Foundation and political platform.

The NP entered the democratic era led by former president of South Africa F. W. de Klerk, the winner with Nelson Mandela of the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in dismantling apartheid. He was succeeded by Marthinus van Schalkwyk until the eventual disbanding and merger of the party with the African National Congress (ANC). Van Schalkwyk renamed the party towards the end of 1997. In February 1996, the party had announced that it would become a nonracial, Christian-Democratic political organization, and Van Schalkwyk sought to build on this in his efforts to rebrand the NNP as a nonracial, value driven party.  But the New National Party had some difficulty carving out a political base in post-apartheid South Africa. On the one hand, it still had the legacy of its role under apartheid. On the other hand, it seemed uncertain about its relationship with the government led by the ANC and seemed unable to decide whether it was in a political alliance with the ANC or in opposition. These two issues led to defections to the Democratic Party (DP), which had a historical legacy of being anti-apartheid and was clearly an opposition party to the ANC. It also lost support to other parties.

Election results and alliances.

The NNP fared poorly in the general election of 1999. With 6.87% of the vote, the party lost votes both to the DP and ANC as well as its status as the official opposition nationally and in most provinces. But it remained influential in the Western Cape province, where it was the party of government, despite being pushed into second place there by the ANC. The party faced comparatively smaller losses in the province in large part due to the retention of most of its coloured support, but it also fared better with white voters than in most other provinces. 50% of its voter base now came from this one province, and despite retaining representation in all nine provincial legislatures, it was seemingly becoming a regional political force.  The party remained in power in the Western Cape through a coalition with the Democratic Party. The two then began to plan a merger in 2000, under the name Democratic Alliance (DA). By 2001 the party had broken away from the DA before the merger could be completed, and instead entered close co-operation with the ANC. In December 2001, the NNP formed a new provincial coalition with the ANC in the Western Cape, and members of the NNP were appointed to the national cabinet.  During the general election of 2004, the NNP was almost eliminated from parliament. Much of its support deserted the party, due to unhappiness with its alliance with the ANC, and its share of the national vote dropped from 6.87% in 1999 to 1.65%, having been 20.4% under the National Party name in 1994. The party was all but wiped out in most provinces and retained only limited pockets of large support in the Western Cape, where it was pushed into a distant third place behind the DA in its former stronghold.

Dissolution and merger with the ANC.

With the former governing party now only the sixth-largest in the country, questions were asked about its long-term future, and the leadership of van Schalkwyk. Despite his party's poor performance in the polls, van Schalkwyk was given the cabinet post of Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, as a reward for aligning the NNP with the ANC.  At its assembly on 9 April 2005, the NNP's Federal Council voted by 88 to 2 to disband. It also settled its outstanding debt of R5.2 million to the Absa Group Limited, in preparation for dissolution.  With effect from 5 August 2005, all NNP members of parliament became members of the ANC, in accordance with the system of crossing the floor in South Africa, which allowed politicians, elected on one party ticket, to defect to other parties or becoming independents. This system was repealed in 2009.

The New National Party (NNP) was a South African political party formed in 1997 as the successor to the National Party, which ruled the country from 1948 to 1994. The name change was an attempt to distance itself from its apartheid past, and reinvent itself as a moderate, mainstream conservative and non-racist federal party. The attempt was largely unsuccessful, and in 2005 the New National Party voted to disband itself.

新国民党(,英语:New National Party)是一个于1997年成立的南非政党,其为1948年至1994年统治南非的国民党的继承者。改名是为了与过去的种族隔离保持距离,并将自身重塑为一个温和、主流的保守主义与非种族主义的联邦政党。这次尝试基本上并不成功,2005年,新国民党投票决定解散。其政治地位由民主联盟继承。


Discovery of nuclear fission.

In December 1938, German chemist Otto Hahn and his assistant Fritz Strassmann sent a manuscript to the German science journal "Naturwissenschaften" ("Natural Sciences") reporting that they had detected and identified the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons. Their article was published on 6 January 1939. On 19 December 1938, eighteen

First "Uranverein".

On 22 April 1939, after hearing a colloquium paper by Wilhelm Hanle proposing the use of uranium fission in a "Uranmaschine" (uranium machine, i.e., nuclear reactor), Georg Joos, along with Hanle, notified Wilhelm Dames, at the "Reichserziehungsministerium" (REM, Reich Ministry of Education), of potential military applications of nuclear energy. The group included the physicists Walther

Other 1939 initiatives.

Paul Harteck was director of the physical chemistry department at the University of Hamburg and an advisor to the "Heereswaffenamt" (HWA, Army Ordnance Office). On 24 April 1939, along with his teaching assistant Wilhelm Groth, Harteck made contact with the "Reichskriegsministerium" (RKM, Reich Ministry of War) to alert them to the potential of military applications of nuclear chain reactions. This initiative led, later in the year, to the Second "Uranverein". Two days earlier, Joos and Hanle had

Second "Uranverein".

The second "Uranverein" began after the HWA squeezed out the "Reichsforschungsrat" (RFR, Reich Research Council) of the REM and started the formal German nuclear weapons project under military auspices. This second "Uranverein" was formed on 1 September 1939, the day World War II began, and had its first meeting on 16 September 1939. The meeting was organized by Kurt Diebner, advisor to the HWA, and held in Berlin. The invitees included Walther Bothe, Siegfried Flügge, Hans Geiger, Otto Hahn, Paul Harteck, Gerhard Hoffmann, Josef Mattauch, and Georg Stetter. A second meeting was held soon thereafter and included Klaus Clusius, Robert Döpel, Werner Heisenberg, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. Also at this time, the "Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Physik" (KWIP, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, after World War II the Max Planck Institute for Physics), in Berlin-Dahlem, was placed under HWA authority, with Diebner as the administrative director, and the military control of the nuclear research commenced.  Heisenberg said in 1939 that the physicists at the (second) meeting said that "in principle atomic bombs could be made... it would take years... not before five". He said "I didn't report it to the Fuehrer until two weeks later and very casually because I did not want the Fuehrer to get so interested that he would order great efforts immediately to make the atomic bomb. Speer felt it was better that the whole thing should be dropped and the Fuehrer also reacted that way." He said they presented the matter in this way for their personal safety as the probability (of success) was nearly zero, but if many thousands (of) people developed nothing, that could have "extremely disagreeable consequences for us." So we turned the slogan around to "make use of warfare for physics" not "make use of physics for warfare" Erhard Milch asked how long America would take and was told 1944 though the group "between ourselves" thought it would take longer, three or four years.  When it was apparent that the nuclear weapon project would not make a decisive contribution to ending the war in the near term, control of the KWIP was returned in January 1942 to its umbrella organization, the "Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft" (KWG, Kaiser Wilhelm Society, after World War II the Max-Planck Gesellschaft). HWA control of the project was subsequently passed to the RFR in July 1942. The nuclear weapon project thereafter maintained its "kriegswichtig" (war importance) designation, and

Isotope separation.

Paul Peter Ewald, a member of the "Uranverein", had proposed an electromagnetic isotope separator, which was thought applicable to U production and enrichment. This was picked up by Manfred von Ardenne, who ran a private research establishment.  In 1928, von Ardenne had come into his inheritance with full control as to how it could be spent, and he established his private research laboratory the "Forschungslaboratoriums für Elektronenphysik", in Berlin-Lichterfelde,

Moderator production.

The production of heavy water was already under way in Norway when the Germans invaded on 9 April 1940. The Norwegian production facilities for heavy water were quickly secured (though some heavy water had already been removed) and

Internal reports.

Reports from the research conducted were published in "Kernphysikalische Forschungsberichte" ("Research Reports in Nuclear Physics"), an internal publication of the "Uranverein". The reports were classified Top Secret, they had very limited distribution, and the authors were not allowed to keep copies. The reports were confiscated under the Allied Operation Alsos and sent to the United States

Politicization.

Two factors which had deleterious effects on the nuclear weapon project were the politicization of the education system under National Socialism and the rise of the "Deutsche Physik" movement, which was anti-Semitic and had a bias against theoretical physics, especially quantum mechanics.

Emigrations.

Adolf Hitler took power on 30 January 1933. On 7 April, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was enacted; this law, and its subsequent related ordinances, politicized the education system in Germany. This had immediate damaging effects on the physics capabilities of Germany. Furthermore, combined with the "Deutsche Physik" movement, the damaging effects were intensified and prolonged. The consequences to physics in Germany and its subfield of nuclear physics were multifaceted.  An immediate consequence upon passage of the law was that it produced both quantitative and qualitative losses to the physics community. Numerically, it has been estimated that a total of 1,145 university teachers, in all fields, were driven from their posts, which represented about 14% of the higher learning institutional staff members in 1932–1933. Out of 26 German nuclear physicists cited in the literature before 1933, 50% emigrated. Qualitatively, 11 physicists and four chemists who had won or would win the Nobel Prize emigrated from Germany shortly after Hitler came to power, most of them in 1933. These 15 scientists were: Hans Bethe, Felix

Heisenberg affair.

The politicization of the education system essentially replaced academic tradition and excellence with ideological adherence and trappings, such as membership in National Socialist organizations, such as the "Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei" (NSDAP, National Socialist German Workers Party), the "Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Dozentenbund" (NSDDB, National Socialist German University Lecturers League), and the "Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund" (NSDStB, National Socialist German Student League). The politicization can be illustrated with the conflict which evolved when a replacement for Arnold Sommerfeld was sought in view of his emeritus status. The conflict involved one of the prominent "Uranverein" participants, Werner Heisenberg.  On 1 April 1935 Arnold

Missing generation of physicists.

