Maritime Disaster

Former Secret Service agent and star of Bravo’s Spy Games Evy Poumpouras shares lessons learned from protecting presidents, as well insights and skills from the oldest and most elite security force in the world to help you prepare for stressful situations, instantly read people, influence how...

In September 1854, the American steamship SS Arctic was one of the great symbols of transatlantic progress. Fast, elegant, and celebrated, she represented the confidence of a new age of steam, commerce, and modern travel. Then, in thick fog off Newfoundland, she collided with the French steamer Vesta and began to die. What followed turned a maritime disaster into a moral scandal. As Arctic slowly filled and the hope of reaching land faded, the structures that should have preserved order began to break apart. The lifeboats were mishandled. Discipline faltered. Fear spread. And when the final...

A historical adventure book set on a small, isolated island during the early nineteenth century."Pacific Shipwreck" is a gripping tale of survival, friendship, and resilience set against the backdrop of a mysterious, uninhabited island. Packed with thrilling adventures, high-sea battles, and life-altering decisions, the book offers readers a riveting emotional journey.The story revolves around the harrowing experiences of the passengers and crew of the ship "Pacific," namely Captain Peterson, the second mate Ready, and the tight-knit Hendrickson family, who intend to make a new beginning in...

On a fog-choked night in July 1956, two modern ships met in the North Atlantic. One would survive. One would not. The collision between the Italian luxury liner Andrea Doria and the Swedish vessel Stockholm was not a failure of seamanship in the traditional sense. It was a failure of modern confidence. Radar worked. Crews were trained. Procedures existed. And yet, through misinterpretation, overconfidence, and the quiet pressure to maintain speed, a technologically advanced ship was fatally wounded within sight of safety. In Andrea Doria: Collision, Fog, and the Modern Sea, Gordon J. ...

Do you think the ocean is a dangerous place? Yes, it can be. Titanic…Amoco Cadiz…Herald of Free Enterprise…Exxon Valdez…every shipwreck tells a story. Veteran sea captain Beetashok Chatterjee reveals the stories behind 13 of the greatest civilian maritime disasters, outside the realms of war, that shook the world. Not just for the number of lives lost, but in some cases the damage caused to the environment and livelihoods, or the media attention those incidents garnered. Allow him to take you back in time and on the high seas, where you can watch and learn from these disasters—...

Beneath the waves lie stories the world was never meant to forget. From the doomed voyage of the Titanic to the eerie silence of the Mary Celeste, Drowned in Silence dives deep into fifteen of the most chilling, mysterious, and tragic sea disasters ever recorded. Author James Calloway brings each tale to life with immersive, emotional storytelling that will haunt readers long after the final page. Survival. Mystery. Loss. The sea remembers everything.

“A Perfect Storm for a new generation, Rachel Slade's Into the Raging Sea is a masterful page-turning account of the El Faro's sinking.” —Ben Mezrich, bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook On October 1, 2015, Hurricane Joaquin barreled into the Bermuda...

"...Damron's able narration carries listeners through this arduous journey with a steady tone that lightens at moments of joy and becomes grave at times of deep sadness and loss. While the tale has all of the trappings of a great adventure novel, neither the author nor Damron let listeners...

Nelson Simon didn’t want to sign up as a last-minute crew member to transport a Norwegian schooner from Brooklyn to Bermuda. But one thing led to another, and there he was. He told himself that it would be a sort of pleasure cruise: a week in the Gulf Stream with a gourmet chef on board, some down time on a tropical island, then a quick flight home. What did it matter that he had practically no sailing experience? The eight other crew members had plenty - they just needed an extra pair of hands. What could possibly go wrong? 

2015 saw the worst American maritime disaster in decades. The captain of the SS El Faro commanded his crew to sail straight into a hurricane. The ship sank and all 33 crew members died. The sinking raised troubling questions: Why did the captain choose to sail into the hurricane? Why did no one on board or on shore stop him? And why was such an old and heavily loaded ship even allowed on the water? The crew of the SS El Faro is gone, but their haunting final hours were preserved by the ship’s black box.

