Mount Hope Bay

Mount Hope Bay is a tidal estuary located at the mouth of the Taunton River on the Massachusetts and Rhode Island border. It is an arm of Narragansett Bay. The bay is named after Mount Hope, a small hill located on its western shore in what is now Bristol, Rhode Island. It flows into the East Passage of Narragansett Bay and also the Sakonnet River. Mount Hope Bay has played an important role to the history of the area, from pre-colonial times to the present. While many years of sewage and industrial pollution have severely degraded the quality of the shallow waters of the bay, there are currently major efforts underway to clean up and restore it.

Geography

Mount Hope Bay is part of the Narragansett Basin, formed as a rift in the Avalon terrane about 315 million years ago. It is underlaid by sedimentary rocks estimated to be several miles thick. The bay covers and area of about 13 square miles (36 square km) with an average depth of 18.7 feet, although portions of the southern end of the bay are as deep as 74 feet deep near the Mount Hope Bridge.

Hope Bay

Hope Bay (Spanish: Bahía Esperanza) on Trinity Peninsula, is 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) long and 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) wide, indenting the tip of Antarctic Peninsula and opening on Antarctic Sound. It is the site of the Argentinian Antarctic settlement Esperanza Base, established in 1952

Important Bird Area

The bay has been identified as an Important Bird Area (IBA) by BirdLife International because it supports one of the largest Adélie penguin colonies in Antarctica with around 125,000 pairs. Other birds nesting at the site include gentoo penguins, brown skuas, Antarctic terns, Wilson's storm-petrels, kelp gulls and snowy sheathbills.

History

The Bay was discovered on January 15, 1902 by the Swedish Antarctic Expedition under Otto Nordenskiöld, who named it in commemoration of the winter spent there by J. Gunnar Andersson, S.A. Duse, Toralf Grunden and José María Sobral of his expedition after his ship (the Antarctic) was crushed by the ice and lost. They were eventually rescued by Argentine corvette Uruguay.

Mount Hope (Rhode Island)

Mount Hope (originally Montaup in Pokanoket language) is a small hill in Bristol, Rhode Island overlooking the part of Narragansett Bay known as Mount Hope Bay. The 7000 acres that now make up the Town of Bristol in Rhode Island were called the Mt. Hope Lands. The elevation of Mt. Hope summit is 209 feet, and drops sharply to the bay on its eastern side. Mount Hope was the site of a Wampanoag (Pokanoket) village. It is remembered for its role in King Philip's War.

Today, Brown University owns 376 acres (1.52 km²) of woodland on Mt. Hope off Tower Street in Bristol. The university's grounds on Mount Hope include King Philip's Seat (or "chair"), a large quartz rock formation where Wampanoag sachem King Philip held meetings. The site of King Philip's death in Misery Swamp is nearby. Mount Hope Farm is also nearby.

The first battle of King Philip's War took place near here in 1675. By the second half of the seventeenth century the English settlers need for land had reduced the land of the Pokanoket to the Mt. Hope Lands. After his father Massasoit died, and then his older brother died, Metacom, now King Philip, began making alliances with other tribes and war soon began. King Philip made nearby Mount Hope his base of operations. "King Philip's Chair," a rocky ledge on the mountain, was a lookout site for enemy ships on Mount Hope Bay. Philip was eventually defeated. The site where Captain Benjamin Church's men killed King Philip in 1676 is located in nearby Misery Swamp.

Mount Hope

Mount Hope may refer to:

Antarctica

Australia

Canada

Trinidad and Tobago

United States

Mount Hope (Antarctica)

Mount Hope is a dome-shaped hill, rising to approximately 3,500 feet (1,100 m), situated at the foot of the Beardmore Glacier, Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica at 83°45′S 171°00′E / 83.750°S 171.000°E / -83.750; 171.000Coordinates: 83°45′S 171°00′E / 83.750°S 171.000°E / -83.750; 171.000.

Discovery

It was discovered on 3 December 1908, by Ernest Shackleton and his south polar party, on their journey towards the South Pole during the Nimrod Expedition. Through their ascent of this hill the party gained their first sight of the glacier which provided the route to the polar plateau and the pole itself. Shackleton recorded: "We reached the base of the mountain which we hoped to climb in order to gain a view of the surrounding country [...] With great difficulty we clambered up this rock face, and then ascended a gentle snow slope [...] From the top of this ridge there burst upon our view an open road to the south, for there stretched before us a great glacier [...] stretching away south inland until at last it seemed to merge in high inland ice". Shackleton named the hill that provided this vantage point "Mount Hope", for the promise that it provided. Shackleton's party ascended the glacier to the plateau, but turned back before reaching the Pole.