Politicization of the academic community, combined with the impact of the "Deutsche Physik" movement, and other policies such as drafting physicists to fight in the war, had the net effect of bringing about a missing generation of physicists. At the close of the war, physicists born between 1915 and 1925 were almost nonexistent. Those drafted included "Uranverein" members Paul O. Müller and Karl-Heinz Höcker. Müller died on the Russian front, but Höcker was repatriated in poor health in 1942. They had the classification ("uk") not ("uk", indispensable) and not even Kurt Diebner, managing director of

Autonomy and accommodation.

Members of the "Uranverein", Wolfgang Finkelnburg, Werner Heisenberg, Carl Ramsauer, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker were effective in countering the politicization of academia and effectively putting an end to the influence of the "Deutsche Physik" movement. However, in order to do this they were, as were many scientists, caught between autonomy and accommodation. Essentially, they would have to legitimize the National Socialist system by compromise and collaboration.  During the period in which "Deutsche Physik" was gaining prominence, a foremost concern of the great majority of scientists was to maintain autonomy against political encroachment. Some of the more established scientists, such as Max von Laue, could demonstrate more autonomy than the younger and less established scientists. This was, in part, due to political organizations, such as the "Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Dozentenbund" (National Socialist German University Lecturers League), whose district leaders had a decisive role in the

Exploitation and denial strategies.

Near the end of World War II, the principal Allied war powers each made plans for exploitation of German science. In light of the implications of nuclear weapons, German nuclear fission and related technologies were singled out for special attention. In addition to exploitation, denial of these technologies, their personnel, and related materials to rival allies was a driving force of their efforts. This typically meant getting to these resources first, which to some extent put the Soviets at a disadvantage in some geographic locations easily reached by the Western Allies, even if the area was destined to be in the Soviet zone of occupation by the Potsdam Conference. At times all parties were heavy-handed in their pursuit and denial to others.  The best known US denial and exploitation effort was Operation Paperclip, a broad dragnet that encompassed a wide range of advanced fields, including jet and rocket propulsion, nuclear physics, and other developments with military applications such as infrared technology. Operations directed specifically towards German nuclear fission were Operation Alsos and Operation Epsilon, the latter being done in collaboration with the British. In lieu of the codename for the Soviet operation it is referred to by Oleynikov as the Russian "Alsos".

American and British.

Berlin had been a location of many German scientific research facilities. To limit casualties and loss of equipment, many of these facilities were dispersed to other locations in the later years of the war.

Operation BIG.

Unfortunately for the Soviets, the "Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Physik" (KWIP, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics) had mostly been moved in 1943 and 1944 to Hechingen and its neighboring town of Haigerloch, on the edge of the Black Forest, which eventually became the French occupation zone. This move allowed the Americans to take into custody a large number of German scientists associated with nuclear research. The only section of the institute which remained in Berlin was the low-temperature physics section, headed by Ludwig Bewilogua, who was in charge of the exponential uranium pile.  American Alsos teams carrying out Operation BIG raced

Oranienburg plant.

With the interest of the "Heereswaffenamt" (HWA, Army Ordnance Office), Nikolaus Riehl, and his colleague Günter Wirths, set up an industrial-scale production of high-purity uranium oxide at the "Auergesellschaft" plant in Oranienburg. Adding to the capabilities in the final stages of metallic uranium production were the strengths of the Degussa corporation's capabilities in metals production.  The Oranienburg plant provided the uranium sheets and cubes for the "Uranmaschine" experiments conducted at the KWIP and the "Versuchsstelle" (testing station) of the "Heereswaffenamt" (Army Ordnance Office) in Gottow. The G-1 experiment performed at the HWA testing station, under the direction of Kurt Diebner, had lattices of 6,800 uranium oxide cubes (about 25 tons), in the nuclear moderator paraffin.  Work of the American Operation Alsos

French.

From 1941 to 1947, Fritz Bopp was a staff scientist at the KWIP, and worked with the "Uranverein". In 1944, when most of the KWIP was evacuated to Hechingen in Southern Germany due to air raids on Berlin, he went there too, and he was the Institute's Deputy Director there. When the American Alsos Mission evacuated Hechingen and Haigerloch, near the end of World War II, French armed forces occupied Hechingen. Bopp did not get along with them and described the initial French policy objectives

Soviet.

At the close of World War II, the Soviet Union had special search teams operating in Austria and Germany, especially in Berlin, to identify and "requisition" equipment, material, intellectual property, and personnel useful to the Soviet atomic bomb project. The exploitation teams were under the Soviet Alsos and they were headed by Lavrentij Beria's deputy, Colonel General A. P. Zavenyagin. These teams were composed of scientific staff members, in NKVD officer's uniforms, from the bomb project's only laboratory, Laboratory No. 2, in Moscow, and included Yulij Borisovich Khariton, Isaak Konstantinovich Kikoin, and Lev Andreevich Artsimovich. Georgij Nikolaevich Flerov had arrived earlier, although Kikoin did not recall a vanguard group. Targets on the top of their list were the "Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Physik" (KWIP, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics), the Frederick William University (today, the University of Berlin), and the "Technische Hochschule Berlin" (today, the "Technische Universität Berlin" (Technical University of Berlin").  German physicists who worked on the "Uranverein" and were sent to the Soviet Union to work on the Soviet atomic bomb project included: Werner Czulius, Robert Döpel, Walter Herrmann, Heinz Pose, Ernst Rexer,

Comparison of the Manhattan Project and the "Uranverein".

The United States, British, and Canadian governments worked together to create the Manhattan Project that developed the uranium and plutonium atomic bombs. Its success has been attributed to meeting all four of the following conditions:  Even with all four of these conditions in place the Manhattan Project succeeded only after the war in Europe had been brought to a conclusion.  For the Manhattan Project, the second condition was met on 9 October 1941 or shortly thereafter. Germany for a long time was thought to have fallen short of what was required to make an atomic bomb. Mutual distrust existed between the German government and some scientists. By the end of 1941 it was already apparent that the German nuclear weapon project would not make a decisive contribution to ending the German war effort in the near term, and control of the project was relinquished by the "Heereswaffenamt" (HWA, Army Ordnance Office) to the "Reichsforschungsrat" (RFR, Reich Research Council) in July 1942.  As to condition four, the high priority allocated to the Manhattan Project allowed for the recruitment and concentration of capable scientists on the project. In Germany, on the other hand, a great many young scientists and technicians who

Controversies regarding alleged nuclear tests.

In a 2005 book, "Hitlers Bombe", Rainer Karlsch claimed to have located, in the archives of the former KGB in Moscow, Heisenberg's speech notes from the Harnack Haus conference of July 1942, revealing that Heisenberg was a strong advocate for development of a German nuclear weapon.  Karlsch alleged that Diebner's team conducted the first successful nuclear weapon test, of some type of nuclear-related device employing hollow charges for ignition, in Ohrdruf, Thuringia, on 4 March 1945, allegedly not far from the concentration camp there. Karlsch quoted a purported eyewitness named Clare Werner, who claimed to have been standing on a hillside in Thuringia at the time of the test:  Not too far away was the military training base near the town of Ohrdruf. Unexpectedly there was a flash of light. "I suddenly saw something,' she said... "it was as bright as hundreds of bolts of lightning, red on the inside and yellow on the outside, so bright you could've read the newspaper. It all happened so quickly, and then

References.

Footnotes Citations

The German nuclear weapons project (; informally known as the Uranverein; ) was an unsuccessful scientific effort led by Germany to research and develop the atomic weapons during World War II. It went through several phases of work, but in the words of a historian, it was ultimately "frozen at the laboratory level" with the "modest goal" to "build a nuclear reactor which could sustain a nuclear fission chain reaction for a significant amount of time and to achieve the complete separation of at least tiny amount of the uranium isotopes." Scholarly consensus is that it failed to achieve these goals.

德国核武器开发计划是一项在二战中由纳粹德国秘密领导的研制核武器的项目,德国将其称之为「铀工程」()。这个项目开始于1939年,仅于核裂变被发现后的几个月,但又在几个月后中止,因为德国入侵波兰,很多科学家被编入德国国防军。但是,由于德国军队中管理上的调整,这个项目又在二战开始那天(1939年9月)重新启动。个项目最终发展为三个部分:核反应堆、铀和重水生产,以及铀同位素分离。最后,经过有关部分评估,核裂变对结束战争并没有太大的贡献,因此在1942年,德国国防军把项目转移到了Reich Research Council,同时继续提供赞助。从此,这个项目就被九个研究技工所分摊,造成项目发展放缓。另外,一些研究应用核裂变的科学家离开这个项目,转而去研究一些战争更需要的其他项目。


Context.

Adenauer was heavily criticized in parliament for his signing of the agreement, particularly due to the Ruhr issue.  The International Authority for the Ruhr was established on 28 April 1949. Of the 15 votes, 3 were assigned to the German state, although voted as a block by a representative of the occupation authority. By agreeing to join the control council of the authority, West Germany gained control of those three votes, but also accepted the control of the authority over West Germany's main industrial center. In the following debate in parliament, Adenauer stated:  The Allies have told me that dismantling would be stopped only if I satisfy the Allied desire for security, Does the Socialist Party want dismantling to go on to the bitter end? The opposition leader Kurt Schumacher responded by labeling Adenauer "Chancellor of the Allies".  The first treaty with a foreign power that West Germany was allowed to sign was the unpopular Marshall plan agreement specified in the treaty. Under U.S. pressure, the agreement was also made into federal law. Although it gave the Germans greater freedom in how to spend the funds, it also gave the U.S. greater powers to interfere in German economic matters, as well as requiring West Germany to subsidize West Berlin which was under occupation and not part of West Germany. The treaty also mandated deliveries from Germany to the U.S. of goods in short supply in the U.S.  The treaty stated that for practical reasons the state of war with Germany could not be ended as requested by the Germans. According to the press, the state of war was maintained because ""the U.S. wants to retain a legal basis for keeping a U.S. force in Western Germany"".  In 1952, members of the German parliament went to court to challenge the legality of the agreement.

