And so at around 4:30 this morning we passed under the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge on our way into New York Harbour.

The bridge is named after Giovanni da Verrazzano, the first European to enter the harbour through the narrows and connects Staten Island to Brooklyn. Those athletes amongst you will recognise it from pictures of the New York Marathon, which starts its tour of all five boroughs of New York on Staten Island before taking the competitors over the bridge into Brooklyn and onwards through Queens, the Bronx and ending in Central Park, Manhattan.

Shortly after entering the harbour we saw in the distance that most famous of landmarks, the Statue of Liberty. Those historians amongst you will recognise the title of today’s entry being from the poem “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus which describes the statue:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

And of course, no visit to the harbour of New York would be complete without a view of the skyline of Manhattan, which gave its name to the Manhattan Engineer District, otherwise known as the Manhattan Project - to develop the first nuclear weapon.
The nuclear weapon project led to the excellent song “Manhattan Project” by Rush, from their 1985 album “Power Windows”.

Take a look at this interesting video that someone has done based on the song.

And a couple of hours later, we are off the ship and on dry land again, at Red Hook Dock, Brooklyn (Brooklyn being named after David and Victoria Beckham’s first child...or was it the other way?).

Red Hook was originally a village colonised by the Dutch at the time that New York was known as New Amsterdam. One claim to fame is that it is the only part of New York that has a full frontal (but not that sort) view of the Statue of Liberty, which was oriented towards France.