Lafayette’s newly re-created “L’Hermione” will travel up the East Coast and lead the Parade of Ships on July 4
Pier 16, South Street Seaport
July 1-4, free (public tours available July 2-3, parade July 4)
www.southstreetseaport.com
hermione2015.com
The annual Parade of Tall Ships held in New York Harbor in conjunction with the July 4 festivities will have a special guest this year, as more than one hundred seaworthy vessels will be joined by an exact replica of L’Hermione, the eighteenth-century ship, commanded by Louis-René de Latouche, that brought Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roche Gilbert du Motier, better known as Marquis de Lafayette, the “Boy General,” to America in 1780 to help fight in the Revolutionary War. The blue, black, and gold ship is 117 feet tall and 210 feet long and features 3 masts, 19 sails, and 34 cannons. It’s re-creating its famous journey, making its way across the Atlantic and then north from Yorktown, Mount Vernon, Annapolis, and Philadelphia to Manhattan, Newport, Boston, and Nova Scotia. It will be on view at the South Street Seaport July 1-4, hosted by the South Street Seaport Museum, and will be celebrated with a Lower Manhattan Historical Society foot parade and flag raising on July 3, going from the Seaport to Bowling Green, followed on July 4 by the People’s Parade of Ships, sailing from the Verrazano Bridge to the Statue of Liberty and the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum before berthing at Governors Island and then continuing back to the Seaport. L’Hermione has been painstakingly reconstructed over twenty years by the Friends of the Hermione-Lafayette in America, which boasts honorary chairman Henry Kissinger and whose mission statement is “to evoke the spirit of ‘why not?’ and demonstrate that given determination, anything is achievable. Through this, to create a lasting educational legacy which will be accessible to generations of young Americans to come. To symbolize and rekindle through the Hermione the intimate ties between France and the United States, and the spirit of liberty that sustains them. . . . To bring to life the memory of Marquis de Lafayette, who embodied this spirit.”