands of exhibits illustrating the history of navigation, from simple wooden canoes to modern liners.
You can look all day long at the blackened from sea salt and time silver coins, taken from the bottom after the shipwreck, at the bottles of wine and champagne, full after so many years, at the perfume bottles and gourmet dishes. Very often, merchant ships sunk barely moving away from the coast. The reason was the multiple coral reefs.
Learn the history of world-known expeditions. Probably, you can reveal the secret of some shipwrecks. There, step by step, you can see how expeditions were prepared, and sailors were selected, and ships were equipped – just take a look at the old documents.
You can walk through the halls and suddenly see the miniatures of ships. Some of them are small, some are big enough ... You look at them, notice the details of sails and masts, and in the mind’s eye sail in the sea as a captain of a ship in a beautiful frock coat, or a bearded sailor in a singlet.
And the Maritime Museum is not dedicated to the sea, ships, and secrets of the seabed. It is about people, about their life in travel. There you can see the items that travelers used, the way of their lives. It is also about a connection through huge distances. Ships transport goods, people, binding countries, and continents.
The Second World War affected such a small island in the Pacific Ocean. Over a million US military have landed there! Their stay can be proved not just by archival documents, but also items found in the lagoon.
They became a separate collection of the museum. A bottle of cola became the symbol of that time. There were a lot of them, but only one was presented in the maritime museum. A glass bottle of Coca-Cola was welded to the American military casque. They became an organic whole owing to the time and coral. But if you do not know about the casque, you may think that the bottle stuck to a piece of coral.
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