The Petersberg Agreement is an international treaty that extended the rights of the Federal Government of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) vis-a-vis the occupying forces of Britain, France, and the United States, and is viewed as the first major step of the Bonn Republic towards sovereignty. It was signed by Chancellor of West Germany Konrad Adenauer and the Allied High Commissioners Brian Hubert Robertson (Britain), André François-Poncet (France), and John J. McCloy (United States of America) on 22 November 1949. The Hotel Petersberg, near Bonn, was at that time the seat of the High Commissioners and the place of signature. It was the first modification of the Occupation statute.

彼得斯贝格协议(德语:Petersberger Abkommen;英语:Petersberg Agreement)是1949年11月22日签署的一项旨在扩大联邦德国(西德)在英国、法国、美国占领下权利的国际协议,被视为联邦德国走向主权国家的第一步。协议由联邦德国首相康拉德·阿登纳和盟军最高委员会布赖恩·休伯特·罗伯逊(英国)、安德烈·弗朗索瓦-蓬塞(法国)、约翰·J·麦克洛伊(美国)签署,签署于今德国波恩附近的彼得斯贝格饭店内。


Early life.

Ville Hermanni Valo was born on 22 November 1976 in Helsinki, Finland. His mother Anita is from Hungary, and she worked at a shoe shop and later for the city of Helsinki. Ville's father Kari worked as a taxi driver, until he left his job and opened a sex shop in Helsinki called Aikuisten lelukauppa, where Ville sometimes worked as a teenager. Ville also has a younger brother Jesse, born in 1983.  A few months after Ville was born, his family moved from Vallila to Oulunkylä, where he attended comprehensive school. Valo was first introduced to music through his father, who would often listen to a variety Finnish folk artists, such as Tuomari Nurmio and Tapio Rautavaara. At the age of eight, Valo bought the album "Animalize" by Kiss, which sparked his interest in music. After second grade, Valo was accepted to music class, where he took up playing the bass guitar, inspired by Gene Simmons. It was during this time that he met fellow bassist and future bandmate Mikko "Mige" Paananen. While still in school, Valo formed his first band called B.L.O.O.D., which played its first and only show in front of the music class. Around the age of ten, Valo joined the Eloveena Boys, for which he wrote his first song. In seventh grade, Valo met guitarist Mikko "Linde" Lindström and the two began playing together in Aurora, with Valo on the drums. During his time in Aurora, Valo also played bass and drums in various other bands and attended the Helsinki Pop & Jazz Conservatory. He also applied to the Sibelius Upper Secondary School of music and dance, but was rejected, and eventually dropped out of school altogether to concentrate on his music. From 1992 to 1993, Valo played bass in the Donits-Osmo Experience. Valo was permitted not to perform Finland's national military service, due to his asthma.

Career.

HIM.

Valo and bassist Mikko "Mige" Paananen first formed the band HIM in 1991. The group broke-up in 1993, but reformed in 1995. Joined by guitarist Mikko "Linde" Lindström, keyboardist Antto Melasniemi and drummer Juhana "Pätkä" Rantala, HIM released their debut album "Greatest Lovesongs Vol. 666" in 1997. In 2000, now with drummer Gas Lipstick and keyboardist Juska Salminen, the band released "Razorblade Romance", which reached number one in Finland, Austria and Germany. The first single "Join Me in Death" also charted at number one in Finland and Germany, eventually going platinum in the former. Following the addition of keyboardist Janne "Burton" Puurtinen, HIM released "Deep Shadows and Brilliant Highlights" and "Love Metal" in 2001 and 2003, respectively. Both cracked the top ten in several countries, and became the band's first albums to chart in the United Kingdom and the United States.  In 2005, HIM released "Dark Light", which became their most successful album to date, going gold in Germany, the UK, the US, and platinum in Finland. In 2007, HIM released "Venus Doom", which went gold in Finland and Germany, and gave the band their highest US chart position ever at number twelve. After 2010's "", the band went on hiatus after drummer Gas Lipstick was diagnosed with a repetitive stress injury and nerve damage in his hands. HIM eventually regrouped and released the album "Tears on Tape" in 2013. In 2015, Gas Lipstick announced his departure from HIM after sixteen years to pursue other musical projects. He was subsequently replaced by Jukka "Kosmo" Kröger. On 5 March 2017, HIM announced the end of the band following a farewell tour that same year. HIM played its final show on New Year's Eve 2017 as a part of the band's annual Helldone Festival.

Collaborations and guest appearances.

Valo has collaborated with many different artists during his career, often under different pseudonyms. Between 1997 and 2004, Valo performed back-up vocals on five albums by The 69 Eyes, and appeared in the music video for the song "Wasting the Dawn". In 1999, he sang back-up on Tehosekoitin's album "Freak Out", and performed three songs with Finnish schlager band Agents. In 2000, Valo contributed a track for the Tuomari Nurmio tribute album "Tuomarin todistajat", and in 2001, he played drums on Daniel Lioneye's album "The King of Rock 'n Roll" and sang back-up on Five Fifteen's album "Death of a Clown". In 2002 and 2004, Valo sang back-up on two albums by The Skreppers. In 2004, he also collaborated with Lowe Motor Corporation and Apocalyptica, performing the song "Bittersweet" with the latter, which also featured Lauri Ylönen of The Rasmus. In 2005, Valo was featured on the album "Hefty Fine" by the Bloodhound Gang, and performed at the "Roadrunner United" concert in New York City. In 2006, Valo played bass and sang back-up on "Welcome to Carcass Cuntry" by Jeff Walker und Die Fluffers, and made guest appearances on albums by Cradle of Filth and Isabelle's Gift. He also performed two songs for the Finnish compilation album "Synkkien laulujen maa", one of which was a duet with Kari Tapio. In August 2006, Valo joined Anathema's Daniel Cavanagh on stage twice for a performance of "Inner Silence". In 2007, Valo made a guest appearance on Manna's album "Sister", and performed the song "Summer Wine" with Polish-German actress and singer Natalia Avelon for the film "Eight Miles High". The song eventually went platinum in Germany.  In 2008, Valo sang back-up on Save Nuta's cover of "Rock 'n' Roll High School" by the Ramones. The track was a collaborative effort by several prominent Finnish musicians to save youth centers across the country. In 2010, Valo sang back-up vocals on Anathema's "We're Here Because We're Here" album, and remixed three songs with his brother Jesse Valo for the HIM album "SWRMXS". That same year he also mixed HIM bassist Mige's solo album "Cimmerica", which was released under the pseudonym MZ. In 2014, Valo was featured on the track "Whisper in the Chaos '97" by Lullacry, which was released on their compilation album "Legacy 1998-2014". At the 2014 Helldone Festival, Valo rejoined Daniel Lioneye on drums and made his live solo debut under the pseudonym Rambo Rimbaud. In 2016, Valo made guest appearances on releases by Teho Majamäki, MGT, The Mission and Andy McCoy. On 4 July 2016, he released his first solo single "Olet mun kaikuluotain", a cover of "Annie's Song" by John Denver, with Finnish lyrics by Hector. The song's music video would go on to win Video of the Year at the Emma Gala. In 2017, Valo provided the soundtrack for the virtual reality game "Downward Spiral: Prologue" by 3rd Eye Studios. He would go on to score the 2018 sequel "Downward Spiral: Horus Station" as well.  In 2018, Valo sang back-up on Andy McCoy's "Soul Satisfaction" EP and reunited with Agents to perform previously unreleased songs by Finnish singer-songwriter Rauli "Badding" Somerjoki. The first single "Orpolapsi kiurun" was released on 21 September 2018. Ville Valo and Agents performed at the annual Emma Gala on 2 February 2019, and released their self-titled album on 15 February. The album went gold in less than a week and debuted at number one on the Finnish Album Chart. The group began their Finnish tour in March, which concluded in August.  On 20 March 2020, Ville Valo released a three-song EP titled "Gothica Fennica Vol. 1", under the pseudonym VV.

Other work.

Valo has also done some work outside of music, mainly a few appearances in TV and film. In 1998, he played the role of "Lippumies" in the Ilppo Pohjola directed short film "Asphalto". Valo has often collaborated with skateboarder and "Jackass" member Bam Margera, appearing in his films "CKY 3", "", "411 Productions Presents: 61: The Bam Issue", "Jackass Number Two" and "", as well as the TV series "Viva La Bam". In 2008, Valo voiced the character "Moto Moto" in the Finnish dub of "". When asked about the possibility of becoming an actor, Valo responded: "I've had offers in the past. Nothing too big, nothing too interesting. But I'm not an actor. I've always felt that we need to sell about 80 million copies more for me to become an actor, a painter, an opera singer or a TV personality."  In 2005, Valo designed a limited line of Coca-Cola Light cans, with the proceeds going to the Red Cross.

Personal life.

Valo currently resides in Helsinki, Finland. He previously lived in a 19th-century tower house designed by Carl Ludvig Engel in Munkkiniemi, which he bought in 2006. In 2015, the house was put back on sale. Valo is an asthmatic, and non-religious. He has been a vegetarian since he was a teenager, and currently has an "almost vegan" diet.  Valo dated Finnish television host and model Jonna Nygrén in the early 2000s. The two became engaged in 2005, but broke-up in spring 2006. The couple reunited in the summer of 2006, but broke-up again in 2007. In 2009, Valo was involved in a relationship with an undisclosed partner, which served as the main inspiration for HIM's 2010 album "". In March 2012, Valo was linked to Parisian model Sandra Mittica. In April 2015, the couple were reported to have ended their relationship. Since September 2016, Valo has been linked to Finnish model Christel Karhu.  In 2004, Valo was invited to the Presidential Independence Day reception at Finland's presidential palace, but was unable to attend due to a fever. He attended later in 2006.

