Reindeer
The reindeer known as the caribou in North America, is a species of deer with circumpolar distribution, native to Arctic, sub-Arctic, tundra and mountainous regions of northern Europe and North America. This includes both migratory populations. Rangifer herd size varies in different geographic regions; the Taimyr herd of migrating Siberian tundra reindeer in Russia is the largest wild reindeer herd in the world, varying between 400,000 and 1,000,000. What was once the second largest herd is the migratory boreal woodland caribou George River herd in Canada, with former variations between 28,000 and 385,000; as of January 2018, there are fewer than 9,000 animals estimated to be left in the George River herd, as reported by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The New York Times reported in April 2018 of the disappearance of the only herd of southern mountain caribou in the lower 48 states, with an expert calling it "functionally extinct" after the herd's size dwindled to a mere three animals.
Rangifer varies in size and colour from the smallest, the Svalbard reindeer, to the largest, the boreal woodland caribou. The North American range of caribou extends from Alaska through Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut into the boreal forest and south through the Canadian Rockies and the Columbia and Selkirk Mountains; the Barren-ground caribou, Porcupine caribou, Peary caribou live in the tundra, while the shy boreal woodland caribou prefer the boreal forest. The Porcupine caribou and the barren-ground caribou form large herds and undertake lengthy seasonal migrations from birthing grounds to summer and winter feeding grounds in the tundra and taiga; the migrations of Porcupine caribou herds are among the longest of any mammal. Barren-ground caribou are found in Kitaa in Greenland, but the larger herds are in Alaska, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut; some subspecies are rare and at least one has become extinct: the Queen Charlotte Islands caribou of Canada. The range of the sedentary boreal woodland caribou covered more than half of Canada and into the northern States in the U.
S. Woodland caribou have disappeared from most of their original southern range and were designated as threatened in 2002 by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada. Environment Canada reported in 2011 that there were 34,000 boreal woodland caribou in 51 ranges remaining in Canada.. Siberian tundra reindeer herds are in decline, Rangifer tarandus is considered to be vulnerable by the IUCN. Arctic peoples have depended on caribou for food and shelter, such as the Caribou Inuit, the inland-dwelling Inuit of the Kivalliq Region in northern Canada, the Caribou Clan in Yukon, the Inupiat, the Inuvialuit, the Hän, the Northern Tutchone, the Gwich'in. Hunting wild reindeer and herding of semi-domesticated reindeer are important to several Arctic and sub-Arctic peoples such as the Duhalar for meat, antlers and transportation; the Sami people have depended on reindeer herding and fishing for centuries. In Lapland, reindeer pull pulks. Male and female reindeer can grow antlers annually, although the proportion of females that grow antlers varies between population and season.
Antlers are larger on males. In traditional festive legend, Santa Claus's reindeer pull a sleigh through the night sky to help Santa Claus deliver gifts to good children on Christmas Eve. Carl Linnaeus chose the name Rangifer for the reindeer genus, which Albertus Magnus used in his De animalibus, fol. Liber 22, Cap. 268: "Dicitur Rangyfer quasi ramifer". This word may go back to the Saami word raingo. Linnaeus chose the word tarandus as the specific epithet, making reference to Ulisse Aldrovandi's Quadrupedum omnium bisulcorum historia fol. 859–863, Cap. 30: De Tarando. However and Konrad Gesner – thought that rangifer and tarandus were two separate animals. In any case, the tarandos name goes back to Theophrastus; the use of the terms Reindeer and caribou for the same animal can cause confusion, but the IUCN delineates the issue: "The world's Caribou and Reindeer are classified as a single species Rangifer tarandus. Reindeer is the European name for the species while in North America, the species is known as Caribou."
