Ships & Shipbuilding

On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants....

A major literary event: a never-before-published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God that brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade....

New York Times bestselling author Hampton Sides returns with a white-knuckle tale of polar exploration and survival in the Gilded Age....

The story begins in 1629, when the pride of the Dutch East India Company, the Batavia, is on its maiden voyage en route from Amsterdam to the Dutch East Indies, laden down with the greatest treasure to leave Holland....

In the early hours of February 25, 1968, a Russian submarine armed with three nuclear ballistic missiles set sail from its base in Siberia on a routine combat patrol to Hawaii. Then it vanished....

On October 1, 2015, Hurricane Joaquin barreled into the Bermuda Triangle and swallowed the container ship El Faro whole, resulting in the worst American shipping disaster in 35 years....

From best-selling author John U. Bacon, a gripping narrative history of the largest manmade detonation prior to Hiroshima....

On December 4th, 1872, a 100-foot brigantine was discovered drifting through the North Atlantic without a soul on board. Not a sign of struggle, not a shred of damage, no ransacked cargo-and not a trace of the captain, his wife and daughter, or the crew....

John Maxtone-Graham devotes his considerable knowledge and impeccable prose to a discussion of salient, provocative, and rarely investigated components of the story....

Drawing on decades of experience, Gibbins reveals the riches beneath the waves and shows us how the treasures found there can be a porthole to the past that tell a new story about the world and its underwater secrets.

A few minutes before midnight on April 14, 1912, the "unsinkable" RMS Titanic, on her maiden voyage to New York, struck an iceberg....

Elliot Rappaport, a professional captain of traditional sailing ships, has spent three decades at sea, where understanding weather is crucial to the safety of vessels and their crews. In Reading the Glass, he offers a sailor’s-eye view of the moving parts of our atmosphere....

The technological marvel of its age, the Erie Canal grew out of a sudden fit of inspiration. Proponents didn't just dream; they built a 360-mile waterway entirely by hand....

A vivid narrative history of the Mayflower and of the Winslow family, who traveled to America in search of a new world....

Even if we live within sight of the sea, it is easy to forget that our world is an ocean world....

Steamboats and Sailors of the Great Lakes is the most thorough and factual study of the Great Lakes shipping industry written this century....

In Graveyard of the Lakes, Thompson suggests that most of the accidents and deaths on the lakes have been the result of human error, ranging from simple mistakes to gross incompetence....

The modern listener is given a seat in the whale boat of Owen Chase as he and his fellow crew and their captain make way in three boats after the wreckage of the Whaleship Essex....

Seaworthy is about nature—human and other; about learning what you can control and what you do when fate takes matters out of your control....

The small ship making the Liverpool-to-New York trip in the early months of 1856 hit an iceberg that tore the ship asunder. Five lifeboats were lowered. On one were 13 souls. Only one would survive. This is his story....

He gathered his crew of four, readied his 49-foot steel boat, the Can Do, and entered the maelstrom of the blizzard that was to become known as the "Storm of the Century"....

Against the backdrop of the extraordinary history of Great Lakes shipping, Too Much Sea for Their Decks chronicles shipwrecked schooners, wooden freighters, early steel-hulled steamers, whalebacks, and bulk carriers all lost in the frigid waters of Lake Superior....

In the tradition of Erik Larson's Dead Wake comes The Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria, about the sinking of the glamorous Italian ocean liner....

The Shipwreck Hunter chronicles David L. Mearns' most intriguing finds. It describes the extraordinary techniques used, the detailed research, and the courage required to find a wreck thousands of feet beneath the sea, plus the moving human stories that lie behind these tragedies....

In 1973, a routine dive to the telecommunication cable that snakes along the Atlantic sea bed went badly wrong. Pisces III, with Roger Chapman and Roger Mallinson onboard, had tried to surface when a catastrophic fault suddenly sent the mini-submarine tumbling to the ocean bed....