Substance abuse and legal troubles.

On more than one occasion Valo has been reported to have performed intoxicated. In 2000, he nearly fell off the balcony of a hotel while under the influence, but was stopped by friends. During a 2005 US tour, Valo's drink was spiked in Minneapolis. He suffered minor injuries and was robbed of his jacket, asthma medicine, cigarettes, credit cards and cell phone. In February 2006, Valo was reportedly arrested at his home in Finland after allegedly threatening to kill his neighbor and resisting arrest. He elaborated on the incident stating: "It was a guy just talking a lot of bull about me and my fiancée [...] And I got pissed off, I went to his door [...] I kicked the door, he opened the door and I told him that if he was ever gonna talk badly about me and my girl, he was gonna end up being dead, and I punched him in the face, and that's the whole thing."  During the making of HIM's 2007 album "Venus Doom", Valo's alcohol abuse worsened to the point where he was vomiting and defecating blood. According to Valo, he neither slept nor ate for weeks. Things came to a head, when Valo suffered a nervous breakdown during the recording process. He was able to recuperate, until he suffered a relapse during the album's mixing stage. Valo was eventually admitted to the Promises Rehabilitation Clinic in Malibu by the band's manager Seppo Vesterinen. Following his time in rehab, HIM released "Screamworks: Love in Theory and Practice", which was the band's first album Valo recorded entirely sober. Since then, he has relapsed, but Valo has said that he tries to balance his drinking, stating: "I'm an on and off guy. If I drink, I drink properly for long stretches of time. And if I don't drink, I don't drink at all."

Tattoos.

Valo is known to sport several tattoos. He has a total of five heartagram tattoos; one on the back of his neck, one on his lower stomach, one around his left nipple, one on his lower back, made to resemble a hexagram, and one on his right leg as the topper on a scepter of a pope with an astronaut's head, called the "Cosmic Pope". The heartagram around Valo's left nipple was done by Kat Von D to cover up the initial of a former girlfriend. Valo's left arm is covered with a full sleeve-tattoo, while his right arm has portraits of Timo K. Mukka, Charles Baudelaire and Charles Bukowski. On his right wrist, Valo has a heart surrounded by lettering, including the acronym "DILLIGAF" ("Do I look like I give a fuck?"), which he got together with his then-fiancée Jonna Nygrén. On his bicep, Valo has a monogram of "Venus Doom", as well as an hourglass, and an eye with a skull inside the pupil.  After getting engaged to Jonna Nygrén, Valo tattooed the letter "J" on his left ring finger but stated later on that he had removed it himself, using lit cigarettes. On his chest, Valo has a portrait of Maya Deren, and beneath it, a hexagram with malachim lettering. On his stomach, Valo has a portrait of Klaus Kinski sucking his thumb, while lying on a naked woman. On his back, Valo has the eyes of Edgar Allan Poe, which were done by Kat Von D and her then-husband Oliver Peck. On his lower back, Valo has the Estonian letter for "night", which he shares with his brother. The letter also has a minus sign inside one of the umlauts, which was done as a tribute to late Type O Negative singer Peter Steele. On his left leg, Valo also has an Egyptian symbol for "flame".

Artistry and influences.

Many of Valo's songs deal with themes of love. While talking about his songwriting, Valo stated: "I feel like there is no subject more important for a song than relationships. It's the only thing than moves me." He also takes some inspiration from literature, explaining: "As a guy who writes songs, I get excited about an idea, or a book, or a sentence. I don't necessarily get excited about the whole of Tolkien, I just get excited about Uruk-hai. Just a little detail that just makes my mind work overdrive." Valo and the rest of HIM referred to their music as "love metal", the idea of which was to combine more melodic and melancholic elements, with heavier influences. Valo has described HIM's music as "sentimental, hard-hitting rock". Some of Valo's favorite artists and musical influences include Black Sabbath, Type O Negative, KISS, Neil Young, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, King Diamond, Queen, Mötley Crüe, Twisted Sister, Nirvana, Iggy & the Stooges, Misfits, The Sisters of Mercy, Fields of the Nephilim, Faith No More, Johnny Cash, Bob Marley, Inner Circle, Depeche Mode, Elvis Presley, Rauli "Badding" Somerjoki and Tapio Rautavaara. Some of his non-musical influences include Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, William Shakespeare, Timo K. Mukka, Charles Baudelaire and Charles Bukowski, as well as Austin Osman Spare, Maya Deren, Yukio Mishima, Shigeo Fukuda and Akira Kurosawa. Much of HIM's success has been attributed to Valo's songwriting ability, as well as his image and charisma. In 2004, "Metal Hammer" magazine described Valo as one of the few new "rockstars" in music, stating: "HIM were like no other band. They had a special something, but more importantly they had a special someone. Ville shone like a star with his blend of Mick Jagger posturing and Brandon Lee's dark charms in "The Crow"". "Helsingin Sanomat" described Valo's image as utilizing "the tried and true James Dean formula, where sensitivity and edginess combined." Valo possesses a baritone voice type with a five octave range, and was found by VVN Music to possess the eight-highest vocal range of any known singer in popular music. Valo was ranked number 80 in "Hit Parader"s "Top 100 Metal Vocalists of All Time". "Loudwire" ranked him as the fourteenth greatest metal frontman of the 21st century, stating: "His baritone voice is undeniably gorgeous, his vampiric charisma is almost hypnotic, male fans desperately attempt to emulate him and female fans scream ballistically as if he was the second coming of Elvis." In 2004 and 2005, Valo was awarded the Golden God Award and the Icon Award, respectively, at the Metal Hammer Golden Gods Awards. In 2004, "Kerrang!" magazine named him the biggest sex symbol in the world, and in 2011, Valo was voted the "Hottest Dude In Hard Rock And Metal" by the readers of "Revolver" magazine. In 2018, Valo was voted "Finland's Hottest Guy" in a poll by MTV. Regarding these accolades, Valo has stated: "To be honest, I don't know what a sex symbol is. Compliments are nice, but I've always liked compliments on the music more."  On his twentieth birthday, Valo created the heartagram, which would eventually become the symbol of HIM. A combination of a heart and a pentagram, the heartagram is meant to represent the juxtaposition of "the soft and the hard, the male and the female, the yin and the yang". Musically the heart is meant to represent the softer side of the band, while the pentagram conveys the heavier elements of their sound. Since its creation, Valo has stated that the heartagram "is probably the best thing [he's] ever come-up with", and that it's "worth a lot more than money" and "bigger than [the] band". He noted in 2016, "There are a lot of people who have Heartagram tattoos now. Kat Von D has one, Steve-O has a dickagram, which is like a Heartagram but ends with a dick. It’s started to have a life of its own: there are a lot of people who have them who don’t actually know what it was, don’t relate it to the band, and in that sense, I consider that to be my greatest achievement. So it’ll be nice to have it on my tombstone. And it’ll be nice to see where it’s going to go next."

Awards.

Metal Hammer Golden Gods Awards BMI Awards Emma Awards

Ville Hermanni Valo (born 22 November 1976) is a Finnish singer, songwriter and musician, best known as the lead vocalist of the gothic rock band HIM. Influenced by the likes of KISS, Black Sabbath and Type O Negative, Valo began his career playing bass and drums in various bands around his hometown of Helsinki. In 1991, he formed HIM, which would go on to become one of the most successful Finnish bands of all time, and the first to receive a gold record in the United States. He performed as the band's lead singer and chief songwriter from their inception until their dissolution in 2017. Valo is also credited as the creator of the heartagram, the band's trademarked symbol which nonetheless has achieved great popularity outside of the band's fanbase.

维勒·瓦罗()是芬兰著名摇滚乐队HIM的主唱、歌曲创作者和领导人物。HIM一共推出了8张录音室专辑,3张特别大碟及1张EP。他们在2006年发行的专辑《Dark Light (HIM album)》得到美国唱片业协会(RIAA)的金唱片认证,成为第一队,也是唯一一队夺得这个殊荣的芬兰乐队。在芬兰,HIM的5张专辑获得了白金唱片认证,并且第2张专辑《Razorblade Romance》获得了双白金唱片认证与德国的白金唱片认证。


Education and early life.

Lars Onsager was born in Kristiania (now Oslo), Norway. His father was a lawyer. After completing secondary school in Oslo, he attended the Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH) in Trondheim, graduating as a chemical engineer in 1925.

Career and research.

In 1925 he arrived at a correction to the Debye-Hückel theory of electrolytic solutions, to specify Brownian movement of ions in solution, and during 1926 published it. He traveled to Zürich, where Peter Debye was teaching, and confronted Debye, telling him his theory was wrong. He impressed Debye so much that he was invited to become Debye's assistant at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH), where he remained until 1928.

Johns Hopkins University.

Eventually in 1928 he went to the United States to take a faculty position at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. At JHU he had to teach freshman classes in chemistry, and it quickly became apparent that, while he was a genius at developing theories in physical chemistry, he had little talent for teaching. He was dismissed by JHU after one semester.

Brown University.

On leaving JHU, he accepted a position (involving the teaching of statistical mechanics to graduate students in chemistry) at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where it became clear that he was no better at teaching advanced students than freshmen, but he made significant contributions to statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. The only graduate student who could really understand his lectures on electrolyte systems, Raymond Fuoss, worked under him and eventually joined him on the Yale chemistry faculty. In 1933, when the Great Depression limited Brown's ability to support a faculty member who was only useful as a researcher and not a teacher, he was let go by Brown, being hired after a trip to Europe by Yale University, where he remained for most of the rest of his life, retiring in 1972.  His research at Brown was concerned mainly with the effects on diffusion of temperature gradients, and produced the Onsager reciprocal relations, a set of equations published in 1929 and, in an expanded form, in 1931, in statistical mechanics whose importance went unrecognized for many years. However, their value became apparent during the decades following World War II, and by 1968 they were considered important enough to gain Onsager that year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 1933, just before taking up the position at Yale, Onsager traveled to Austria to visit electrochemist Hans Falkenhagen. He met Falkenhagen's sister-in-law, Margrethe Arledter. They were married on September 7, 1933, and had three sons and a daughter.

