Showing titles in Maritime History & Piracy

When Thomas Jefferson became president in 1801, America faced a crisis. The new nation was deeply in debt and needed its economy to grow quickly, but its merchant ships were under attack. Pirates from North Africa's Barbary coast routinely captured American sailors and held them as slaves, demanding ransom and tribute payments far beyond what the new country could afford.

Beginning with the Continental Navy, Small Boats and Daring Men traces maritime missions through the wars of the early republic, from the coast of modern-day Libya to the rivers and inlets of the Chesapeake Bay. Armstrong brings a uniquely informed perspective to his subject; and his work is at once an exciting narrative of danger and combat at sea and a thoroughgoing analysis of how these events fit into concepts of American sea power.

Freedom of expression and individual enterprise have distinguished the societies of powers dominant at sea, and since supreme maritime nations have prevailed over their territorial rivals in the great wars of the modern era, it is they who have created today's world. In this final volume of his masterful trilogy, Padfield carries the theme through the terrible wars of the last century to the present, with vivid descriptions of the naval battles that have shaped our world.

The Great Lakes shipping industry can trace its lineage to 1679 with the launching on Lake Erie of the Griffon, a 60-foot galley weighing nearly 50 tons. Built by LaSalle, a French explorer who had been commissioned to search for a passage through North America to China, it was the first sailing ship to operate on the upper lakes, signaling the dawn of the Great Lakes shipping industry as we know it today. Steamboats and Sailors of the Great Lakes is the most thorough and factual study of the Great Lakes shipping industry written this century.

During the height of the blizzard of 1978, the tanker Global Hope floundered on the shoals off the Massachusetts coast. The Coast Guard dispatched a patrol boat, but was soon in as much trouble as the tanker. Then pilot boat captain Frank Quirk, hearing of the Coast Guard's troubles on his radio, decided to act.

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.

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.

When Campbell & Clark, Scottish merchants based in India, dispatched an Indian ship hurriedly renamed the Sydney Cove to the colony of NSW in 1797, they were hoping to make their fortune. The ship's 'speculative' cargo included all kinds of products to entice the new colony's inhabitants, including 7,000 gallons of rum intended to be sold to the Rum Corp. But when the ship went down north of Van Diemen's Land, cargo master William Campbell and 16 other crew members decided to walk the 600 miles to Sydney Town to get help and rescue crew and cargo.

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.

Fenômeno de público e crítica, Os náufragos do Wager reconstitui a história real de um naufrágio no século XVIII—e da história impressionante de seus sobreviventes.

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.

Author Kurt C. Schlichting tells the story of the Manhattan waterfront as a struggle between public and private control of New York's priceless asset. Nature provided New York with a sheltered harbor but presented the city with a challenge: to find the necessary capital to build and expand the maritime infrastructure. From colonial times until after the Civil War, the city ceded control of the waterfront to private interests, excluding the public entirely and sparking a battle between shipping companies, the railroads, and ferries for access to the waterfront.

Im Januar 1742 wird ein windschiefes Segelboot an die Küste Brasiliens gespült. An Bord 30 Männer, die einzigen Überlebenden des königlichen Eroberungsschiffs »The Wager«, das in einem Sturm zerschellt ist. Sechs Monate später landen drei Schiffbrüchige an der Küste Chiles und behaupten, die 30 Männer seien Meuterer, die sich den königlichen Befehlen widersetzt und skrupellos gemordet hätten... Wer lügt, wer sagt die Wahrheit? Das soll ein britisches Kriegsgericht entscheiden. Es geht um Leben oder Tod.

Soon after the first maritime trade routes became operational, seafaring bandits appeared to prey upon the cargo, crews, and ships of others. Crimson Waters traces the history of piracy around the globe, stretching back from its roots in 2500 BCE, through the Golden Age of Piracy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and up to the modern-day pirates who still threaten boats along coastlines and on the open seas.

When the United States was young, importing luxury goods from China was a secretive, glamorous, often brutal business - one where teas and silks and porcelain were purchased with profits from the opium trade. But the journey by sea to New York from Canton could take six agonizing months, and so the most pressing technological challenge of the day became ensuring one’s goods arrived first to market. Barons of the Sea tells the story of a handful of cutthroat competitors who raced to build the fastest, finest, most profitable clipper ships to carry their precious cargo to American shores.

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.

On Wide Seas: The US Navy in the Jacksonian Era details the ways in which the US Navy transformed from an antiquated arm of the nation’s military infrastructure into a more dynamic and effective force that was soon to play a pivotal role in a number of national and international conflicts. Jackson developed a clear, concise naval strategy that policymakers and officers alike could seize and execute. They carried out a collective vision that coincided with the national literary movement that recognized America’s future would rely upon the Navy.

This book is an account of ships that have borne the name Queen of the Lakes, an honorary title indicating that, at the time of its launching, a ship is the longest on the Great Lakes. In one of the most comprehensive books ever written on the maritime history of the lakes, Mark Thompson presents a vignette of each of the dozens of ships that have held the title, chronicling the dates the ship sailed, its dimensions, the derivation of its name, its role in the economic development of the region, and its sailing history.

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.

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.