Maritime English

Two Years Before the Mast, written by Richard Henry Dana, provides a vivid account of "the life of a common sailor at sea". Dana sails from Boston, around Cape Horn, stopping in several ports along the California coast including San Diego, San Pedro, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco. On the return trip around Cape Horn in the middle of the Antarctic winter Dana describes terrifying storms and incredible beauty, giving vivid descriptions of icebergs and the scurvy that afflicts members of the crew.

On December 16, 1842, the US brig-of-war Somers dropped anchor in the New York Harbor at the end of a voyage intended to teach a group of adolescents the rudiments of naval life. But this routine exercise ended in catastrophe. Commander Alexander Slidell Mackenzie came ashore claiming he had prevented a mutiny that would have left him and his officers dead. Some of the thwarted mutineers were being held under guard, but three had already been hanged at sea.

For many years, thousands of people have walked past an unassuming black timber fishing boat bobbing in the water down at the wharves of Sydney's Darling Harbour. But appearances can be deceptive. This humble little trawler played a key role in one of World War II's most audacious and successful commando raids. In September 1943, fourteen young Z special operatives sailed the small fishing boat from Australia to Japanese-occupied Singapore. Battling deadly tides, fierce storms, hostile ships and detection from the air, this little ship and its crew made it to the heart of the enemy stronghold.

From 1949 to 1950, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) made crucial decisions to establish a navy and secure China's periphery. The civil war had been fought with a peasant army, yet in order to capture key offshore islands from the Nationalist rival, Mao Zedong needed to develop maritime capabilities. Mao's Army Goes to Sea is a ground-breaking history of the founding of the Chinese navy and Communist China's earliest island-seizing campaigns.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the United States led the world in negotiating one of the most important treaties in history: the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Through these negotiations the United States secured the largest area of maritime jurisdiction in the world—an area larger than the continental United States itself—and protected navigational freedom, so critical for Naval mobility. Today UNCLOS is in force for 168 countries and the European Union. Isolationist arguments, however, have for a quarter-century prevented the Senate from voting on the Convention.

Portugal, 1750s. Cecilia Lamb knew being a sea captain’s wife would mean a life of waiting and watching the horizon for her husband’s ship. But John has been gone longer than any voyage should last. Everyone else has given up hope of his return. But she knows in her bones that he is not lost. Gone, but not lost. Barely able to tear her eyes from the shimmering sea, she feels drawn to the sun-baked shoreline, and amid the bustle of the docks she feels certain that her husband will come back to her. Though along with that feeling is another sense – that something darker is coming.

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?

Celebrated historian Diana Preston presents betrayals, escapes, and survival at sea in her account of the mutiny of the Bounty and the flight of convicts from the Australian penal colony. The story of the mutiny of the Bounty and William Bligh and his men's survival on the open ocean for 48 days and 3,618 miles has become the stuff of legend. But few realize that Bligh's escape across the seas was not the only open-boat journey in that era of British exploration and colonization.

There were few experienced swimmers among over 1,300 Lower East Side residents who boarded the General Slocum on June 15, 1904. It shouldn't have mattered since the steamship was only chartered for a languid excursion from Manhattan to Long Island Sound. But a fire erupted minutes into the trip, forcing hundreds of terrified passengers into the water. By the time the captain found a safe shore for landing, 1,021 had perished. It was New York's deadliest tragedy prior to September 11, 2001.

On January 25, 1917, HMS Laurentic struck two German mines off the coast of Ireland and sank. The ship was carrying 44 tons of gold bullion to the still-neutral United States via Canada in order to finance the war effort for Britain and its allies. Britain desperately needed that sunken treasure, but any salvage had to be secret, since the British government dared not alert the Germans to the presence of the gold. Lieutenant Commander Guybon Damant was the most qualified officer to head the risky mission.