Yale University.

At Yale, an embarrassing situation occurred: he had been hired as a postdoctoral fellow, but it was discovered that he had never received a Ph.D. While he had submitted an outline of his work in reciprocal relations to the Norwegian Institute of Technology, they had decided it was too incomplete to qualify as a doctoral dissertation. He was told that he could submit one of his published papers to the Yale faculty as a dissertation, but insisted on doing a new research project instead. His dissertation, entitled, "Solutions of the Mathieu equation of period 4 pi and certain related functions", was beyond the comprehension of the chemistry and physics faculty, and only when some members of the mathematics department, including the chairman, insisted that the work was good enough that "they" would grant the doctorate if the chemistry department would not, was he granted a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1935. Even before the dissertation was finished, he was appointed assistant professor in 1934, and promoted to associate professor in 1940. He quickly showed at Yale the same traits he had at JHU and Brown: he produced brilliant theoretical research, but was incapable of giving a lecture at a level that a student (even a graduate student) could comprehend. He was also unable to direct the research of graduate students, except for the occasional outstanding one.  During the late 1930s, Onsager researched the dipole theory of dielectrics, making improvements for another topic that had been studied by Peter Debye. However, when he submitted his paper to a journal that Debye edited in 1936, it was rejected. Debye would not accept Onsager's ideas until after World War II. During the 1940s, Onsager studied the statistical-mechanical theory of phase transitions in solids, deriving a mathematically elegant theory which was enthusiastically received. In what is widely considered a tour de force of mathematical physics, he obtained the exact solution for the two dimensional Ising model in zero field in 1944.  In 1960 he was awarded an honorary degree, doctor techn. honoris causa, at the Norwegian Institute of Technology, later part of Norwegian University of Science and Technology.  In 1945, Onsager was naturalized as an American citizen, and the same year he was awarded the title of "J. Willard Gibbs Professor of Theoretical Chemistry". This was particularly appropriate because Onsager, like Willard Gibbs, had been involved primarily in the application of mathematics to problems in physics and chemistry and, in a sense, could be considered to be continuing in the same areas Gibbs had pioneered. In 1947, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and in 1950 he joined the ranks of Alpha Chi Sigma.  After World War II, Onsager researched new topics of interest. He proposed a theoretical explanation of the superfluid properties of liquid helium in 1949; two years later the physicist Richard Feynman independently proposed the same theory. He also worked on the theories of liquid crystals and the electrical properties of ice. While on a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Cambridge, he worked on the magnetic properties of metals. He developed important ideas on the quantization of magnetic flux in metals. He was awarded the Lorentz Medal in 1958, Willard Gibbs Award in 1962, and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1968. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1975.

After Yale.

In 1972 Onsager retired from Yale and became emeritus. He then became a member of the Center for Theoretical Studies, University of Miami, and was appointed Distinguished University Professor of Physics. At the University of Miami he remained active in guiding and inspiring postdoctoral students as his teaching skills, although not his lecturing skills, had improved during the course of his career. He developed interests in semiconductor physics, biophysics and radiation chemistry. However, his death came before he could produce any breakthroughs comparable to those of his earlier years.

Personal life.

He remained in Florida until his death from an aneurysm in Coral Gables, Florida in 1976. Onsager was buried next to John Gamble Kirkwood at New Haven's Grove Street Cemetery. While Kirkwood's tombstone has a long list of awards and positions, including the American Chemical Society Award in Pure Chemistry, the Richards Medal, and the Lewis Award, Onsager's tombstone, in its original form, simply said "Nobel Laureate". When Onsager's wife Gretel died in 1991 and was buried there, his children added an asterisk after "Nobel Laureate," and "*etc." in the lower right corner of the stone.

Legacy.

The Norwegian Institute of Technology established the Lars Onsager Lecture and The Lars Onsager Professorship in 1993 to award outstanding scientists in the scientific fields of Lars Onsager; Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics. In 1997 his sons and daughter donated his scientific works and professional belongings to NTNU (before 1996 NTH) in Trondheim, Norway as his Alma Mater. These are now organized as "The Lars Onsager Archive" at the Gunnerus Library in Trondheim.

Lars Onsager (November 27, 1903 – October 5, 1976) was a Norwegian-born American physical chemist and theoretical physicist. He held the Gibbs Professorship of Theoretical Chemistry at Yale University. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1968.

拉斯·昂萨格(,1903年-11月27日-1976年-10月5日),挪威出生的美国化学家。他因发现非平衡态热力学的一般关系,提出了倒易关系而获得1968年诺贝尔化学奖。


Other names.

Other names for the hypothetical continent have included Terra Australis Ignota, Terra Australis Incognita ("the unknown land of the south") or Terra Australis Nondum Cognita ("the southern land not yet known"). Other names were Brasiliae Australis ("the south of Brazil"), and Magellanica ("the land of Magellan").

Change of name.

During the eighteenth century, today's Australia was not conflated with Terra Australis, as it sometimes was in the twentieth century. Captain Cook and his contemporaries knew that the fifth continent (today's Australia), which they called "New Holland", was entirely separate from the imagined (but still undiscovered) sixth continent (today's Antarctica).  In the nineteenth century, the colonial authorities in Sydney re-allocated the name "Australia" to New Holland and its centuries-old Dutch name eventually disappeared. Meanwhile, having lost its name of "Australia", the south polar continent was nameless for decades until "Antarctica" was coined in the 1890s.  In the early 1800s, British explorer Matthew Flinders popularized the naming of Australia after "Terra Australis", giving his rationale that there was "no probability" of finding any significant land mass anywhere more south than Australia. The continent that would come to be named Antarctica would be explored decades after Flinders' 1814 book on Australia, which he had titled "A Voyage to Terra Australis", and after his naming switch had gained popularity.

Origins of Terra Australis.

Ptolemy (2nd century AD), believed that the Indian Ocean was enclosed on the south by land, and that the lands of the Northern Hemisphere should be balanced by land in the south. Marcus Tullius Cicero used the term "cingulus australis" ("southern zone") in referring to the Antipodes in "Somnium Scipionis" ("Dream of Scipio"). The land ("terra" in Latin) in this zone was the "Terra Australis".  Legends of Terra Australis Incognita—an "unknown land of the South"—date back to Roman times and before, and were commonplace in medieval geography, although not based on any documented knowledge of the continent. Ptolemy's maps, which became well known in Europe during the Renaissance, did not actually depict such a continent, but they did show an Africa which had no southern oceanic boundary (and which therefore might extend all the way to the South Pole), and also raised the possibility that the Indian Ocean was entirely enclosed by land. Christian thinkers did not discount the idea that there might be land beyond the southern seas, but the issue of whether it could be inhabited was controversial.  The first depiction of Terra Australis on a globe was probably on Johannes Schöner's lost 1523 globe on which Oronce Fine is thought to have based his 1531 double cordiform (heart-shaped) map of the world. On this landmass he wrote "recently discovered but not yet completely explored". The body of water beyond the tip of South America is called the "Mare Magellanicum," one of the first uses of navigator Ferdinand Magellan's name in such a context.  Schöner called the continent "Brasiliae Australis" in his 1533 tract, "Opusculum geographicum". In it, he explained: Brasilia Australis is an immense region toward Antarcticum, newly discovered but not yet fully surveyed, which extends as far as Melacha and somewhat beyond. The inhabitants of this region lead good, honest lives and are not Anthropophagi [cannibals] like other barbarian nations; they have no letters, nor do they have kings, but they venerate their elders and offer them obedience; they give the name Thomas to their children [after St Thomas the Apostle]; close to this region lies the great island of Zanzibar at 102.00 degrees and 27.30 degrees South.

Mapping the southern continent.

16th century.