The word rein is of Norse origin. The word deer was broader in meaning, but became more specific over time. In Middle English, der meant a wild animal of any kind, in contrast to cattle; the word caribou comes through French, from the Mi'kmaq qalipu, meaning "snow shoveler", referring to its habit of pawing through the snow for food. Because of its importance to many cultures, Rangifer tarandus and some of its subspecies have names in many languages. Inuktitut is spoken in the eastern Arctic, the caribou is known by the name tuktu; the Gwich’in people have over two dozen distinct caribou-related words. The species' taxonomic name, Rangifer tarandus, was defined by Carl Linnaeus in 1758; the woodland caribou subspecies' taxonomic name Rangifer tarandus caribou was defined by Gmelin in 1788. Based on Banfield's often-cited A Revision of the Reindeer and Caribou, Genus Rangifer, R. t. caboti, R. t. osborni and R. t. terraenovae were considered invalid and included in R. t. caribou. Some recent authorities have considered them all valid suggesting that they are quite distinct.
In their book entitled Mammal Species of the World, American zoologist Don E. Wilson and DeeAnn Reeder agree with Valerius Geist, specialist on large North American mammals, that
John Franklin
Rear Admiral Sir John Franklin was a British Royal Navy officer and explorer of the Arctic. Franklin served as Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land from 1837 to 1843, he disappeared while on his last expedition, attempting to chart and navigate the Northwest Passage in the North American Arctic. The icebound ships were abandoned and the entire crew died of starvation, tuberculosis, lead poisoning, scurvy. Franklin was born in Spilsby, Lincolnshire, on 16 April 1786, the ninth of twelve children born to Hannah Weekes and Willingham Franklin, his father was a merchant descended from a line of country gentlemen while his mother was the daughter of a farmer. One of his brothers entered the legal profession and became a judge in Madras. Educated at King Edward VI Grammar School in Louth, he soon became interested in a career at sea, his father, who intended for Franklin to enter the church or become a businessman, was opposed but was reluctantly convinced to allow him to go on a trial voyage on a merchant ship when he was aged 12.
His experience of seafaring only confirmed his interest in a career at sea, so in March 1800, Franklin's father secured him a Royal Navy appointment on HMS Polyphemus. Commanded by a Captain Lawford, the Polyphemus carried 64 guns and, at the time of Franklin's appointment, was still at sea, he did not join the vessel until the autumn of 1800. Serving as a first class volunteer, Franklin soon saw action in the Battle of Copenhagen in which the Polyphemus participated as part of Horatio Nelson's squadron. An expedition to the coast of Australia aboard HMS Investigator, commanded by Captain Matthew Flinders, with Franklin now a midshipman, he was present at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 aboard HMS Bellerophon, at the Battle of New Orleans. He accompanied Captain Nathaniel Dance on the Earl Camden, frightening off Admiral Charles de Durand-Linois at the Battle of Pulo Aura in the South China Sea on 14 February 1804. In 1819, Franklin was chosen to lead an expedition overland from Hudson Bay to chart the north coast of Canada eastwards from the mouth of the Coppermine River.
On his 1819 expedition, Franklin fell into the Hayes River at Robinson Falls and was rescued by a member of his expedition about 90 metres downstream. Between 1819 and 1822, he lost 11 of the 20 men in his party. Most died of starvation, but there were at least one murder and suggestions of cannibalism; the survivors were forced to eat lichen and attempted to eat their own leather boots. This gained Franklin the nickname of "the man who ate his boots". In 1823, after returning to England, Franklin married the poet Eleanor Anne Porden, their daughter, Eleanor Isabella, was born the following year. His wife died of tuberculosis in 1825. In 1825, he left for his second third Arctic expedition; the goal this time was the mouth of the Mackenzie River from which he would follow the coast westward and meet Frederick William Beechey who would try to sail northeast from the Bering Strait. With him was John Richardson who would follow the coast east from the Mackenzie to the mouth of the Coppermine River.
