It is in this environment that the 13-year-old Carnival Triumph was trying to sail back to Galveston.

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In 1839, 53 African-born slaves on a ship bound from one Cuban sugar plantation to another attacked their captors, killing all but two, spared to help them sail back to Africa.

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And when we go back to the sea -- whether it is to sail or to watch it -- we are going back from whence we came.

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Once all passengers leave the ship, the Dream's crew will sail back to Port Canaveral on Sunday, the company said.

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Likewise, Carol Delaney, a cultural anthropologist at Stanford University, concludes that Columbus was a deeply religious man whose purpose was to sail to Asia to obtain gold in order to finance a crusade to take back Jerusalem and rebuild the Jews' holy Temple.

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The key was not to try to dig a Suez-type of canal, a great sea-level trench from ocean to ocean, but to create a lock-and-lake canal, where the ships are lifted up by a series of locks to a man-made lake, and then they sail across that lake, and then they are set back down on the other side by another series of locks.

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