Old pieces of wood -1

Long ago, the French authorities had commissioned an engineer to construct one system to protect the Saint-Malo seafront (France) against the storms and the swell from the Atlantic. The man had the idea to plant in the sand some big trunks of oak as breakwaters. The invisible part pushed down in the sand has the same length as the visible one, i.e. about 15 feet. (See photographs above)
Needless to say Saint Malo has its history closely linked to the sea. Historians believe it dates back to the first century BC at the Celtic period on a rocky island nearby the continent and the current city of Saint Malo. Later, Romans named the place Aleth and Irish monks established a monastery. Then, Aleth became Maclow or Malo from a Celtic bishop. But at those times, the island was connected with the shoreline by a strip of sand swept by the winds and oceanic swell. Today, the island is a peninsula and the area still bears the name of City of Aleth.
Little by little Saint Malo turned into an attractive and strategic vantage point for traders and battle fleet of the kings (French dynasties) who succeeded each other from the eleventh until the nineteenth century. But the proximity of the Anglo-Norman islands and constant wars with the English Crown opened the way for smuggling and endemic piracy. At the very beginning, piracy was the fact of merchants trained with seafaring. Many of them went back and forth the Channel and sacked foreign ships. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the kings of France endorsed that behavior so that pirates were named corsairs from the Italian word corsaro and the Latin cursus (race). However there was an essential distinction between the merchants making their fortune by means of piracy and corsairs. These were civil crew members sailing on board of civil ships which had authorization from the king to attack any enemy ship during wartime. One of the most famous corsairs is Robert Surcouf. http:--claude-lustier.artistwebsites.com-featured-1-old-pieces-of-wood-2-planetoday-photography.html
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