At the same time, William Edward Parry would try to sail west from the Atlantic. Supplies were better organized this time, in part because they were managed by Peter Warren Dease of the Hudson's Bay Company. After reaching the Great Slave Lake using the standard HBC route, Franklin took a reconnaissance trip 1,000 miles down the Mackenzie and on 16 August 1825, became the second European to reach its mouth, he erected a flagpole with buried letters for Parry. He returned to winter at Fort Franklin on the Great Bear Lake; the following summer he found the ocean frozen. He worked his way west for several hundred miles and gave up on 16 August 1826 at Return Reef when he was about 150 miles east of Beechey's Point Barrow. Reaching safety at Fort Franklin on 21 September, he left Fort Franklin on 20 February 1827 and spent the rest of the winter and spring at Fort Chipewyan, he reached Liverpool on the first of September 1827. Richardson's eastward journey was more successful. On 5 November 1828, he married Jane Griffin, a friend of his first wife and a seasoned traveller who proved indomitable in the course of their life together.
On 29 April 1829, he was knighted by George IV and the same year awarded the first Gold Medal of the Société de Géographie of France. On 25 January 1836, he was made Knight Commander of the Royal Guelphic Order and a Knight of the Greek Order of the Redeemer. Franklin was appointed Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen's Land in 1837, but was removed from office in 1843, he is remembered by a significant landmark in the centre of Hobart—a statue of him dominates the park known as Franklin Square, the site of the original Government House. On the plinth below the statue appears Tennyson's epitaph: His wife worked to set up a university, established in 1890, a museum, credited to the Royal Society of Tasmania in 1843 under the leadership of her husband. Lady Franklin may have worked to have the Lieutenant-Governor's private botanical gardens, established in 1818, managed as a public resource. Lady Franklin established a glyptotheque and surrounding lands to support it near Hobart; the village of Frankli
Sahara
The Sahara is a desert located on the African continent. It is the largest hot desert in the world, the third largest desert overall after Antarctica and the Arctic, its area of 9,200,000 square kilometres is comparable to the area of the United States. The name'Sahara' is derived from a dialectal Arabic word for ṣaḥra; the desert comprises much of North Africa, excluding the fertile region on the Mediterranean Sea coast, the Atlas Mountains of the Maghreb, the Nile Valley in Egypt and Sudan. It stretches from the Red Sea in the east and the Mediterranean in the north to the Atlantic Ocean in the west, where the landscape changes from desert to coastal plains. To the south, it is bounded by the Sahel, a belt of semi-arid tropical savanna around the Niger River valley and the Sudan Region of Sub-Saharan Africa; the Sahara can be divided into several regions including: the western Sahara, the central Ahaggar Mountains, the Tibesti Mountains, the Aïr Mountains, the Ténéré desert, the Libyan Desert.
For several hundred thousand years, the Sahara has alternated between desert and savanna grassland in a 41,000 year cycle caused by the precession of the Earth's axis as it rotates around the Sun, which changes the location of the North African Monsoon. The area is next expected to become green in about 15,000 years. There is a suggestion that the last time that the Sahara was converted from savanna to desert it was due to overgrazing by the cattle of the local population; the Sahara covers large parts of Algeria, Egypt, Mali, Niger, Western Sahara and Tunisia. It covers 9 million square kilometres, amounting to 31% of Africa. If all areas with a mean annual precipitation of less than 250 mm were included, the Sahara would be 11 million square kilometres, it is one of three distinct physiographic provinces of the African massive physiographic division. The Sahara is rocky hamada. Wind or rare rainfall shape the desert features: sand dunes, dune fields, sand seas, stone plateaus, gravel plains, dry valleys, dry lakes, salt flats.
Unusual landforms include the Richat Structure in Mauritania. Several dissected mountains, many volcanic, rise from the desert, including the Aïr Mountains, Ahaggar Mountains, Saharan Atlas, Tibesti Mountains, Adrar des Iforas, the Red Sea Hills; the highest peak in the Sahara is Emi Koussi, a shield volcano in the Tibesti range of northern Chad. The central Sahara is hyperarid, with sparse vegetation; the northern and southern reaches of the desert, along with the highlands, have areas of sparse grassland and desert shrub, with trees and taller shrubs in wadis, where moisture collects. In the central, hyperarid region, there are many subdivisions of the great desert: Tanezrouft, the Ténéré, the Libyan Desert, the Eastern Desert, the Nubian Desert and others; these arid areas receive no rain for years. To the north, the Sahara skirts the Mediterranean Sea in Egypt and portions of Libya, but in Cyrenaica and the Maghreb, the Sahara borders the Mediterranean forest and scrub eco-regions of northern Africa, all of which have a Mediterranean climate characterized by hot summers and cool and rainy winters.