Explorers of the Age of Discovery, from the late 15th century on, proved that Africa was almost entirely surrounded by sea, and that the Indian Ocean was accessible from both west and east. These discoveries reduced the area where the continent could be found; however, many cartographers held to Aristotle's opinion. Scientists such as Gerardus Mercator (1569) and Alexander Dalrymple as late as 1767 argued for its existence, with such arguments as that there should be a large landmass in the south as a counterweight to the known landmasses in the Northern Hemisphere. As new lands were discovered, they were often assumed to be parts of the hypothetical continent.  The German cosmographer and mathematician Johannes Schöner (1477–1547) constructed a terrestrial globe in 1515, based on the world map and globe made by Martin Waldseemüller and his colleagues at St. Dié in Lorraine in 1507. Where Schöner departs most conspicuously from Waldseemüller is in his globe's depiction of an Antarctic continent, called by him Brasilie Regio. His continent is based, however tenuously, on the report of an actual voyage: that of the Portuguese merchants Nuno Manuel and Cristóvão de Haro to the River Plate, and related in the "Newe Zeytung auss Presillg Landt" ("New Tidings from the Land of Brazil") published in Augsburg in 1514. The "Zeytung" described the Portuguese voyagers passing through a strait between the southernmost point of America, or Brazil, and a land to the south west, referred to as "vndtere Presill" (or "Brasilia inferior").  This supposed "strait" was in fact the Rio de la Plata (or the San Matias Gulf). By "vndtere Presill", the Zeytung meant that part of Brazil in the lower latitudes, but Schöner mistook it to mean the land on the southern side of the "strait", in higher latitudes, and so gave to it the opposite meaning. On this slender foundation he constructed his circum-Antarctic continent to which, for the reasons that he does not explain, he gave an annular, or ring shape. In an accompanying explanatory treatise, "Luculentissima quaedam terrae totius descriptio" ("A Most Lucid Description of All Lands"), he explained: "The Portuguese, thus, sailed around this region, the Brasilie Regio, and discovered the passage very similar to that of our Europe (where we reside) and situated laterally between east and west.  From one side the land on the other is visible; and the cape of this region about 60 miles away, much as if one were sailing eastward through the Straits of Gibraltar or Seville and Barbary or Morocco in Africa, as our Globe shows toward the Antarctic Pole. Further, the distance is only moderate from this Region of Brazil to Malacca, where St. Thomas was crowned with martyrdom."  On this scrap of information, united with the concept of the Antipodes inherited from Graeco-Roman antiquity, Schöner constructed his representation of the southern continent. His strait served as inspiration for Ferdinand Magellan's expedition to reach the Moluccas by a westward route.  He took Magellan's discovery of Tierra del Fuego in 1520 as further confirmation of its existence, and on his globes of 1523 and 1533 he described it as "TERRA AVSTRALIS RECENTER INVENTA SED NONDUM PLENE COGNITA" ("Terra Australis, recently discovered but not yet fully known"). It was taken up by his followers, the French cosmographer Oronce Fine in his world map of 1531, and the Flemish cartographers Gerardus Mercator in 1538 and Abraham Ortelius in 1570. Schöner's concepts influenced the Dieppe school of mapmakers, notably in their representation of Jave la Grande. "Terra Australis" was depicted on the mid-16th-century Dieppe maps, where its coastline appeared just south of the islands of the East Indies; it was often elaborately charted, with a wealth of fictitious detail. There was much interest in Terra Australis among Norman and Breton merchants at that time. In 1566 and 1570, Francisque and André d'Albaigne presented Gaspard de Coligny, Admiral of France, with projects for establishing relations with the Austral lands. Although the Admiral gave favourable consideration to these initiatives, they came to nought when Coligny was killed in 1572.  Gerardus Mercator believed in the existence of a large Southern continent on the basis of cosmographic reasoning, set out in the abstract of his "Atlas or Cosmographic Studies in Five Books," as related by his biographer, Walter Ghim, who said that even though Mercator was not ignorant that the Austral continent still lay hidden and unknown, he believed it could be "demonstrated and proved by solid reasons and arguments to yield in its geometric proportions, size and weight, and importance to neither of the other two, nor possibly to be lesser or smaller, otherwise the constitution of the world could not hold together at its centre".  The Flemish geographer and cartographer, Cornelius Wytfliet, wrote concerning the "Terra Australis" in his 1597 book, "Descriptionis Ptolemaicae Augmentum: The terra Australis is therefore the southernmost of all other lands, directly beneath the antarctic circle; extending beyond the tropic of Capricorn to the West, it ends almost at the equator itself, and separated by a narrow strait lies on the East opposite to New Guinea, only known so far by a few shores because after one voyage and another that route has been given up and unless sailors are forced and driven by stress of winds it is seldom visited. The terra Australis begins at two or three degrees below the equator and it is said by some to be of such magnitude that if at any time it is fully discovered they think it will be the fifth part of the world.  Adjoining Guinea on the right are the numerous and vast Solomon Islands which lately became famous by the voyage of Alvarus Mendanius.  Juan Fernandez, sailing from Chile in 1576, claimed he had discovered the Southern Continent. The "Polus Antarcticus" map of 1641 by Henricus Hondius, bears the inscription: ""Insulas esse a Nova Guinea usque ad Fretum Magellanicum affirmat Hernandus Galego, qui ad eas explorandas missus fuit a Rege Hispaniae Anno 1576" (Hernando Gallego, who in the year 1576 was sent by the King of Spain to explore them, affirms that there are islands from New Guinea up to the Strait of Magellan)".

17th century.

Luis Váez de Torres, a Galician or Portuguese navigator who commanded the "San Pedro y San Pablo", the "San Pedrico" and the tender or yacht, "Los Tres Reyes Magos" during the 1605–1606 expedition led by Pedro Fernandes de Queiros in quest of the Southern Continent, proved the existence of a passage south of New Guinea, now known as Torres Strait. Commenting on this in 1622, the Dutch cartographer and publisher of Queiros' eighth memorial, Hessel Gerritsz, noted on his "Map of the Pacific Ocean:" "Those who sailed with the yacht of Pedro Fernando de Quiros in the neighbourhood of New Guinea to 10 degrees westward through many islands and shoals and over 23 and 24 fathoms for as many as 40 days, estimated that Nova Guinea does not extend beyond 10 degrees to the south; if this be so, then the land from 9 to 14 degrees would be a separate land".  Pedro Fernandes de Queirós, another Portuguese navigator sailing for the Spanish Crown, saw a large island south of New Guinea in 1606, which he named La Austrialia del Espiritu Santo. He represented this to the King of Spain as the Terra Australis incognita. In his 10th Memorial (1610), Queirós said: "New Guinea is the top end of the Austral Land of which I treat [discuss], and that people, and customs, with all the rest referred to, resemble them".  Dutch father and son Isaac and Jacob Le Maire established the Australische Compagnie (Australian Company) in 1615 to trade with Terra Australis, which they called "Australia".  The Dutch expedition to Valdivia of 1643 intended to round Cape Horn sailing through Le Maire Strait but strong winds made it instead drift south and east. The small fleet led by Hendrik Brouwer managed to enter the Pacific ocean sailing south of the island disproving earlier beliefs that it was part of Terra Australis.  The cartographic depictions of the southern continent in the 16th and early 17th centuries, as might be expected for a concept based on such abundant conjecture and minimal data, varied wildly from map to map; in general, the continent shrank as potential locations were reinterpreted. At its largest, the continent included Tierra del Fuego, separated from South America by a small strait; New Guinea; and what would come to be called Australia. In Ortelius's atlas "Theatrum Orbis Terrarum", published in 1570, Terra Australis extends north of the Tropic of Capricorn in the Pacific Ocean.  As long as it appeared on maps at all, the continent minimally included the unexplored lands around the South Pole, but generally much larger than the real Antarctica, spreading far north – especially in the Pacific Ocean. New Zealand, first seen by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman in 1642, was regarded by some as a part of the continent.

18th century.

Alexander Dalrymple, the Examiner of Sea Journals for the English East India Company, whilst translating some Spanish documents captured in the Philippines in 1762, found de Torres's testimony. This discovery led Dalrymple to publish the "Historical Collection of the Several Voyages and Discoveries in the South Pacific Ocean" in 1770–1771. Dalrymple presented a beguiling tableau of the Terra Australis, or Southern Continent: The number of inhabitants in the Southern Continent is probably more than 50 millions, considering the extent, from the eastern part discovered by Juan Fernandez, to the western coast seen by Tasman, is about 100 deg. of longitude, which in the latitude of 40 deg. amounts to 4596 geographic, or 5323 stature miles. This is a greater extent than the whole civilized part of Asia, from Turkey to the eastern extremity of China. There is at present no trade from Europe thither, though the scraps from this table would be sufficient to maintain the power, dominion, and sovereignty of Britain, by employing all its manufacturers and ships. Whoever considers the Peruvian empire, where arts and industry flourished under one of the wisest systems of government, which was founded by a stranger, must have very sanguine expectations of the southern continent, from whence it is more than probable Mango Capac, the first Inca, was derived, and must be convinced that the country, from whence Mango Capac introduced the comforts of civilized life, cannot fail of amply rewarding the fortunate people who shall bestow letters instead of quippos (quipus), and iron in place of more awkward substitutes. Dalrymple's claim of the existence of an unknown continent aroused widespread interest and prompted the British government in 1769 to order James Cook in HM Bark "Endeavour" to seek out the Southern Continent to the South and West of Tahiti, discovered in June 1767 by Samuel Wallis in and named by him King George Island. The London press reported in June 1768 that two ships would be sent to the newly discovered island and from there to "attempt the Discovery of the Southern Continent". A subsequent press report stated: "We are informed, that the Island which Captain Wallis has discovered in the South-Sea, and named George's Land, is about fifteen hundred Leagues to the Westward and to Leeward of the Coast of Peru, and about five-and-thirty Leagues in circumference; that its principal and almost sole national Advantage is, its Situation for exploring the Terra Incognita of the Southern Hemisphere. The Endeavour, a North-Country Cat, is purchased by the Government, and commanded by a Lieutenant of the Navy; she is fitting out at Deptford for the South-Sea, thought to be intended for the newly-discovered Island". The aims of the expedition were revealed in days following: "To-morrow morning Mr. Banks, Dr. Solano [sic], with Mr. Green, the Astronomer, will set out for Deal, to embark on board the Endeavour, Capt. Cook, for the South Seas, under the direction of the Royal Society, to observe the Transit of Venus next summer, and to make discoveries to the South and West of Cape Horn". The London "Gazetteer" was more explicit when it reported on 18 August 1768: "The gentlemen, who are to sail in a few days for George's Land, the new discovered island in the Pacific ocean, with an intention to observe the Transit of Venus, are likewise, we are credibly informed, to attempt some new discoveries in that vast unknown tract, above the latitude 40". The results of this first voyage of James Cook in respect of the quest for the Southern Continent were summed up by Cook himself. He wrote in his Journal on 31 March 1770 that the "Endeavour's" voyage "must be allowed to have set aside the most, if not all, the Arguments and proofs that have been advanced by different Authors to prove that there must be a Southern Continent; I mean to the Northward of 40 degrees South, for what may lie to the Southward of that Latitude I know not".  The second voyage of James Cook aboard explored the South Pacific for the landmass between 1772 and 1775 whilst also testing the Larcum Kendall's K1 chronometer as a method for measuring longitude.

Decline of the idea.

