Ship History

For fans of sea battles, adventures, and war stories like Unbroken, this is the incredible true story of a boy who helps to bring closure to the survivors of the tragic sinking of the USS Indianapolis, and helps exonerate the ship's captain 50 years later. Hunter Scott first learned about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis by watching the movie Jaws when he was just 11 years old. This was 50 years after the ship had sunk, throwing more than 1,000 men into shark-infested waters - a long 50 years in which justice still had not been served.

Samuel Leech provides a fascinating account of life as a sailor in the War of 1812 and through early 19th century. It is a remarkable account of a man who, until the conflict with the USS United States, had fought British Navy but after that battle changed allegiance to the United States and continued sailing with her navy for a further four years. A perfect addition to any sailor's library, A Voice from the Main Deck is a vivid account of life at sea in the early 19th century.

Sailors who served aboard one of many L.S.T.s: This book is to hopefully help the world know just what these truly brave young men went through serving aboard their ship during World War Two, and how their brave contributions contributed to the Allies’ triumphs over both the Japanese and Germans during the war. Listen to the book to become aware of their exciting and unbelievable story.

This irreverent debut delivers a headlong human comedy of trauma and triumph, narrated by the concealed inner selves of a woman on the brink: Katherine, a lost creative soul and suburban mother of two, who has struggled into her forties with the urge to self-harm. "Tracks the scattered parts of...

'A hugely entertaining mystery' – Fiona Noble, The Bookseller Children's Previews 'One to Watch' Greenwich, London, 15th February 1894. Luna thinks that an evening at her aunt's butterfly club sounds deathly boring. But it turns out that the meeting, held in the Butterfly Room at the Greenwich...

The SS City of Benares was born in the optimism of the interwar years. Launched in 1936 for the Ellerman Line, she embodied reliability, elegance, and the promise of safe passage between Britain and its empire. With her sleek twin funnels and polished interiors, she seemed destined to carry families, officials, and traders eastward in comfort. Yet within only four years, her name would be etched into the darkest chapter of Britain’s wartime history—not for her design or her service in peacetime, but for the lives of the children she carried on her final voyage.

In July 1862, Confederate Captain Raphael Semmes took command of a secret new warship. At the helm of the Alabama, he became the most hated and feared man along the Union coast, as well as a Confederate legend. Now, with unparalleled authority, depth, and a vivid sense of the excitement and danger of the time, Stephen Fox describes Captain Semmes's remarkable wartime exploits.

An extraordinary story of survival and alliance during World War II: the icy journey of four Allied ships crossing the Arctic to deliver much needed supplies to the Soviet war effort. On the fourth of July, 1942, four Allied ships traversing the Arctic separated from their decimated convoy to...

A propulsive human drama that chronicles the mass exodus of Jews from Eastern Europe to America in the early years of the twentieth century, and the men who made it possible. Over thirty years, from 1890 to 1921, 2.5 million Jews, fleeing discrimination and violence in their homelands of Eastern...

On the morning of November 9, 1942, the Dunedin Star, a 13,000-ton refrigerated cargo ship, was tugged off her moorings, and nudged into the mouth of the Mersey River, that iconic entranceway to Liverpool Harbor, and the British gateway to the outside world. On her port side, Fort Perch hung ghostly and silent in the dawn light, and the old Leashow Lighthouse blinked forlornly on the North Wirral headland. As she passed the harbor walls and entered open water, the harbor pilot shook the captain's hand and wished him Godspeed,.

Despite Russia's imposing image in the world, less apparent weaknesses within the tsarist government threatened the country's stability. Several events in the early 20th century led to an eroding loyalty among Russian military forces, and Potemkin was the first modern ship to reveal it, an act that would bring it fame and make it the subject of some of the most well-known works of film and literature in Russian history.

After Benson, O'Malley, and I returned from our trip to the Granada Relocation Center, Dad started working on the solar-powered history machine to make it better than ever. It took us awhile to decide where our next adventure would take us, but finally my brothers and I settled on exploring some family history from way back in the 1600s!

In the best-selling tradition of The Devil in the White City, award-winning author Brian Hicks tells the explosive story of the Morro Castle, the elegant luxury liner that burned off the coast of New Jersey on September 7, 1934. The captain died under mysterious circumstances seven hours before his ship caught fire off the New Jersey coast.

Dynasties of the Sea is the first audiobook to examine one of the most powerful forces in global trade and economic development: world shipping and the magnates who drive the industry. Operating from Monaco to Hong Kong, London to Athens, Singapore to Oslo, shipowners and their financiers have changed the world in every way.

For three decades the Windrush was the maritime Zelig of the 20th century, playing different roles in the most turbulent years in modern times. Designed in 1930 in the Hamburg boatyard of a Jewish shipbuilder to ferry Germans to a new life in South America, it wasn't long before Goebbels requisitioned her as one of his ‘Strength Through Joy’ vessels. However, her duties soon darkened: she became a Nazi troop carrier, a support vessel for the pocket battleship Tirpitz and a prison ship transporting Jews to Auschwitz.

It has been called the greatest engineering project of the 1800s and the greatest undertaking by a single municipality, but the creation of the Chicago Canal was actually a reversal of nature, for the benefit of man. In the 19th century, some of the most important canals in the world were conceived or constructed, and while the Panama Canal and Suez Canal are better known, the Chicago Canal is one of the greatest engineering projects in history.

On a snowy morning in January 1910, the Alaska Steamship Company's Farallon struck Black Reef in Cook Inlet. The vessel carried no wireless radio to broadcast an SOS. Thirty-eight men scrambled into lifeboats, to be cast up on the rugged shore where they huddled under make-shift tents constructed from the Farallon's sails. Exposed to a bitter northern winter with meager equipment and clothing, a disturbing awareness sank in-rescuers may arrive too late.

As the Confederacy felt itself slipping beneath the Union juggernaut in late 1864, the South launched a desperate counteroffensive to shatter the U.S. economy and force a standoff. Its secret weapon? A state-of-the-art raiding ship whose mission was to prowl the world’s oceans and sink the U.S...

In 2001, journalist Jessica DuLong ditched her dot-com desk job for the diesel engines of a rusty antique fireboat, the John J. Harvey, and the storied waters of the Hudson. My River Chronicles: Rediscovering America on the Hudson tells the story of this mechanic's daughter and Stanford graduate who had left her blue-collar upbringing behind until the fireboat drew her back, offering a chance to become an engineer and a taste of home she hadn't realized she was missing.

By the early decades of the 20th century, the fur trade had tapered off some from its heyday in the 19th century, but it still proved profitable enough for hunters to live for months at a time in remote regions of Alaska. Their only contact with the outside world consisted of the company ships that came to buy their furs and bring them supplies. One of these vessels was the steamer Baychimo, a Hudson's Bay Company ship that plied the treacherous waters off Alaska, Arctic Canada, and Siberia for many years.