According to the botanical criteria of Frank White and geographer Robert Capot-Rey, the northern limit of the Sahara corresponds to the northern limit of date palm cultivation and the southern limit of the range of esparto, a grass typical of the Mediterranean climate portion of the Maghreb and Iberia. The northern limit corresponds to the 100 mm isohyet of annual precipitation. To the south, the Sahara is bounded by the Sahel, a belt of dry tropical savanna with a summer rainy season that extends across Africa from east to west; the southern limit of the Sahara is indicated botanically by the southern limit of Cornulaca monacantha, or northern limit of Cenchrus biflorus, a grass typical of the Sahel. According to climatic criteria, the southern limit of the Sahara corresponds to the 150 mm isohyet of annual precipitation. Important cities located in the Sahara include the capital of Mauritania; the Sahara is the world's largest low-latitude hot desert. It is located in the horse latitudes under the subtropical ridge, a significant belt of semi-permanent subtropical warm-core high pressure where the air from upper levels of the troposphere tends to sink towards the ground.
This steady descending airflow causes a drying effect in the upper troposphere. The sinking air prevents evaporating water from rising, therefore prevents adiabatic cooling, which makes cloud formation difficult to nearly impossible; the permanent dissolution of clouds allows thermal radiation. The stability of the atmosphere above the desert prevents any convective overturning, thus making rainfall non-existent; as a consequence, the weather tends to be sunny and stable with a minimal chance of rainfall. Subsiding, dry air masses associated with subtropical high-pressure systems are unfavorable for the development of convectional showers; the subtropical ridge is the predominant factor that explains the hot desert climate (Köppen climate classifica
North Africa
North Africa is a region encompassing the northern portion of the African continent. There is no singularly accepted scope for the region, it is sometimes defined as stretching from the Atlantic shores of Morocco in the west, to Egypt's Suez Canal and the Red Sea in the east. Others have limited it to top North-Western countries like Algeria and Tunisia, a region, known by the French during colonial times as "Afrique du Nord" and is known by all Arabs as the Maghreb; the most accepted definition includes Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt, the 6 countries that shape the top North of the African continent. Meanwhile, "North Africa" when used in the term North Africa and the Middle East refers only to the countries of the Maghreb and Libya. Egypt, being part of the Middle East, is considered separately, due to being both North African and Middle Eastern at the same time. North Africa includes a number of Spanish and Portuguese possessions, Plazas de soberanía, Ceuta and Melilla and the Canary Islands and Madeira.
The countries of North Africa share a common ethnic and linguistic identity, unique to this region. Northwest Africa has been inhabited by Berbers since the beginning of recorded history, while the eastern part of North Africa has been home to the Egyptians. Between the A. D. 600s and 1000s, Arabs from the Middle East swept across the region in a wave of Muslim conquest. These peoples, physically quite similar, formed a single population in many areas, as Berbers and Egyptians merged into Arabic and Muslim culture; this process of Arabization and Islamization has defined the cultural landscape of North Africa since. The distinction between North Africa, the Sahel and the rest of the continent is as follows: Nineteenth century European explorers, attracted by the accounts of Ancient geographers or Arab geographers of the classical period, followed the routes by the nomadic people of the vast "empty" space, they documented the names of the stopping places they discovered or rediscovered, described landscapes, took a few climate measurements and gathered rock samples.
