Ships & Shipbuilding

In August of 1914, the British ship Endurance set sail for the South Atlantic. In October 1915, still half a continent away from its intended base, the ship was trapped, then crushed in the ice

Focused on those directly affected by the tragedy, The Gales of November is both an emotional tribute to the lives lost and a propulsive, thrilling narrative history of America’s most-mourned maritime disaster.

On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants....

New York Times bestselling author Hampton Sides returns with a white-knuckle tale of polar exploration and survival in the Gilded Age....

The story begins in 1629, when the pride of the Dutch East India Company, the Batavia, is on its maiden voyage en route from Amsterdam to the Dutch East Indies, laden down with the greatest treasure to leave Holland....

From best-selling author John U. Bacon, a gripping narrative history of the largest manmade detonation prior to Hiroshima....

Stalking the Red Bear, for the first time ever, describes the action principally from the perspective of a commanding officer of a nuclear submarine during the Cold War....

The small ship making the Liverpool-to-New York trip in the early months of 1856 hit an iceberg that tore the ship asunder. Five lifeboats were lowered. On one were 13 souls. Only one would survive. This is his story....

The Titanic collided with an iceberg on April 14, and 1,500 people died in the freezing waters. It's a story that has spurred legends and still sends shivers down the spine....

The sea is the largest museum on earth, with more than a million lost ships resting in its depths. Those shipwrecks date back thousands of years, some from civilizations long vanished, others from more recent history. Some are famous, others obscure and unremembered but each has a story to tell.

The Great Lakes are graveyards of a vast number of shipwrecks (30,000 by some estimates), and Lake Michigan has more than the other four lakes combined. The stories of those wrecks tell the history of that mighty lake in its endless, mercurial challenge to human endeavor.

Joshua Slocum was believed to be the first man to sail single-handed around the world....

In 1973, a routine dive to the telecommunication cable that snakes along the Atlantic sea bed went badly wrong. Pisces III, with Roger Chapman and Roger Mallinson onboard, had tried to surface when a catastrophic fault suddenly sent the mini-submarine tumbling to the ocean bed....

Endeavour is the story of a ship, an idea, and a way of looking at the world. It is grounded in the Enlightenment, an age of endeavors, with Britain consumed by the impulse for grand projects undertaken at speed....

Out of nothing but the government’s behest, a few bold men conjured a giant ship-building industry in 1940 and launched the ships that took America to war and to victory.

Deadliest Sea by Kalee Thompson is the spellbinding true story of the greatest rescue in US Coast Guard history. Recounting the tragic sinking of the fishing trawler, Alaska Ranger, in the Bering Sea and its remarkable aftermath in March 2008....

In the tradition of Erik Larson's Dead Wake comes The Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria, about the sinking of the glamorous Italian ocean liner....

This work is the prime source for the biographies of many well-known pirates of that era and shaped the popular notions about pirates of the day....

A few minutes before midnight on April 14, 1912, the "unsinkable" RMS Titanic, on her maiden voyage to New York, struck an iceberg....

Rescue of the Bounty is the harrowing story of the sinking and rescue of Bounty - the tall ship used in the classic 1962 film Mutiny on the Bounty....

Hear the enthralling story of the HMS Queen Elizabeth, the Royal Navy's largest ever warship....

Drawing on a wealth of previously unpublished letters, memoirs, diaries, and interviews with their family members, award-winning journalist Andrew Wilson brings to life a riveting and groundbreaking account of what happened to the survivors of the Titanic.

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....

A vivid narrative history of the Mayflower and of the Winslow family, who traveled to America in search of a new world....

From the authors of the number-one best-selling The Sea Hunters comes more unforgettable true adventures with famous shipwrecks. ....

In The Gales of November, award-winning journalist John U. Bacon presents the definitive account of the disaster, drawing on more than 100 interviews with the families, friends, and former crewmates of those lost. Bacon explores the vital role Great Lakes shipping played in America’s economic boom, the uncommon lives the sailors led, the sinking’s most likely causes, and the heartbreaking aftermath for those left behind—“the wives, the sons, and the daughters,” as Gordon Lightfoot sang in his unforgettable ballad.

The sea is the largest museum on earth, with more than a million lost ships resting in its depths. Those shipwrecks date back thousands of years, some from civilizations long vanished, others from more recent history. Some are famous, others obscure and unremembered but each has a story to tell. In The Great Museum of the Sea, archaeologist, museum director, television host, journalist, and award-winning author James Delgado takes the listener on a personal tour of the world's wrecks, including many of the more than a hundred lost ships he has personally discovered and investigated.

This eBook on maritime disasters takes readers across more than a century of human ambition, misjudgment, and resilience at sea. It begins with the Titanic, the ship once declared unsinkable, whose tragic end in the icy Atlantic exposed the dangers of overconfidence and inadequate preparedness. From there, the story moves through wartime tragedy with the Wilhelm Gustloff, where the desperation of refugees and the violence of conflict created the deadliest shipwreck in history, and continues with the Doña Paz in the Philippines, a collision that claimed thousands of civilian lives in ...

The History of Mason Barney's Shipyard and Swansea, Massachusetts Carl Sagan once said, “To read is to voyage through time.” This book is your boarding pass to the colonial heart of Swansea, Massachusetts, a place where myth, industry, and faith converged on the banks of the Palmer River. Step into the bustling world of Mason Barney’s legendary shipyard, where over 150 vessels were crafted by hand, from nimble fishing boats to towering ships of over 1,000 tons. Discover the rise of Barneyville, once known as Bungtown, a thriving maritime hub where coopers shaped barrels, cannons were ...

War at sea made and broke lives across the Mediterranean. This book follows the Order of St. John as they face the Ottoman Empire and North African corsairs from 1291 to 1798. It shows how galleys, forts, and prize courts turned raids into a working system that relied on captives and ransom. The story moves from Rhodes to Malta. It covers the 1480 and 1522 sieges of Rhodes, the 1530 move to Malta, the Great Siege of 1565, the Holy League victory at Lepanto, long fights with Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, the rise of sailing ships, and the end in 1798. Each chapter uses records from both ...