Maritime History

Maritime historian Mike Smylie takes the reader on a wonderfully comprehensive journey through the history of fishing in and around Morecambe Bay i...

On December 7, 1941, even as Japanese carrier-launched aircraft flew toward Pearl Harbor, a small American cargo ship chartered by the Army reporte...

Great Britain has for many centuries been one of the world's great sea-faring nations. The Royal Navy has defended her territory and the merchant f...

[S]he struck against a reef ...the scene which then took place was fearful in the extreme. The passengers came rushing up the hatchways, some in t...

Christopher Nicholson vividly describes the construction and history to the present day of some of the world's most famous lighthouses in this clas...

The period 1650 to 1790 was such a turbulent one for Scottish seafarers that much of this fast-flowing narrative reads like Treasure Island. Colour...

The Indian Ocean was the first venue of global trade, connecting the Mediterranean and South China Sea. Inspired by the insights of Fernand Braudel...

Admiral Nelson's most frequent cry was for more frigates. Though not ships of the line these fast and powerful warships were the 'eyes of the fleet...

On mid-Summer's Day 1919 the interned German Grand Fleet was scuttled by their crews at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands despite a Royal Navy guard...

'There is no danger that Titanic will sink. The boat is unsinkable and nothing but inconvenience will be suffered by the passengers.' - Phillip Fra...

On 15 April 2012, 100 years will have passed since the Royal Mail Steamer Titanic hit an iceberg and foundered in the North Atlantic with the loss ...

High cliffs jutting out into the Atlantic and the North Sea, many hundreds of rocky skerries, deep sea lochs, dangerous unseen reefs, powerful tide...

In 1820, a suspicious vessel was spotted lingering off the coast of northern Florida, the Spanish slave ship Antelope. Since the United States had ...

Titanic was not only a ship that embodied technological achievement; she was a microcosm of western civilisation and its misplaced certainties in a...

The collision of the Princess Alice pleasure steamer with the Tyne collier, Bywell Castle, in the Thames in September 1878 resulted in Britain's wo...

This fast-paced narrative traces the emergence of the United States Navy as a global power from its birth during the American Revolution through to...

The loss of the Costa Concordia in 2012 shocked Europe when thirty-two passengers died on a luxury liner. Yet in mid-Victorian times, more lives th...

At dawn on 27 April 1789 Fletcher Christian, master's mate on HMS Bounty, took a coconut to quench his thirst from the supply on the quarterdeck. T...

Samuel Halpern has written many books and articles on Titanic and often used the 1912 wreck report as a source of reference. It occurred to him one...

In the Medieval Period the English Channel was a particularly perilous stretch of water. It had two distinct (and often conflicting) functions: as ...

Small, scruffy and stinking of seal oil and old blubber, the 458-ton Nimrod wasnt Ernest Shackletons first choice of ship for his Antarctic Expedit...

As nurses, `Jenny Wrens', and above all as wives and mothers, women have quietly kept the Royal Navy afloat throughout history. From its earliest y...

Constructed from the wood of over 6,000 trees HMS Victory was designed as a first-rate ship, packing a formidable punch with over 100 guns arranged...

The Sussex coastline can boast to be one of the most wreck-rich regions in the English Channel. In fact there are over 4,000 recorded wrecks along ...

The SS Mendi is a wreck site off the Isle of Wight under the protection of Historic England. Nearly 650 men, mostly from the South African Native ...

Down in the fiery belly of the luxury liners of the Titanic era, a world away from the first-class dining rooms and sedate tours of the deck, toile...

Edited and richly annotated by Lt Cdr Andrew David, this volume offers for the first time a complete transcript of the handwritten journal kept by ...

Sink into the depths The great oceans of the world have long been considered alien environments said to harbor strange creatures and unfathomable m...

An updated and expanded edition to celebrate the 150th anniversary of this iconic ship. The narrative spans her construction at Dumbarton in 1869; ...

It was a golden age of travel. The period from the end of the Second World War to the early 1960s saw some of the finest ocean liners ever built an...

The Evolution of the Transatlantic Liner follows the changing form of the transatlantic ocean liner from its inception in the nineteenth century th...

James Seay Dean is the noted authority on these voyages he provides a sympathetic treatment of life aboard ship in some of the most challenging ci...

Considered one of the most treacherous areas of Britains coastline, Lands End has seen many shipwrecks over the past 2,000 years. Where the waters ...

From the Stone Age to the present day, no technology has had a more profound impact on mankind than watercraft. Boats and ships made possible the s...

Tom Cunliffe is one of the biggest names in the sailing world an internationally renowned journalist and speaker, and the go-to guru when the BBC ...

Published to mark the centenary of the sinking, this book tells the story of the Titanic from a new angle: the role of wireless in the disaster. ...

While the near 1,500 victims of Titanic accounted for a huge loss of life, each of the ships here had a greater number of casualties, in some cases...

Commissioned by the General Post Office in 1937, by the time MacDonald Gill completed ''Mail Steamship Routes'' he was already a renowned designer ...