A map began to fill in the white blotch. The Sahara and the Sahel entered the geographic corpus by way of naturalist explorers because aridity is the feature that circumscribes the boundaries of the ecumene; the map details included topographical relief and location of watering holes crucial to long crossings. The Arabic word "Sahel" and "Sahara" made its entry into the vocabulary of geography. Latitudinally, the "slopes" of the arid desert, devoid of continuous human habitation, descend in step-like fashion toward the northern and southern edges of the Mediterranean that opens to Europe and the Sahel that opens to "Trab al Sudan." Longitudinally, a uniform grid divides the central desert shrinks back toward the Atlantic Ocean and the Red Sea. The Sahara-Sahel is further divided into a total of twenty sub-areas: central, southern, eastern, etc. In this way, "standard" geography has determined aridity to be the boundary of the ecumene, it identifies settlements based on visible activity without regard for social or political organizations of space in vast, purportedly “empty” areas.
It gives only cursory acknowledgement to what makes Saharan geography, for that matter, world geography unique: mobility and the routes by which it flows. The Sahel or "African Transition Zone" has been affected by many formative epochs in North African history ranging from Ottoman occupation to the Arab-Berber control of the Andalus; as a result, many modern African nation-states that are included in the Sahel evidence cultural similarities and historical overlap with their North African neighbours. In the present day, North Africa is associated with West Asia in the realm of geopolitics to form a Middle East-North Africa region; the Islamic influence in the area is significant and North Africa is a major part of the Muslim world. Some researchers have postulated that North Africa rather than East Africa served as the exit point for the modern humans who first trekked out of the continent in the Out of Africa migration. North Africa has three main geographic features: the Sahara desert in the south, the Atlas Mountains in the west, the Nile River and delta in the east.
The Atlas Mountains extend across much of northern Algeria and Tunisia. These mountains are part of the fold mountain system that runs through much of Southern Europe, they recede to the south and east, becoming a steppe landscape before meeting the Sahara desert, which covers more than 75 percent of the region. The tallest peaks are in the High Atlas range in south-central Morocco, which has many snow-capped peaks. South of the Atlas Mountains is the dry and barren expanse of the Sahara desert, the largest sand desert in the world. In places the desert is cut by irregular watercourses called wadis—streams that flow only after rainfalls but are dry; the Sahara's major landforms include large seas of sand that sometimes form into huge dunes. The Sahara covers the southern part of Algeria and Tunisia, most of Libya. Only two regions of Libya are outside the desert: Tripolitania in the northwest and Cyrenaica in the northeast. Most of Egypt is desert, with the exception of the Nile River and the irrigated land along its banks.
The Nile Valley forms a narrow fertile thread. Sheltered valleys in the Atlas Mountains, the Nile Valley and Delta, the Mediterranean coast are the main sources of fertile farming land. A wide variety of valuable crops including ce
Admiralty
The Admiralty known as the Office of the Admiralty and Marine Affairs, was the government department responsible for the command of the Royal Navy first in the Kingdom of England in the Kingdom of Great Britain, from 1801 to 1964, the United Kingdom and former British Empire. Exercised by a single person, the Lord High Admiral, the Admiralty was, from the early 18th century onwards invariably put "in commission" and exercised by the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, who sat on the Board of Admiralty. In 1964, the functions of the Admiralty were transferred to a new Admiralty Board, a committee of the tri-service Defence Council of the United Kingdom and part of the Navy Department of the Ministry of Defence; the new Admiralty Board meets only twice a year, the day-to-day running of the Royal Navy is controlled by a Navy Board. It is common for the various authorities now in charge of the Royal Navy to be referred to as simply'The Admiralty'; the title of Lord High Admiral of the United Kingdom was vested in the monarch from 1964 to 2011.
