Maritime History & Piracy

From New York Times bestselling author Hampton Sides, an epic account of the most momentous voyage of the Age of Exploration, which culminated in Captain James Cook’s death in Hawaii, and left a complex and controversial legacy still debated to this day....

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell....

The ordeal of the whaleship Essex was an event as mythic in the nineteenth century as the sinking of the Titanic was in the twentieth....

The mutiny on HMS Bounty, in the South Pacific on 28 April 1789, is one of history's truly great stories - a tale of human drama, intrigue and adventure of the highest order - and in the hands of Peter FitzSimons it comes to life as never before. Commissioned by the Royal Navy to collect breadfruit plants from Tahiti and take them to the West Indies, the Bounty's crew found themselves in a tropical paradise. Five months later, they did not want to leave.

On the night of 14/15 April 1912, a supposedly unsinkable ship, the largest and most luxurious vessel in the world at the time, collided with an iceberg and sank on her maiden voyage. Of the 2,208 people on board, only 712 were saved. The rest either drowned or froze to death.

Driven by a passion for travel and history and a love of ships and the sea, former Monty Python stalwart and beloved television globe-trotter Michael Palin explores the world of HMS Erebus, last seen on an ill-fated voyage to chart the Northwest Passage....

In this grand and thrilling narrative, the acclaimed biographer of Magellan, Columbus, and Marco Polo brings alive the singular life and adventures of Sir Francis Drake, the pirate/explorer/admiral whose mastery of the seas during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I changed....

The true, harrowing story of the ill-fated 1913 Canadian Arctic Expedition and the two men who came to define it....

Ghosh unravels the impact of the opium trade on global history and in his own family—the climax of a years long project....

Finding and identifying a pirate ship is the hardest thing to do under the sea. But two men—John Chatterton and John Mattera—are willing to risk everything to find the Golden Fleece, the ship of the infamous pirate Joseph Bannister....

As he explodes many accepted pirate myths (i.e. "walking the plank" is pure fiction), Cordingly replaces them with a truth that is more complex and often bloodier....

It is impossible to understand our world today without understanding the last 100 years of Middle Eastern history. The history of the region in the 20th century is so varied and complex that it defies easy explanations....

On July 30, 1945, the USS Indianapolis is sailing alone in the Philippine Sea when she is sunk by two Japanese torpedoes. For the next five nights, almost 300 miles from the nearest land, nearly 900 men battle injuries, sharks, dehydration, insanity, and eventually each other....

Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolizing risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of freedom. But at the root of this mythology is a rich history of pirate societies....

The year is 1680, in the heart of the Golden Age of Piracy, and more than 300 daring, hardened pirates—a potent mix of low-life scallywags and a rare breed of gentlemen buccaneers—gather on a remote Caribbean island....

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Ghost Map and Extra Life, the story of a pirate who changed the world....

This is the little-known story of how a newly independent nation was challenged by four Muslim powers and what happened when America's third president decided to stand up....

On December 4th, 1872, a 100-foot brigantine was discovered drifting through the North Atlantic without a soul on board. Not a sign of struggle, not a shred of damage, no ransacked cargo-and not a trace of the captain, his wife and daughter, or the crew....

The Shipwreck Hunter chronicles David L. Mearns' most intriguing finds. It describes the extraordinary techniques used, the detailed research, and the courage required to find a wreck thousands of feet beneath the sea, plus the moving human stories that lie behind these tragedies....

Command of the oceans was crucial to winning World War II. In this definitive account, Evan Mawdsley traces events at sea from the first U-boat operations in 1939 to the surrender of Japan....

Ocean is a story that begins with the formation of the mid-Atlantic ridge some 200 million years ago and ends with the Castilian conquest of the Canary Islands in the fifteenth century, providing a template for the methods used by the Spanish in their colonization of the New World.

More than two centuries after Master’s Mate Fletcher Christian led a mutiny against Lieutenant William Bligh on a small, armed transport vessel called Bounty, the true story of this enthralling adventure has become obscured by the legend....

In The Dutch Moment, Wim Klooster shows how the Dutch built and eventually lost an Atlantic empire that stretched from the homeland in the United Provinces to the Hudson River and from Brazil and the Caribbean to the African Gold Coast....

This book not only retells the story of the battle from both a British and German perspective based on the latest research, but also helps clarify the context of Germany's inevitable naval clash and the aftermath after the smoke had cleared....

Villains of All Nations explores the "Golden Age" of Atlantic piracy (1716-1726) and the infamous generation whose images underlie our modern, romanticized view of pirates....