Maritime English

Hard Aground brings together three intertwined stories documenting the US Navy's strategic and materiel evolution from the end of Civil War through the First World War. The first story focuses on the reconstruction of the US Navy following the swift and near-total dismantling of the Union Navy infrastructure after the Civil War. Jampoler argues that the federal government discovered that the fleet requested by the navy, and paid for by Congress, was the wrong fleet.

Celebrated historian Diana Preston presents betrayals, escapes, and survival at sea in her account of the mutiny of the Bounty and the flight of convicts from the Australian penal colony. The story of the mutiny of the Bounty and William Bligh and his men's survival on the open ocean for 48 days and 3,618 miles has become the stuff of legend. But few realize that Bligh's escape across the seas was not the only open-boat journey in that era of British exploration and colonization.

Historian Jonathan W. White tells the riveting story of Appleton Oaksmith, a swashbuckling sea captain whose life intersected with some of the most important moments, movements, and individuals of the mid-nineteenth century, from the California Gold Rush, filibustering schemes in Nicaragua, Cuban liberation, and the Civil War and Reconstruction. Most importantly, the book depicts the extraordinary lengths the Lincoln Administration went to destroy the illegal trans-Atlantic slave trade.

We may think of "globalism" as a recent development but its origins date back to the fifteenth century and beyond, when seafarers pioneered routes across the oceans with the objectives of exploration, trade, and profit. These voyages only became possible after certain technical innovations—improvements in ship design, compasses, and mapping—enabled navigation across unprecedented distances.

This is the extraordinary story of the mutiny aboard the frigate HMS Hermione in 1797 (eight years after the mutiny on the Bounty) - the bloodiest mutiny ever suffered by the Royal Navy, which led to the extradition from America, and the hanging by the British, of the martyred sailor Jonathan Robbins. This event plunged the two-decades-old American Republic into a constitutional crisis and powerfully contributed to the outcome of the US presidential election of 1800.

The world is changing, and not in a good way. Climate change is accelerating, sea levels are rising, but people still have their heads lodged firmly in the sand, or worse. Maritime Canada is drowning, civilization is disintegrating, and it is every man for himself. Can an ordinary man survive the maelstrom? Does he even want to? Being a Survivor in this new world order may take more than he is willing to give.

John Valliant's essay about the sinking of the Fantome, a Caribbean pleasure cruiser, during Hurricane Mitch in 1998, and the subsequent lawsuit. The disaster was the Atlantic’s worst sailing accident in over forty years.

Maritime history has always been the domain of men. From Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast to Herman Melville's Moby Dick, the human sea experience has always been told from the viewpoint of the men who lived it. Only recently has the story of the women who accompanied these sailors been uncovered and brought to light. The fact is that litterally hundreds, perhaps thousands of women--the wives of sea captains, accompanied their sea captain husbands on the broad ocean in the 19th century. Their view of life at sea in the age of sail is a side of maritime history that is unique ...

For three millennia, the Mediterranean Sea served as the center of western civilization and the scene of many colossal wars and naval battles. In the early summer of 1940, this ancient body of water again played host to a new and extensive conflict as the Kingdom of Italy challenged Britain for dominance within the region. With France on the verge of collapse and Britain facing the prospect of imminent invasion, the Italians hoped to re-establish control over the Mediterranean.

A memoir set in Cape Cod during the early to mid-20th century. *Cape Cod Dream* is an enchanting memoir set in the picturesque and charming Cape Cod, Massachusetts, during the early to mid-20th century. From the bustling seascapes to the tranquil ponds and dense forests, this book carries readers through the heart and soul of Cape Cod's unique culture, tracing its historical and seasonal transitions with vivid storytelling. In this narrative adventure, immerse yourself in the evocative tales and experiences of life on Cape Cod. The memoir captures everyday moments turned into nostalgic ...