Over the centuries the idea of Terra Australis gradually lost its hold. In 1615, Jacob le Maire and Willem Schouten's rounding of Cape Horn proved that Tierra del Fuego was a relatively small island, while in 1642 Abel Tasman's first Pacific voyage proved that Australia was not part of the mythical southern continent. Much later, James Cook sailed around most of New Zealand in 1770, showing that even it could not be part of a large continent. On his second voyage he circumnavigated the globe at a very high southern latitude, at some places even crossing the south polar circle, showing that any possible southern continent must lie well within the cold polar areas. There could be no extension into regions with a temperate climate, as had been thought before. In 1814, Matthew Flinders published the book "A Voyage to Terra Australis." Flinders had concluded that the Terra Australis as hypothesized by Aristotle and Ptolemy did not exist, so he wanted the name applied to what he saw as the next best thing: "Australia". He wrote: There is no probability, that any other detached body of land, of nearly equal extent, will ever be found in a more southern latitude; the name Terra Australis will, therefore, remain descriptive of the geographical importance of this country, and of its situation on the globe: it has antiquity to recommend it; and, having no reference to either of the two claiming nations, appears to be less objectionable than any other which could have been selected....with the accompanying note at the bottom of the page: Had I permitted myself any innovation upon the original term, it would have been to convert it into AUSTRALIA; as being more agreeable to the ear, and an assimilation to the names of the other great portions of the earth.  His conclusion would soon be revealed as a mistake, but by that time the name had stuck.

The Province of Beach.

A land feature known as the "Province of Beach" or "Boeach" – from the Latin "Provincia boëach" – appears to have resulted from mistranscriptions of a name in Marco Polo's "Il Milione" (Book III). Polo described his journey by sea from China to India by way of Champa ("provincia ciamba"; modern southern Vietnam), "Java Major"), "Locach" (modern Lop Buri), and Sumatra ("Java Minor"). In Cantonese, Lavo (an early name of Lop Buri) was pronounced "Lo-huk" 羅斛 and "Locach" was Marco Polo's transcription of this name. According to Polo, Locach was a kingdom where gold was "so plentiful that no one who did not see it could believe it". Polo's narrative describes the route southward from Champa toward Sumatra, but by a slip of the pen the name "Java" (which Polo did not himself visit) was substituted for "Champa" as the point of departure, thereby mis-locating Sumatra and Lochach south of Java (rather than Champa). Consequently, some geographers believed that Sumatra and Lochcach were near, or extensions of, "Terra Australis".  In the German cursive script, "Locach" and "Boeach" look similar. A feature known as the "Province of Beach" or "Boeach" – from the Latin "Provincia boëach" – appears on European maps as early as the 15th century. On a map of the world published in Florence in 1489 by Henricus Martellus, the Latin name "provincia boëach" is given to a southern neighbour of Champa. In fact, by 1532, in an edition of Marco Polo's "Travels", Locach was changed to "Boëach", later shortened to "Beach".  By the mid-16th century, according to Henry Yule, the editor of a modern (1921) edition of Polo's "Travels", some geographers and cartographers followed the error in older editions of Polo that "placed... the land of "Boeach" (or Locac)" south-east of Java and "introduced in their maps a continent in that situation". Gerard Mercator did just that on his 1541 globe, placing "Beach provincia aurifera" ("Beach the gold-bearing province") in the northernmost part of the "Terra Australis" in accordance with the faulty text of Marco Polo's "Travels". The landmass of Beach remained in this location on Mercator's world map of 1569, with the amplified description, quoting Marco Polo, "Beach provincia aurifera quam pauci ex alienis regionibus adeunt propter gentis inhumanitatem" ("Beach the gold-bearing province, wither few go from other countries because of the inhumanity of its people") with "Lucach regnum" shown somewhat to its south west. Following Mercator, Abraham Ortelius also showed and in these locations on his world map of 1571.  In 1596, on a popular map by Jan Huygen van Linschoten, showed and, projecting from the map's southern edge as the northernmost parts of the "Terra Australis" long hypothesized by Europeans. Ironically, an accidental encounter by the Dutch vessel "Eendracht", commanded by Dirk Hartog, with Shark Bay, Western Australia in 1616, appeared to confirm that land existed where the maps showed "Beach"; Hartog named the wider landmass "Eendrachtsland", after his ship. Nevertheless, the old name persisted for some time: in August 1642, the Council of the Dutch East India Company – evidently still relying on Linschoten's map – despatched Abel Tasman and Franchoijs Jacobszoon Visscher on a voyage of exploration to areas, including Beach and its purported gold, between the Cape of Good Hope and Staten Land (near Cape Horn) and south of the Solomon Islands. which one of the objects was to obtain knowledge of "all the totally unknown provinces of Beach".

Antarctica.

Antarctica was finally sighted in the hypothetical area of Terra Australis in 1820. The extent of Terra Australis was finally determined, also proving the Southern Hemisphere has much less land than the Northern.

In fiction.

The unexplored southern continent was a frequent subject of fantastic fiction in the 17th and 18th centuries in the imaginary voyages genre. Among the works which dealt with imaginary visits to the continent (which at the time was still believed to be real) were:

Terra Australis (Latin for "South Land") was a hypothetical continent first posited in antiquity and which appeared on maps between the 15th and 18th centuries. The existence of Terra Australis was not based on any survey or direct observation, but rather on the idea that continental land in the Northern Hemisphere should be balanced by land in the Southern Hemisphere. This theory of balancing land has been documented as early as the 5th century on maps by Macrobius, who uses the term Australis on his maps.

未知的南方大陆()是15世纪至18世纪时,于欧洲地图上出现的假想大陆。又称为「麦哲伦洲」()。明代《坤舆万国全图》将 Magallanica / Magellanica 以中文标示为墨瓦蜡泥加。


Geology.

In common with the rest of the Western Isles, Barra is formed from the oldest rocks in Britain, the Lewisian gneiss which dates from the Archaean eon. Some of the gneiss in the east of the island is noted as being pyroxene-bearing. Layered textures or foliation in this metamorphic rock is typically around 30° to the east or northeast. Palaeoproterozoic age metadiorites and metatonalites forming a part of the East Barra Meta-igneous Complex occur around Castlebay as they do on the neighbouring islands of Vatersay and Flodday. A few metabasic dykes intrude the gneiss in the east. The island is traversed by a handful of normal faults running WNW-ESE and by west-facing thrust faults bringing nappes of gneiss from the east. Blown sand masks the bedrock around Borve and Allisdale as it does west of Barra airport. Peat deposits are mapped across Beinn Chliaid and Beinn Sgurabhal in the north of the island.

Geography.

The Isle of Barra is roughly in area, long and wide. A single-track road, the A888, runs around the coast of the southern part of the island following the flattest land and serving the many coastal settlements. The interior of the island here is hilly and uninhabited. The west and north of the island has white sandy beaches consisting of sand created from marine shells adjoining the grassed, while the south east side has numerous rocky inlets. To the north a sandy peninsula runs to the beach airport and Eoligarry.

Places of interest.

The main village is Castlebay ("") in a sheltered bay, where Kisimul Castle sits on a small islet not far from shore; giving the village its name. This is the main harbour.  A smaller medieval tower house,, is in the middle of Loch St Clare on the west side of the island at Tangasdale.  The highest elevation on the island is Heaval, near the top of which is a prominent white marble statue of the Madonna and Child, called "Our Lady of the Sea", which was erected during the Marian year of 1954. The predominant faith on the island is Catholicism and the Catholic church dedicated to Our Lady of the Sea is apparent to those arriving at Castlebay.  Other places of interest on the island include a ruined church and museum at, a number of Iron Age brochs such as those at and, and a range of other Iron Age and later structures which have recently been excavated and recorded.  Barra is connected by a modern causeway to the smaller island of Vatersay, population 90.

History.

Early history.

During the construction of a road in the 1990s, the discovery of a near-complete pottery beaker dating from 2500BC established that there has been a human presence on Barra since the neolithic era. As well as pottery, a number of stone remains were found, including a neolithic "work platform", which complement the several standing stones scattered around the island. In the hills to the north of Borve, there is a large chambered cairn, sited in a prominent position.  Beyond the main island, a Bronze Age cemetery can be found on Vatersay, as well as an Iron Age broch; the remains of a similarly aged broch can be found on the east of Barra itself. Remains of Bronze Age burials and Iron Age roundhouses were also discovered in sand dunes, near the hamlet of Allasdale, following storms in 2007. Occupation of Barra continued during the later Iron Age, as evidenced by the discovery of a wheelhouse from the end of the period, which was later re-occupied between the 3rd and 4th centuries, and again in the 7th and 8th centuries.  Whoever the occupants were, they were followed in the 9th century by viking settlers, who gave the island at least part of its name. The latter is derived from two elements: "Barr" and Old Norse'("island"). "Barr" may represent the Gaelic personal name '. Or it could represent the Old Norse elements'or'("bare" or "rough"), or perhaps the Celtic element *"barr" ("top" or "peak"). According to the ancient Grettis saga, the first viking to arrive was named "Omund the Wooden-Leg".

Kingdom of the Isles.

