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...

“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...

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.

They are all gone now―the Titanic survivors. No human being who stood on her decks that fateful night was alive to commemorate the event on its 100th anniversary. Their stories are with us, however, and the lessons remain. From the moment the world learned the Titanic had sunk, we wanted to know, who had survived? Those answers didn’t come until the evening of Thursday, April 18, 1912―when the Cunard liner Carpathia finally reached New York with the 706 survivors who had been recovered from Titanic’s lifeboats. Harold Bride, “Titanic’s surviving wireless operator,” relayed the...

Before Titanic, White Star had already known catastrophe. In 1873, RMS Atlantic left Liverpool on a transatlantic voyage to North America. She was a modern steamship of her age, built for the White Star Line and carrying passengers, emigrants, crew, cargo, and the confidence of a company still building its reputation across the Atlantic. Then coal became a problem. Atlantic diverted toward Halifax, Nova Scotia, seeking fuel before continuing her voyage. In darkness, under a mistaken understanding of position, she approached the coast wrongly and struck the rocks near Mars Head. The ship had...

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.

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.

"...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...

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.

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,...

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.

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.

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? 

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.

On the night of 27 September 1994, the passenger ferry MS Estonia left Tallinn for Stockholm on what should have been a routine Baltic crossing. By morning, the ship was gone. In one of Europe’s worst peacetime maritime disasters, 852 people died and only 137 survived. The ferry’s rapid sinking shocked Estonia, Sweden, Finland, and the wider world. How could a modern passenger vessel, sailing a known route through a regulated European sea, vanish so quickly? MS Estonia: The Ferry Disaster That Europe Could Not Forget tells the story of the ship, the route, the storm, the bow visor ...

The Tragic Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald A Novella by Sylvester Murray On a freezing November night in 1975, the mighty Edmund Fitzgerald—a 729‑foot titan of the Great Lakes—vanished beneath the violent waves of Lake Superior. No distress call. No survivors. Only questions that have haunted generations. In this gripping and atmospheric novella, Sylvester Murray brings the final voyage of the Fitzgerald to life with cinematic intensity and deep emotional resonance. Through the eyes of the crew, the families waiting on shore, and the relentless power of the lake itself, the story ...

On 29 May 1914, the RMS Empress of Ireland was struck in thick fog on the St. Lawrence River and sank in just sixteen minutes. More than one thousand people died, making it one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in modern history. Yet unlike Titanic, the loss of the Empress of Ireland never became a permanent global symbol. It happened too quickly, too close to shore, and too close to the outbreak of the First World War. Even so, its lessons were just as severe. This was not a story of too few lifeboats or hours of slow abandonment. It was a story of collision, flooding, and the ...

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 ...

In July 1545, Henry VIII watched as one of the proudest warships of his reign sank in the Solent. The Mary Rose was not an ordinary vessel. Built during Henry’s naval revolution, she represented England’s move from temporary sea power to a permanent royal fleet. She carried guns, soldiers, sailors, craftsmen, and the political ambition of a king who wanted the sea itself to become an instrument of Tudor power. Then, during the Battle of the Solent, she heeled, took water, and sank with terrifying speed. Hundreds of men were trapped and drowned within sight of the English coast. Mary ...