Maritime History

Set against the backdrop of the Age of Exploration, Black Flags, Blue Waters reveals the dramatic and surprising history of American piracy's "Golden Age" when lawless pirates plied the coastal waters of North America and beyond. Best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin illustrates how American colonists at first supported these outrageous pirates in an early display of solidarity against the Crown, and then violently opposed them. Upending popular misconceptions and cartoonish stereotypes, Dolin provides this wholly original account of these seafaring outlaws.

A monumental retelling of world history through the lens of maritime enterprise, revealing in breathtaking depth how people first came into contact with one another by ocean and river, lake and stream, and how goods, languages, religions, and entire cultures spread across and along the world's waterways, bringing together civilizations and defining what makes us most human.

Beneath the waves lie stories the world was never meant to forget. From the doomed voyage of the Titanic to the eerie silence of the Mary Celeste, Drowned in Silence dives deep into fifteen of the most chilling, mysterious, and tragic sea disasters ever recorded. Author James Calloway brings each tale to life with immersive, emotional storytelling that will haunt readers long after the final page. Survival. Mystery. Loss. The sea remembers everything.

The Gulf of Mexico presents a compelling, salt-streaked narrative of the Earth's 10th-largest body of water. In this beautifully written volume, John S. Sledge explores the people, ships, and cities that have made the Gulf's human history and culture so rich. Many famous figures who sailed the Gulf's viridian waters are highlighted, including Ponce de Leon, Robert Cavelier de La Salle, Francis Drake, Elizabeth Agassiz, Ernest Hemingway, and Charles Dwight Sigsbee. Sledge also introduces a fascinating array of people connected to maritime life in the Gulf.

From the author of the acclaimed The Great Sea, David Abulafia's new book guides listeners along the world's greatest bodies of water to reveal their primary role in human history. The main protagonists are the three major oceans - the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Indian - which together comprise the majority of the earth's water and cover over half of its surface. These waterways carried goods, plants, livestock, and, of course, people across vast expanses, transforming and ultimately linking irrevocably the economies and cultures of Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

On October 1, 2015, Hurricane Joaquin barreled into the Bermuda Triangle and swallowed the container ship El Faro whole, resulting in the worst American shipping disaster in 35 years. No one could fathom how a vessel equipped with satellite communications and a sophisticated navigation system could suddenly vanish - until now. Relying on hundreds of exclusive interviews with family members and maritime experts, as well as the words of the crew members themselves - whose conversations were captured by the ship’s data recorder - journalist Rachel Slade unravels the mystery.

Acclaimed journalist and author Lee Sandlin delivers a riveting glimpse of a dangerous and colorful place in America’s historical landscape - the Mississippi River of the 19th century. Long before it was dredged into a shipping channel or romanticized into myth, the untamed Mississippi - the lifeblood of communities that rose and fell along its banks - spawned a motley array of pirates and dignitaries, visionaries, and thieves.

In the great wars of modern history, maritime powers have always prevailed over land-based empires, whether Habsburg, Napoleonic, Nazi, or Soviet. In contrast to the rigid hierarchies and centralization of land-based empires, those nations attaining mastery at sea have been distinguished by liberty, flexibility, and enterprise. The 17th-century Dutch were the first to achieve naval and trading dominance.

The story of the world's largest, longest, and best-financed scientific expedition of all time, triumphantly successful, gruesomely tragic, and never before fully told. The immense 18th-century scientific journey, variously known as the Second Kamchatka Expedition or the Great Northern Expedition, from St. Petersburg across Siberia to the coast of North America, involved over 3,000 people and cost Peter the Great over one-sixth of his empire's annual revenue.

British maritime history in the age of sail is full of the deeds of officers like Nelson but has given little voice to plain, "illiterate" seamen. Now, Stephen Taylor draws on published and unpublished memoirs, letters, and naval records, including court-martials and petitions, to present these men in their own words. In this exhilarating account, ordinary seamen are far from the hapless sufferers of the press gangs.