The Vikings established the Kingdom of the Isles throughout the Hebrides, including Barra. Following Norwegian unification, the Kingdom of the Isles became a crown dependency of the Norwegian king; to the Norwegians it was "Suðreyjar" (meaning "southern isles"). Malcolm III of Scotland acknowledged in writing that they were not Scottish, and king Edgar quitclaimed any residual doubts. In the north of Barra, from this period survived a gravestone, on which a Celtic cross is present on one side, and runic inscriptions on the other.  However, in the mid 12th century, Somerled, a Norse-Gael of uncertain origin, launched a coup, which made Suðreyjar entirely independent. Following his death, Norwegian authority was nominally restored, but in practice the kingdom was divided between Somerled's heirs (), and the dynasty that Somerled had deposed (the Crovan dynasty)., a branch of Somerled's heirs, ruled Barra, as well as Uist, Eigg, Rùm, the Rough Bounds, Bute, Arran, and northern Jura.  In the 13th century, despite Edgar's quitclaim, Scottish forces attempted to conquer parts of Suðreyjar, culminating in the indecisive Battle of Largs. In 1266, the matter was settled by the Treaty of Perth, which transferred the whole of Suðreyjar to Scotland, in exchange for a very large sum of money. The Treaty expressly preserved the status of the rulers of Suðreyjar; the Clann Ruaidhri lands, excepting Bute, Arran, and Jura, became the "Lordship of Garmoran", a quasi-independent crown dependency, rather than an intrinsic part of Scotland.

Lordship of Garmoran.

In 1293, king John Balliol established the Sheriffdom of Skye, which included the Outer Hebrides. However, following his usurpation, the sheriffdom ceased to be mentioned, and the Garmoran lordship (including Barra) was confirmed to, the head of Clann Ruaidhri. In 1343, King David II issued a further charter to Ruaidhrí's son, Raghnall, but Raghnall's assassination, just three years later, left Garmoran in the hands of Amy of Garmoran.  The southern parts of the Kingdom of the Isles had become the "Lordship of the Isles", ruled by the MacDonalds (another group of Somerled's descendants). Amy married the MacDonald leader, John of Islay, but a decade later he divorced her, and married the king's niece instead (in return for a substantial dowry). As part of the divorce, John deprived his eldest son, Ranald, of the ability to inherit the Lordship of the Isles, in favour of a son by his new wife. As compensation, John granted Lordship of the Uists to Ranald's younger brother Godfrey, and made Ranald Lord of the remainder of Garmoran.  However, on Ranald's death, disputes between Godfrey and his nephews led to an enormous amount of violence. In 1427, frustrated with the level of violence generally in the highlands, King James I demanded that highland leaders should attend a meeting at Inverness. On arrival, many of the leaders were seized and imprisoned; Alexander MacGorrie, son of Godfrey, was considered to be one of the two most reprehensible, and after a quick showtrial, was immediately executed. As Alexander had by now inherited Godfrey's de facto position as Lord of Garmoran, and in view of Ranald's heirs being no less responsible for the violence, King James declared the Lordship of Garmoran forfeit.

Lairds and pirates.

Following the forfeiture, and in that same year, the Lord of the Isles granted Lairdship of Barra (and half of South Uist) to Giolla Adhamhnáin Mac Néill, Chief of Clan MacNeil.  Headquartering themselves at Kisimul Castle and making use of Birlinns, the MacNeils became famed for piracy after attacking English ships during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, They were summoned by King James VI - King of Scotland - to answer for their behaviour. The Chief, Roderick MacNeil ‘Rory the Turbulent’, argued that he thought king James would be pleased, since Elizabeth had beheaded his mother Mary, Queen of Scots. Pleased, King James released him. The descendants of the Clan Chiefs held on to Barra until 1838, when the island was sold to Colonel Gordon of Cluny (for the sum of £38,050). Roderick MacNeil, Chief of the MacNeils, had already abandoned Kisimul Castle, and built a mansion in the north of Barra; the ensuing debt was one of the reasons he sold the island. In common with many of the new Anglo-Scottish landlords, Colonel Gordon evicted most of the islanders to make way for sheep farming. The displaced islanders variously went to the Scottish mainland, Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Canada.  The MacNeil Chiefs were among the migrants, settling at first in Canada, but moving to America by the 20th century. Barra was restored to MacNeil ownership in 1937 when the Barra estate, which encompassed most of the island, was bought by Robert Lister Macneil, an American. In 2000, his heir, Ian Roderick Macneil (another American), let Kisimul Castle to Historic Scotland, on a 1000-year lease (for a rental of £1 and a bottle of whisky, per annum). In 2003, he transferred ownership of the Barra Estate to the Scottish Government; under Scottish law, the inhabitants have the right to take possession of the estate themselves, if they so wish.  Having been flown unofficially for at least a decade, the island's flag received official recognition from the Lyon Court and the Flag Institute in November 2017. The design is a white Nordic cross on a green background.

Media.

The island has featured in a variety of media.

Film and TV.

Besides being regularly featured in various television programmes on the Scottish Gaelic channel BBC Alba since it began broadcasting in 2008, Barra has also been part of:  The 1949 Ealing Studios comedy "Whisky Galore!" was filmed on Barra. The film is based on the novel "Whisky Galore" by Sir Compton Mackenzie, itself a fictionalised telling of the story of the SS "Politician", which ran aground with a cargo of some 50,000 cases of whisky on board in 1941. Mackenzie, who lived near the airport and died in 1972, is buried in a grave marked by a simple cross at cemetery, which is situated a little way up the hillside overlooking Eoligarry jetty. The sequel "Rockets Galore!" was also filmed in and around the island.  The sitcom "Dad's Army", broadcast from 1968 to 1977, Private Frazer claims to be from Barra, which he often describes as "a wild and lonely place".  Barra was also featured in the 2006 Channel 5 documentary "Extraordinary people: The Boy Who Lived Before", where a young boy named Cameron, who lived in Glasgow, claimed to have memories of a past life on the island.  The island was the location for the fifth (2011) and sixth series (2012) of the BBC Two documentary "An Island Parish" documenting the arrival and subsequent experiences of a new Catholic priest on the island - Father John Paul,

Books.

Franciscan priest, specialist in mystical theology and author Rayner Torrington wrote a book describing how he was influenced after a chance encounter on Barra by meeting a hermit called Peter Calvay who lived on the island of Hellisay for a number of years in the first half of the twentieth century. The book titled ‘Peter Calvay, hermit: A personal rediscovery of prayer’ was first published in 1977 and has had at least eleven reprintings.  Torkington’s book ‘Wisdom from the Western Isles: the making of a mystic’, published in 2008, also describes the author’s meetings with Peter Calvay whilst he was staying on Barra.

Other.

In 2008 the Barra RNLI Life Boat, "Edna Windsor" was featured on a series of stamps. The first class stamp shows the Severn class lifeboat in action in the Sound of Berneray southwest of Barra in swell with of wind.

Sports.

Barra hosts an annual half-marathon called the Barrathon, which is part of the Western Isles Half Marathon series. This is accompanied by a shorter fun-run for families and younger children. A number of fund-raising events are held around this, including ceilidhs and dances.  There is also an annual hill race, in which participants run up Heaval (383 m) before returning to Castlebay Square. The fastest recorded time, set in 1987, is 26.25 minutes.  The Barra community holds an annual games on the island. The island golf club, "", has a 9-hole course that is claimed to be the furthest west in the United Kingdom. However, this title may be held by one of the courses near Enniskillen in Northern Ireland.  Tourists can also go sea kayaking or power kiting and fishing. Pony trekking available on the rare, native Eriskay Ponies.

Transport.

Air.

Barra's airport, near Northbay, uses the cockle shell beach of Traigh Mhor, (Scottish Gaelic: "The Great Beach") as a runway. Planes can land and take off only at low tide, so the timetable varies. Voted the world's most scenic landing location using a scheduled flight, Barra's airport is claimed to be the only airport in the world to have regular scheduled flights landing on a beach. As of 2019 Loganair advertises flights to Barra in the de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter, aircraft travelling to and from Glasgow. There are usually flights every day of the week in the summer.

Sea.

A large Ro-Ro Ferry runs between the island and Oban from the ferry terminal at Castlebay, and takes about 5 hours. A smaller vehicle ferry links the island to South Uist and travels between Ardmore (') at the north of the island and in Eriskay ('). This crossing takes around 40 minutes. Both are run by Caledonian MacBrayne.

Internal road.

There are local buses, which use the circular A888 and the road to the northern ferry terminal to Eriskay and the airport, and usually co-incide with flight times and ferry times.

Industry and tourism.

The fish factory, Barratlantic, in Northbay is a major contributor to the island's economy and the Hebridean Toffee Factory in Castlebay is one of the few manufacturers on Barra.  Tourism provides the main income for the majority of islanders; the high season lasts from May to September. Thousands of people visit the island every year, the busiest times being during & BarraFest in July. The Heritage and Cultural Centre is located in Castlebay, next to Castlebay Community School. It has various exhibitions each year, and is open throughout the year.  In 2010 camping on the machair at the airport was banned due to erosion; this prompted crofters to provide areas on their crofts for visiting tourists. Boat trips to the neighbouring island of Mingulay are available during the summer season, and island-hopping plane trips are also available.  A distillery is planned to be built in Borve, on the west side of the island. The Isle of Barra Distillery (trading as Ltd) is now a Community Benefit Society under the Co-operative and Community Benefit Societies Act 2014 and has an active crowdfunder campaign that aims to raise £1.5 million by 31 March 2019, to enable the project to proceed with construction. In December 2012, four 6 kW wind turbines made by Proven (now known as Kingspan) were erected next to the reservoir Loch, which originally supplied the drinking water to Castlebay. It is proposed that as much as possible of the raw materials, supply chain and labor to produce the whisky should remain as local as possible to minimise imports and maximise the benefit to the island's economy.  The company's latest project is a 900 kW Enercon E-44 wind turbine being installed at, at the most north-westerly point of the island, and early indications are that the wind resource will make this one of the most productive 900 kW turbines in Western Europe.

Climate.

Barra has an oceanic climate, with mild temperatures year round.

Barra (; or ) is an island in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, and the second southernmost inhabited island there, after the adjacent island of Vatersay to which it is connected by a short causeway. The island is named for Saint Finbarr of Cork.

巴拉岛,是座英国苏格兰外赫布里底群岛中的一个岛屿,除了相邻的Vatersay,它是群岛中最南端的有人居住的岛屿。