On October 13, tall ship ARA Libertad cast off the Broadway dock in Fells Points, Baltimore, the capital city of the State of Maryland. The head of the Navy’s Naval Logistics Mission in the United States of America, Captain Pedro Roberto Racca, was present at the farewell, who was accompanied by members of the Mission.
During the stay of the Training Ship in Baltimore, the Midshipmen on Commission were able to make tourist and museological tours of the city, and also of New York and the capital, Washington D.C.
Likewise, from Friday to Monday, they interacted with the local public and visitors, who had the opportunity to tour the main deck, averaging 6,500 visits.
As is traditional in any favorable opportunity, in a landscaped sector near Pier No. 1 of Inner Harbor, a ceremony was held in tribute to Admiral Guillermo Brown, next to the plaque placed in 2003 by the Argentine Navy that marks the area where the young Brown arrived with his father, from Ireland.
It was presided over by the Chief of the General Staff of the Navy, Admiral Carlos María Allievi, who was accompanied by the Ambassador of the Argentine Republic to the United States of America, Alejandro Oxenford, and the Naval Attaché to the Argentine Embassy, Rear Admiral Osvaldo Raúl Chiñi.
The allusive words were in charge of the representative of the Brownian National Institute in the United States of America, Dr. Gonzalo Sebastián Paz, who began by making a summary of the circumstances in which the Father of the Nation arrived on the East Coast at sea.
“The seeds of the magnificent Chesapeake Bay and the Delaware bore fruit in the vast Rio de la Plata. That young Irishman, William Brown, becomes our mature and experienced William Brown. It was the sailor and Commander Brown, the result of a maritime culture and naval knowledge of the highest international level,” said Paz.
He added that it would be this fundamental knowledge that would prevail in the Río de la Plata, and in immense seas “where that knowledge allowed him to become one of the founding fathers of Argentine and South American Independence, and that he and his comrades projected under our flag of freedom in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the icy Antarctic seas, and even the Caribbean Sea.”
Finally, he pointed out that “the sons of Argentina and those who committed themselves in a sacred oath before the Homeland, to be worthy heirs, invoke his iron name with eternal gratitude, and we pay tribute to him in this port and these waters, where he was formed as a man and as a sailor.”
The ceremony ended with the sound of silence from the horn of the Training Ship.