The Battle of the Artic follows not just the Royal Navy and its successful efforts to shepherd ships through storms and past floating icebergs. It also tells a part of history which has never been properly understood by the British public. It involves the forgotten heroes of the Arctic convoys, the officers, armed guards and the ordinary civilian seamen, mostly from Britain and America, but also from Holland, Norway, Russia and Poland.

The Bucko Mate (140,000 words) describes the author's seafaring experiences over two decades sailing as an officer in the American merchant marine. This nonfiction, nautical adventure is full of the profane, the dangerous, the drunken, the crazy, the humorous, the romantic and the brave shipmates the author knew. The degeneration of the maritime industry in the United States is paralleled with the disintegration of the abilities and mental stability of a man who had to finally realize that he was burned out at the age of forty. To be a mate on a merchant ship in the modern heyday of the ...

If Britain's maritime history were embodied in a single ship, she would have a prehistoric prow, a mast plucked from a Victorian steamship, the hull of a modest fishing vessel, the propeller of an ocean liner and an anchor made of stone. We might call her Asunder, and, fantastical though she is, we could in fact find her today, scattered in fragments across the country's creeks and coastlines. This extraordinary book collects those fragments for a profound and haunting exploration of our seafaring past.

Sailing on a boat by yourself out at sea and out of sight of land can be exhilarating or terrifying, compelling or tedious - sometimes it can be all of these things just in one morning. It is an adventure at odds with our normal, sociable lives, carried out floating on a medium wholly inimical to our existence. But the deep ocean is also a remarkable place on which to think. Richard King's enormously engaging and curious book is about the debt we owe to solo sailors: women and men, young and old, who have set out alone.

This audiobook attempts to answer as many of those questions as possible through an informal, narrative style. It focuses on the overall experience and the feelings and emotions of the people going through it rather than just on facts and figures. It covers every aspect of the Titanic saga from inception and construction to the recent rediscovery of the ship. It also examines the impact of the disaster on society and culture.

As the daughter of the most powerful trader in the Narrows, the sea is the only home 17-year-old Fable has ever known. It s been four years since the night she watched her mother drown during an unforgiving storm. The next day, her father abandoned her on a legendary island filled with thieves and little food. To survive, she must keep to herself, learn to trust no one and rely on the unique skills her mother taught her. The only thing that keeps her going is the goal of getting off the island, finding her father and demanding her rightful place beside him and his crew.

The islands of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia stretch across a huge expanse of ocean and encompass a multitude of different peoples. Starting with Captain James Cook, the earliest European explorers to visit the Pacific were astounded and perplexed to find populations thriving thousands of miles from continents. Who were these people? From where did they come? And how were they able to reach islands dispersed over such vast tracts of ocean?

Nothing breaks the ice like a frozen wife and whiskey. In the murderously hot kingdom of Lithowania—an island so deliberately missing from maps that explorers go to "great pains" to exclude it—Captain Slavic Kristofferson arrives with the ultimate diplomatic strategy: a massive ice sculpture of his wife's face. Where previous negotiators earned only spears in their hulls, Kristofferson's whiskey-on-ice and innovative snow machine soon have the natives building temples to frozen Hilda. After all, when you've spent your entire existence melting, the sudden discovery of "cold" becomes ...

Deepwater archaeology uncovers secrets from the ancient maritime past...Thousands of shipwrecks and archaeological sites lie undiscovered in deep water, potentially holding important clues to our maritime past. Ships from the Depths surveys the dramatic advances in technology over the last few years that have made it possible for scientists to locate, study, and catalogue archaeological sites in waters previously inaccessible to humans. Søreide provides an introduction to and survey of the history, development, and potential of this exciting branch of nautical archaeology.

Jeremy Black takes the listener through its evolution to becoming one of the most important oceans in the world. He discusses the importance of the Atlantic in relation to world history as well as addressing topics such as those bravest to attempt to cross the ocean before Columbus, the beginnings of slavery from 1400-1600, the struggle for control between empires in the 1600s, the way technology adapted with steamships to telegraph cables, the battle of the Falkland and the Cold War.