On the night of February 18, 1952, during one of the worst winter storms that New England has ever seen, two oil tankers just off the shore of Cape Cod were torn in half by the force of the storm. This middle-grade adaptation of an adult nonfiction book tells the story of the shipwreck and a harrowing Coast Guard rescue when four men in a tiny lifeboat overcame insurmountable odds and saved more than thirty stranded sailors.  

Out in the open ocean, far beyond shipping lanes and rescue routes, something ancient is hunting again. Crandle’s Keep is a remote island refuge—quiet, isolated, and surrounded by deep, uncharted waters. For Jake Crandle, it was supposed to be a sanctuary from the past. For marine biologist Amy Caldwell, it was a temporary research stop to study warming ocean currents. For a handful of others, it was simply another waypoint at sea. None of them knew they had entered a feeding ground. When ships begin vanishing without distress calls, when steel hulls are torn open as if they were paper,...

From the author of the acclaimed The Great Sea, David Abulafia's new book guides listeners along the world's greatest bodies of water to reveal their primary role in human history. The main protagonists are the three major oceans - the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Indian - which together comprise the majority of the earth's water and cover over half of its surface. These waterways carried goods, plants, livestock, and, of course, people across vast expanses, transforming and ultimately linking irrevocably the economies and cultures of Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

The novel that predicted the Titanic disaster—fourteen years before it happened. Long before history recorded the tragedy of the Titanic, Morgan Robertson imagined it. First published in 1898, The Wreck of the Titan, or Futility tells the haunting story of the Titan, the largest ship ever built, hailed as unsinkable—until it strikes an iceberg in the icy North Atlantic and sinks beneath the waves. Fourteen years later, the Titanic followed the same doomed course. Now, for the first time, the Official Autograph Facsimile Edition™ restores the rare 1912 edition, bringing Robertson’s ...

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 worst maritime disaster in American history did not happen at sea. It happened on the Mississippi River, in the dark hours before dawn, when the overloaded steamboat SS Sultana exploded north of Memphis and turned a journey home into a river of fire. In April 1865, the American Civil War had just ended. Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated. The nation was exhausted, grieving and distracted. Thousands of released Union prisoners of war, many weakened by months in Confederate prison camps such as Andersonville and Cahaba, were being sent home. They boarded Sultana believing the worst was...

A modern cruise liner. Calm seas. Land in sight. And one of the most avoidable maritime disasters in modern history. On 13 January 2012, the Costa Concordia struck rock off the coast of Giglio, Italy. What followed was not simply a shipwreck, but the collapse of command, the failure of truth under pressure, and the exposure of how fragile modern systems become when leadership breaks at the centre. In Costa Concordia: The Disaster That Exposed the Illusion of Safety, Gordon J. MacKenzie tells the full story of the disaster as a study in illusion, risk, and institutional failure. This is not ...

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. How could this 'unsinkable' vessel sink and why did so few of those aboard survive? The authors bring the tragedy to life, telling the story of the ship's design, construction, and maiden voyage.

So Others May Live: Coast Guard Rescue Swimmers: Saving Lives, Defying Death is the award-winning untold story of the US Coast Guard's quiet but resolute rescue swimmers. From deep ocean caves on the Oregon coast to the panicked and chaotic streets of post-Katrina New Orleans, here are their stunningly heroic stories.

Off the jagged coast of Maine, a remote community keeps its secrets buried deep—until the bodies refuse to stay down. When insurance investigator Nate Halpern arrives to audit a string of suspicious maritime claims, he expects to uncover a mundane financial scam. Instead, he finds a town bound by a blood-soaked pact. For two centuries, a powerful local family has protected a horrifying lineage, masking brutal massacres as tragic boating accidents and collecting the payouts to fund their silence. But the sedation protocols are failing. The chains are breaking. And as a catastrophic storm ...