The title was awarded to Duke of Edinburgh by Queen Elizabeth II on his 90th birthday. There continues to be a Vice-Admiral of the United Kingdom and a Rear-Admiral of the United Kingdom, both of which are honorary offices; the office of Admiral of England was created around 1400. King Henry VIII established the Council of the Marine—later to become the Navy Board—in 1546, to oversee administrative affairs of the naval service. Operational control of the Royal Navy remained the responsibility of the Lord High Admiral, one of the nine Great Officers of State; this management approach would continue in force in the Royal Navy until to 1832. King Charles I put the office of Lord High Admiral into commission in 1628, control of the Royal Navy passed to a committee in the form of the Board of Admiralty; the office of Lord High Admiral passed a number of times in and out of commission until 1709, after which the office was permanently in commission. In this organization a dual system operated the Lord High Admiral Commissioners of the Admiralty exercised the function of general control of the Navy and they were responsible for the conduct of any war, while the actual supply lines and services were managed by four principal officers, the Treasurer, Comptroller and Clerk of the Acts, responsible individually for finance, supervision of accounts and maintenance of ships, record of business.
These principal officers came to be known as the Navy Board responsible for'civil administration' of the navy, from 1546 to 1832. This structure of administering the navy lasted for 285 years, the supply system was inefficient and corrupt its deficiencies were due as much to its limitations of the times they operated in; the various functions within the Admiralty were not coordinated and lacked inter-dependency with each other, with the result that in 1832, Sir James Graham abolished the Navy Board and merged its functions within those of the Board of Admiralty. At the time this had distinct advantages. In 1860 saw big growth in the development of technical crafts, the expansion of more admiralty branches that began with age of steam that would have an enormous influence on the navy and naval thought. Between 1860 and 1908, there was no real study of strategy and of staff work conducted within the naval service. All the Navy's talent flowed to the great technical universities; this school of thought for the next 50 years was technically based.
The first serious attempt to introduce a sole management body to administer the naval service manifested itself in the creation of the Admiralty Navy War Council in 1909. It was believed by officials within the Admiralty at this time that the running of war was quite a simple matter for any flag officer who required no formal training. However, this mentality would be questioned with the advent of the Agadir crisis, when the Admiralty's war plans were criticized. Following this, a new advisory body called the Admiralty War Staff was instituted in 1912, headed by the Chief of the War Staff, responsible for administering three new sub-divisions responsible for operations and mobilisation; the new War Staff had hardly found its feet and it continually struggled with the opposition to its existence by senior officers they were categorically opposed to a staff. The deficiencies of the system within this department of state could be seen in the conduct of the Dardanelles campaign. There were no mechanisms in place to answer the big strategic questions.
A Trade Division was created in 1914. Sir John Jellicoe came to the Admiralty in 1916, he re-organized the war staff as following: Chief of War Staff, Intelligence, Signal Section, Trade. It was not until 1917 that the admiralty department was again properly reorganized and began to function as a professional military staff. In May 1917, the term "Admiralty War Staff" was renamed and that department and its functional role were superseded by a new "Admiralty Naval Staff". Appointed was a new post, that of
Gosport
Gosport is a town in Hampshire on the south coast of England. At the 2011 Census, its population was 82,622, it is situated on a peninsula on the eastern side of Portsmouth Harbour, opposite the city of Portsmouth, to which it is linked by the Gosport Ferry. Gosport lies south-east of Fareham, to which it is linked by a road; the Rowner area of the peninsula was settled by the Anglo-Saxons, is mentioned in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle as Rughenor. Both Rowner and Alverstoke, the name coming from the point where the River Alver entered the Solent at Stokes Bay, were included in the Domesday Book. Rowner was the earliest known settlement of the peninsula, with many Mesolithic finds and a hunting camp being found, tumuli on the peninsula investigated. Bronze Age items found in a 1960s construction in HMS Sultan included a hoard of axe heads and torcs. A three-celled dwelling unearthed during construction of the Rowner naval Estate in the 1970s points to a settled landscape. Next to the River Alver which passes the southern and western edge of Rowner is a Norman motte and bailey, the first fortification of the peninsula, giving a vantage point over the Solent, Stokes Bay, Lee-on-the-Solent and the Isle of Wight.
