Maritime English

At the outbreak of the War of 1812, America's prospects looked dismal. It was clear that the primary battlefield would be the open ocean but America's war fleet, only 20 ships strong, faced a practiced British navy of more than a thousand men-of-war. Still, through a combination of nautical deftness and sheer bravado, the American navy managed to take the fight to the British and turn the tide of the war.

Between August and October 1720, two female pirates named Anne Bonny and Mary Read terrorized the Caribbean in and around Jamaica. Despite their short career, they became two of the most notorious pirates during the height of the eighteenth-century Golden Age of Piracy. In a world dominated by men, they became infamous for their bravery, cruelty and unwavering determination to escape the social constraints placed on women during that time.

It was a frigid night in February 2013 when the five young fishermen vanished. The crew of the Miss Ally - a 12-metre Cape Islander from Woods Harbour, Nova Scotia - was fishing for halibut far off the Nova Scotia coast when their boat’s spotlight malfunctioned. A vicious winter storm was approaching from her south, and all other boats at the fishing grounds were steaming for shore. Unable to locate his longlining gear, the Miss Ally’s young captain decided to stay an extra day to retrieve the gear and, hopefully, a big catch.

The vast expanse, unknown depths, dangers, and mysteries of the sea have led mariners to create fantastical stories of ghosts and monsters for centuries; it is a world strange and other to the experience of land dwellers. This body of lore has served to bond nautical communities together around the world and throughout history, with international stories fusing with local tales. The Perilous Deep explores why these stories were told, how they were repeated and mutated, and what fears, anxieties, and desires they helped to express.

The fearsome wrath of the storms that brew over the Great Lakes has challenged and defeated some of the staunchest vessels constructed in the shipyards of port cities along the US and Canadian lakeshores. Here Richard Gebhart tells the tales of some of these ships and their captains and crews, from their launches to their sad demises—or sometimes, their celebrated retirements. This volume is a must-hear for anyone intrigued by the maritime history of the Great Lakes.

Two Years Before the Mast is Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s captivating account of life as a common sailor on board a merchant ship in the early 1830s. Dana captures the cruel conditions on board the ship, the injustices of merchant seamen at the hands of brutally unforgiving captains, and the treacherous icy weather at Cape Horn. An iconic maritime memoir said to have influenced Herman Melville, Two Years Before the Mast remains one of America’s greatest and most vivid seafaring tales.

Captain William Kidd stands as one of the most notorious "pirate" outlaws ever, but his legend is tainted by a bed of lies. Having captivated imaginations for more than three hundred years and inspired many stories about pirates, troubling questions remain. Was he really a criminal or is the truth more inconvenient: that he was a buccaneer's worst nightmare, a revered pirate hunter turned fall guy for scheming politicians?

A documentary drawn from testimony at the Coast Guard’s official inquiry looks anew at one of the most storied, and mysterious, shipwrecks in American history. The sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald is one of the most famous shipwreck stories in Great Lakes history. It is also one of maritime lore’s great mysteries, the details of its disappearance as obscure now as on that fateful November day in 1975.

After Sir John Franklin and his ships disappeared in the Arctic while seeking the Northwest Passage, thirty-nine rescue missions were launched, including one by the Resolute, the Royal Navy’s finest vessel. In 1854, it became locked in the ice and was abandoned. A year later, a Connecticut whaling ship discovered it drifting 1,200 miles away, a 600-ton ghost ship. The whalers boarded the Resolute and steered it through a ferocious hurricane back to Connecticut.

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.

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 impeccably researched and “adventure-packed” (The Washington Post) account of the obsessive quest by Christopher Columbus’s son to create the greatest library in the world is “the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters” (NPR) and offers a vivid picture of Europe on the verge of becoming...

The war of 1812–1815 was a bloody confrontation that tore through the American frontier, the British colonies of Upper and Lower Canada, and parts of the Atlantic coast and the Gulf of Mexico. The conflict saw British, American, and First Nations forces clash, and in the process, shape the future of North American history. Carl Benn explains what led to America's decision to take up arms against Great Britain and assesses the three terrible years of fighting that followed on land and sea, where battles such as Lake Erie and Lake Champlain launched American naval traditions.

Top 10 Pirate Myths takes you beyond the Hollywood sparkle and storybook charm to uncover the surprising truths behind history’s most misunderstood outlaws. Drawing on real historical records, maritime journals, and eyewitness accounts, Jasmine Dyggan separates fact from fantasy and reveals the remarkable human stories buried beneath centuries of myth.

The twelve entries in The Golden Age of Piracy discuss why pirates thrived in the seas of the New World, how pirates operated their plundering ventures, how governments battled piracy, and when and why piracy declined. Separating Hollywood myth from historical fact, these essays bring the real pirates of the Caribbean to life with a level of rigor and insight rarely applied to the subject.

After leaving the only family she's ever had on the Marigold, Willa has made a new start on a remote island carving out her own stake in the future of the Narrows. She's found an unexpected business partner in Koy and whether she likes it or not, they are suited in more ways than one. Together...

An uproariously funny collection of sea tales from the coauthor of Mutiny on the Bounty, a cult classic available in print again for the first time in this century. In Portsmouth, by the fireside of the Cheerful Tortoise taproom, British seamen regale themselves with tales of seafaring...

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.

Book 1 of the Maritime Monsters adult spicy MM Monster romance series.

Launched in 1914, two years after the ill-fated voyage of her sister ship, RMS Titanic, the Britannic was intended to be superior to her tragic twin in every way. But war intervened and in 1915 she was requisitioned as a hospital ship. Just one year later, while on her way to collect troops wounded in the Balkans campaign, she fell victim to a mine laid by a German U-boat and tragically sank in the middle of the Aegean Sea. There her wreck lay, at a depth of 400 feet, until it was discovered fifty-nine years later by legendary explorer Jacques Cousteau.