Maritime History

The growth of piracy led to a major surge in attacks in the Caribbean and along North America’s Atlantic seaboard. With the fragile maritime economy of the Americas threatened with collapse, major ports were threatened and trade brought to a standstill, the British government finally declared war on the pirates. The Pirate Menace draws on extensive research, as well as a wide range of first-hand accounts, to produce a new history of the heyday of historical piracy.

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. The fleets and armies that fought for the Dutch in the decades-long war against Spain included numerous foreigners, largely drawn from countries in northwestern Europe. Likewise, many settlers of Dutch colonies were born in other parts of Europe or the New World.

On November 21, 1914, after sailing more than ten thousand miles from Norway to the Antarctic Ocean, the Endurance finally succumbed to the surrounding ice. Ernest Shackleton and his crew had navigated the 144-foot, three-masted wooden vessel to Antarctica to become the first to cross the barren continent, but early season pack ice trapped them in place offshore. They watched in silence as the ship’s stern rose twenty feet in the air and disappeared into the frigid sea, then spent six harrowing months marooned on the ice in its wake.

A century before Britain became involved in this terrible business, whole villages and towns in European countries were being depopulated by slavers, who transported the men, women, and children to Africa, where they were sold. This is the forgotten slave trade, one which saw over a million Christians forced into captivity in the Muslim world. Starting in the ancient world, Simon Webb traces the history of slavery in Europe, showing that the numbers involved were vast and that the victims were often treated far more cruelly than black slaves in America and the Caribbean.

John Valliant's essay about the sinking of the Fantome, a Caribbean pleasure cruiser, during Hurricane Mitch in 1998, and the subsequent lawsuit. The disaster was the Atlantic’s worst sailing accident in over forty years.

Upon the 100th anniversary of the most terrifying stretch of shark attacks in American history - a wave said to have been the inspiration for Jaws - comes a reissue of the classic Lyons Press account and investigation.

Yet another brilliant entry in Kenemore’s zombie canon - Cap’n Hook meets the undead. Set in the Caribbean of the eighteenth century, the epicenter of piracy, voodoo, and the dark arts, The Code of the Zombie Pirate reveals all the secrets to selecting, customizing, and managing a motley crew of pirates-cum-zombies.

Often romanticized in print and on the silver screen, real-life pirates were a brutal menace that plagued the high seas. In this book, Angus Konstam separates myth from reality, tracing the history of piracy through the centuries, from the pirates who plagued the Ancient Egyptians to the Viking raids and on to the era of privateers. He discusses the so-called "Golden Age of Piracy" and colorful characters such as Blackbeard and Captain Kidd, before examining the West's initial encounters with Eastern pirates off the Chinese coast and the phenomenon of the modern pirate.

Author Kurt C. Schlichting tells the story of the Manhattan waterfront as a struggle between public and private control of New York's priceless asset. Nature provided New York with a sheltered harbor but presented the city with a challenge: to find the necessary capital to build and expand the maritime infrastructure. From colonial times until after the Civil War, the city ceded control of the waterfront to private interests, excluding the public entirely and sparking a battle between shipping companies, the railroads, and ferries for access to the waterfront.

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.

Soon after the first maritime trade routes became operational, seafaring bandits appeared to prey upon the cargo, crews, and ships of others. Crimson Waters traces the history of piracy around the globe, stretching back from its roots in 2500 BCE, through the Golden Age of Piracy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and up to the modern-day pirates who still threaten boats along coastlines and on the open seas.

On a frigid April night in 1912, the world’s largest—and soon most famous—ocean liner struck an iceberg and slipped beneath the waves. She had scarcely disappeared before her new journey began, a seemingly limitless odyssey through the world’s fixation with her every tragic detail. Plans to find and raise the Titanic began almost immediately. Yet seven decades passed before it was found. Why? And of some three million shipwrecks that litter the ocean floor, why is the world still so fascinated with this one?

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.

Captain Kidd was one of the most notorious pirates to ever prowl the seas. But few know that Kidd had an accomplice, a behind-the-scenes player who enabled his plundering and helped him outpace his enemies. That accomplice was his wife, Sarah Kidd, a well-to-do woman whose extraordinary life is a lesson in reinvention and resourcefulness. Twice widowed by twenty-one and operating within the strictures of polite society in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New York, Sarah secretly aided and abetted her husband, fighting alongside him against his accusers.

Are you ready to be engulfed in a world in which man battles with deep emotions of vengeance, the pressures of society, and passive resistance? Herman Melville’s descriptive style of storytelling captivates and thrills listeners as he deftly reveals the undertones and themes of racial conflict, truth, and social injustice.

Two Years Before the Mast is a book by the American author Richard Henry Dana, Jr., written after a two-year sea voyage starting in 1834 and published in 1840. While at Harvard College, Dana had an attack of the measles that affected his vision. Thinking it might help his sight, Dana, rather than going on a Grand Tour as most of his fellow classmates traditionally did (and unable to afford it anyway), and being something of a nonconformist, left Harvard to enlist as a common sailor.

In 1956, a stunned world watched as the famous Italian ocean liner Andrea Doria sank after being struck by a Swedish vessel off the coast of Nantucket. Unlike the Titanic, this sinking played out in real time across radios and televisions, the first disaster of the modern age. Audiences witnessed it all: the unthinkable collision of two modern vessels equipped with radar; perilous hours of uncertainty; the heroic rescue of passengers, and the final gasp as the pride of the Italian fleet slipped beneath the Atlantic, taking some 50 lives with her.

Pacific War expert Mark Stille examines the key aspects of battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval encounter in history and probably the most decisive naval battle of the entire Pacific War, with new and insightful analysis and dismantles the myths surrounding the respective actions and overall performances of the two most important commanders in the battle, and the “lost victory” of the Japanese advance into Leyte Gulf that never happened.

In the first-ever history of the world's female buccaneers, Pirate Women: the Princesses, Prostitutes, and Privateers Who Ruled the Seven Seas tells the story of women, both real and legendary, who through the ages sailed alongside - and sometimes in command of - their male counterparts. These women came from all walks of life but had one thing in common: a desire for freedom.

In June 1631, pirates from Algiers and armed troops of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, led by the notorious pirate captain Morat Rais, stormed ashore at the little harbor village of Baltimore in West Cork. They captured almost all the villagers and bore them away to a life of slavery in North Africa. The prisoners were destined for a variety of fates—some would live out their days chained to the oars as galley slaves, while others would spend long years in the scented seclusion of the harem or within the walls of the Sultan's palace.