The former Rowner naval married quarters estate, now demolished, HMS Sultan were built on a former military airfield, known first as RAF Gosport and as HMS Siskin, which gives its name to the local infant and junior schools. The barracks at Browndown were used in the ITV series Bad Lads' Army. Gosport is believed to derive its name from "goose". An alternative etymology of "gorse" is not supported by the regional name for the plant, "furze". A third theory, claiming a derivation from "God's Port" is believed to be a 19th-century invention; until the last quarter of the 20th century, Gosport was a major naval town associated with the defence and supply infrastructure of Her Majesty's Naval Base Portsmouth. As such over the years extensive fortifications were created; the first fortifications were in 1678 during the reign on Charles II. These consisted of two forts, Fort James and Fort Charles, a series of bastions and double ditches to encircle the town, known as the Gosport Lines. During the Georgian period in 1751 and 1752 they were rebuilt and extended.
Further additions were made in response to the French invasion threat of 1779. By 1860, the Gosport Lines had 58 guns. No.1 Bastion, for example, had mounted 14 guns in brick lined emplacements firing over the parapet. The 1859 Royal Commission on the Defences of the United Kingdom proposed the completion of a line of forts to protect the outer approach to Gosport town, making the earlier defences redundant. However, they were retained to constrain any expansion of the town towards the new line of forts. From the 1890s road widening meant some parts of the ramparts and gates were demolished. Further sections were demolished in the 1960s. Today, the little are protected ancient monuments; the town is still home to HMS Sultan and a Naval Armament Supply Facility as well as a Helicopter Repair base. Most of the former naval and military installations have closed since the Second World War, leaving empty sites and buildings. In response to this, museums have opened, many of the fortifications and installations have been opened to the public as tourism and heritage sites.
One of the more recent additions is the Diving Museum at No 2 Battery at Stokes Bay, bidding to become the National Diving Museum for the British Isles. Several sites have been redeveloped to provide housing, including the New Barracks, the Royal Clarence Victualling Yard and Royal Hospital Haslar. Forton Barracks is now St Vincent College. There has been extensive redevelopment of the harbour area as a marina. In November 1850, two ships of the Ottoman Navy, Mirat-ı Zafer and Sirag-i Bahri Birik, anchored off the Hardway near Gosport; the visit lasted several months and during this time some of the members of the crew contracted cholera and were admitted to Haslar Hospital for treatment, where most of them died. In addition, some other sailors died because of training accidents. In total 26 were laid to rest in the grounds of Haslar. At the turn of the 20th century the bodies were exhumed and transferred to the R. N. Military Cemetery, Clayhall Road, in Alverstoke. In the first week of June 1944, scout cars and wheeled vehicles of the Sherbrooke Fusilier Regiment, Canadian Army loaded Landing craft tanks in Gosport.
Convoys of vehicles had been concealed from German discovery in the areas further inland, in daylight on 3 June moved through Titchfield and Stubbington to G3 Hard on the Gosport waterfront. There, the M4 Sherman tanks were backed into position in preparation for the Channel crossing; the initial plan was for the invasion to begin on 5 June, but bad weathe
Tuareg people
The Tuareg people are a large Berber ethnic confederation. They principally inhabit the Sahara in a vast area stretching from far southwestern Libya to southern Algeria, Niger and Burkina Faso. Traditionally nomadic pastoralists, small groups of Tuareg are found in northern Nigeria; the Tuareg speak the Tuareg languages. The Tuaregs have been called the "blue people" for the indigo-dye coloured clothes they traditionally wear and which stains their skin. A semi-nomadic Muslim people, they are believed to be descendants of the Berber natives of North Africa; the Tuaregs have been one of the ethnic groups that have been influential in the spread of Islam and its legacy in North Africa and the adjacent Sahel region. Tuareg society has traditionally featured clan membership, social status and caste hierarchies within each political confederation; the Tuareg have controlled several trans-Saharan trade routes and have been an important party to the conflicts in the Saharan region during the colonial and post-colonial era.