A Short History of Seafaring tells the 5,000 year history of the remarkable individuals who sailed seas, for trade, to conquer new lands, to explore the unknown. From the early Polynesians to the first circumnavigations by the Portuguese and the British, these are awe-inspiring tales of epic sea voyages involving great feats of seamanship, navigation, endurance, and ingenuity. Explore the lives and maritime adventures, many with first person narratives, of land seekers and globe charters such as Christopher Columbus, Captain James Cook and Vitus Bering.

Most times left solely within the confine of plantation narratives, slavery was far from a land-based phenomenon. This book reveals for the first time how it took critical shape at sea. Expanding the gaze even more widely, the book centers on how the oceanic transport of human cargoes - known as the infamous Middle Passage - comprised a violently regulated process foundational to the institution of bondage. Sowande' Mustakeem's groundbreaking study goes inside the Atlantic slave trade to explore the social conditions and human costs embedded in the world of maritime slavery.

At large during the most colorful period in New Orleans' history, from just after the Louisiana Purchase through the War of 1812, privateers Jean and Pierre Laffite made life hell for Spanish merchants on the Gulf. Pirates to the US Navy officers who chased them, heroes to the private citizens who shopped for contraband at their well-publicized auctions, the brothers became important members of a filibustering syndicate that included lawyers, bankers, merchants, and corrupt US officials.

Command of the oceans was crucial to winning World War II. By the start of 1942 Nazi Germany had conquered mainland Europe, and Imperial Japan had overrun Southeast Asia and much of the Pacific. How could Britain and distant America prevail in what had become a "war of continents"? In this definitive account, Evan Mawdsley traces events at sea from the first U-boat operations in 1939 to the surrender of Japan. He argues that the Allied counterattack involved not just decisive sea battles, but a long struggle to control shipping arteries and move armies across the sea.

The ordeal of the whaleship Essex was an event as mythic in the nineteenth century as the sinking of the Titanic was in the twentieth. In 1819 the Essex left Nantucket for the South Pacific with 20 crew members aboard. In the middle of the South Pacific the ship was rammed and sunk by an angry sperm whale. The crew drifted for more than 90 days in three tiny whaleboats, succumbing to weather, hunger, and disease and ultimately turning to drastic measures in the fight for survival.

World War II at Sea offers a global perspective, focusing on the major engagements and personalities and revealing both their scale and their interconnection: the U-boat attack on Scapa Flow and the Battle of the Atlantic; the "miracle" evacuation from Dunkirk and the pitched battles for control of Norway fjords; Mussolini's Regia Marina - at the start of the war the fourth-largest navy in the world - and the dominance of the Kidö Butai and Japanese naval power in the Pacific; Pearl Harbor then Midway; and much more.

A stunning behind-the-curtain look into the last years of the illegal transatlantic slave trade in the United States.

On a frigid April night in 1912, the world’s largest—and soon most famous—ocean liner struck an iceberg and slipped beneath the waves. She had scarcely disappeared before her new journey began, a seemingly limitless odyssey through the world’s fixation with her every tragic detail. Plans to find and raise the Titanic began almost immediately. Yet seven decades passed before it was found. Why? And of some three million shipwrecks that litter the ocean floor, why is the world still so fascinated with this one?

A total of 305,000 enslaved Africans arrived in the New World aboard American vessels over a span of two hundred years as American merchants and mariners sailed to Africa and to the Caribbean to acquire and sell captives. Using exhaustive archival research, including many collections that have never been used before, historian Sean M. Kelley argues that slave trading needs to be seen as integral to the larger story of American slavery.

A fresh account of some of history's greatest warriors. The Vikings had an extraordinary and far-reaching historical impact. From the eighth to the 11th centuries, they ranged across Europe - raiding, exploring, and colonizing - and their presence was felt as far away as Russia and Byzantium. They are most famous as warriors, yet perhaps their talent for warfare is too little understood.