This is the extraordinary story of the mutiny aboard the frigate HMS Hermione in 1797 (eight years after the mutiny on the Bounty) - the bloodiest mutiny ever suffered by the Royal Navy, which led to the extradition from America, and the hanging by the British, of the martyred sailor Jonathan Robbins. This event plunged the two-decades-old American Republic into a constitutional crisis and powerfully contributed to the outcome of the US presidential election of 1800.

In the best-selling tradition of Indianapolis and In Harm’s Way comes a “captivating...gripping” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) account of the USS Plunkett - a US Navy destroyer that sustained the most harrowing attack on any Navy ship by the Germans during World War II, later made famous by John Ford and Herman Wouk.

Hard Aground brings together three intertwined stories documenting the US Navy's strategic and materiel evolution from the end of Civil War through the First World War. The first story focuses on the reconstruction of the US Navy following the swift and near-total dismantling of the Union Navy infrastructure after the Civil War. Jampoler argues that the federal government discovered that the fleet requested by the navy, and paid for by Congress, was the wrong fleet.

On July 4, 1861, the schooner S. J. Waring set sail from New York on a routine voyage to South America. Seventeen days later it limped back into New York's harbor with the ship's black cook and steward at the helm. While the story of that ill-fated voyage is one of the most harrowing tales of captivity and survival on the high seas, it has been tragically lost to history. Now reclaiming William Tillman as the American hero he deserves to be, historian Brian McGinty takes listeners on a courageous journey.

During his life and even after his death, Captain William Kidd’s name was known around England and the American colonies. He was infamous for the very crime for which he was hanged, piracy. This book by Rebecca Simon dives into the details of the two-year manhunt for Captain Kidd and the events that ensued afterward. Captain Kidd was hanged in 1701, and from that sprung a massive hunt for all pirates led by the British during a period known as the Golden Age of Piracy. Ironically, public executions only led to pirates’ growth in popularity and interest.

Lighthouses are striking totems of our relationship to the sea. For many, they encapsulate a romantic vision of solitary homes amongst the waves, but their original purpose is much more utilitarian than that. Still today we depend upon their guiding lights for the safe passage of ships. Nowhere is this truer than in the rock lighthouses of Great Britain and Ireland, a ring of 19 towers built between 1811-1905, so called because they were constructed on desolate rock formations in the middle of the sea, and made of granite to withstand the power of its waves.

One of the largest, fastest, and most beautiful ships in the world, the Andrea Doria was en route to New York from Italy. Departing from the United States was the much smaller Stockholm. On the foggy night of July 25, 1956, 53 miles southeast of Nantucket, the Stockholm sliced through the Doria's steel hull. Within minutes, the sea was pouring into the Italian liner. Eleven hours later, she capsized and sank into the ocean.

The most feared ship in Britain’s West Africa Squadron, His Majesty’s brig Black Joke was one of a handful of ships tasked with patrolling the western coast of Africa in an effort to end hundreds of years of global slave trading. Sailing after the spectacular fall of Napoleon in France, yet before the rise of Queen Victoria’s England, Black Joke was first a slaving vessel itself, and one with a lightning-fast reputation; only a lucky capture in 1827 allowed it to be repurposed by the Royal Navy to catch its former compatriots.

For centuries, ships' commanders kept journals that recorded their missions. These included voyages of discovery to unknown lands, engagements in war and sea and general trade. Many of their logs, diaries and letters were lodged at The National Archives and give a vivid picture of the situations that they encountered. Entries range from Captain James Cook's notes of his discovery of the South Pacific and Australia, to logs of the great naval battles, such as Waterloo and Trafalgar.

It was in the twilight of Christmas Eve, 1867, when Cyrus Fernsby first caught sight of the tapering square towered lighthouse on Wraith Rock from the large rowing boat which was conveying him to, what was intended to be, a short term keeper posting. As it emerged with evermore clarity from within the Atlantic sea mist, and the spray of the crashing waves which embraced it, an inexplicable and undeniable sense of foreboding began to seize and permeate the innermost reaches of his soul.