Maritime English

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?

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.

This book tells the tale of the fabled schooner, Rouse Simmons, the most famous Christmas story to emerge from the Great Lakes. This ship, loaded with Christmas trees for Chicago, sailed into the year's worst storm and disappeared in Lake Michigan on November 23, 1912, taking with it Captain Herman Schuenemann and about 15 others who were on board.

On October 29, 1991, the 70-foot longliner Andrea Gail, on day 40 of an extended commercial swordfishing trip, was lost in a convergence of three powerful storms off Canada’s Grand Banks. Data buoys measured waves as high as 100 feet, and the boat was hit with winds measuring 80 knots (92 miles per hour). The Andrea Gail’s emergency beacon washed ashore that November on Sable Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia, but the boat and 6-man crew were never found. The crew left behind five children among them, and the entire small town mourned the loss.