The origin and the meaning of the name Tuareg have long been debated, with various etymologies hypothesized. It would appear that Twārəg is derived from the broken plural of Tārgi, a name whose former meaning was "inhabitant of Targa", the Tuareg name of the Libyan region known as Fezzan. Targa in Berber means " channel". Another theory is that Tuareg is derived from the plural of the Arabic exonym Tariqi; the term for a Tuareg man is the term for a woman Tamajaq. Spellings of the appellation vary by Tuareg dialect. However, they all reflect the same linguistic root, expressing the notion of "freemen"; as such, the endonym refers only to the Tuareg nobility, not the artisanal client castes and the slaves. Two other Tuareg self-designations are Kel Tamasheq, meaning "speakers of Tamasheq", Kel Tagelmust, meaning "veiled people" in allusion to the tagelmust garment, traditionally worn by Tuareg men; the English exonym "Blue People" is derived from the indigo color of the tagelmust veils and other clothing, which sometimes stains the skin underneath.
Another term for the Tuareg is Imuhagh or Imushagh, a cognate to the northern Berber self-name Imazighen. The Tuareg today inhabit a vast area in the Sahara, stretching from far southwestern Libya to southern Algeria, Niger and Burkina Faso, their combined population in these territories exceeds 2.5 million, with an estimated population in Niger of around 2 million and in Mali of another 0.5 million (3% of inhabitants. The Tuareg are the majority ethnic group in the Kidal Region of northeastern Mali; the Tuareg traditionally speak the Tuareg languages known as Tamasheq, Tamashekin and Kidal. These tongues belong to the Berber branch of the Afroasiatic family. According to Ethnologue, there are an estimated 1.2 million Tuareg speakers. Around half this number consists of speakers of the Eastern dialect; the exact number of Tuareg speakers per territory is uncertain. The CIA estimates that the Tuareg population in Mali constitutes 0.9% of the national population, whereas about 3.5% of local inhabitants speak Tuareg as a primary language.
In contrast, Imperato estimates. In antiquity, the Tuareg moved southward from the Tafilalt region into the Sahel under the Tuareg founding queen Tin Hinan, believed to have lived between the 4th and 5th century; the matriarch's 1,500 year old monumental Tin Hinan tomb is located in the Sahara at Abalessa in the Hoggar Mountains of southern Algeria. Vestiges of an inscription in Tifinagh, the Tuareg's traditional Libyco-Berber writing script, have been found on one of the ancient sepulchre's walls. External accounts of interaction with the Tuareg are available from at least the 10th century. Ibn Hawkal, El-Bekri, Ibn Batutah, Leo Africanus, all documented the Tuareg in some form as Mulatthamin or “the veiled ones.” Of the early historians, fourteenth century Arab scholar, Ibn Khaldûn has some of the most detailed commentary on the life and people of the Sahara, though he never met them. Some studies have linked the Tuareg to early ancient Egyptian civilization. At the turn of the 19th century, the Tuareg territory was organised into confederations, each ruled by a supreme Chief, along with a counsel of elders from each tribe.
These confederations are sometimes called "Drum Groups" after the Amenokal's symbol of authority, a drum. Clan elders, called Imegharan, are chosen to assist the chief of the confederation. There have been seven major confederations: Kel Ajjer or Azjar: centre is the oasis of Aghat. Kel Ahaggar, in Ahaggar mountains. Kel Adagh, or Kel Assuk: Kidal, Tin Buktu Iwillimmidan Kel Ataram, or Western Iwillimmidan: Ménaka, Azawagh region Iwillimmidan Kel Denneg, or Eastern Iwillimmidan: Tchin-Tabaraden, Teliya Azawagh. Kel Ayr: Assodé, Agadez, In Gal and Ifrwan. Kel Gres: Zinder and Tanut and south into northern Nigeria. Kel Owey: Aïr Massif, seasonally south to Tessaoua In the late 19th century, the Tuareg resisted the French colonial invasion of their Central Saharan homelands and annihilated a French expedition led by Paul Flatters in 1881. However, in the long run Tuareg broadswords were no match for the more advanced weapons of French
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