Piracy History

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.

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.

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.

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.

Everyone knows the story of the Titanic, but in terms of loss of life that catastrophe doesn't even figure as one of the 50 worst maritime disasters of the last three hundred years. The causes of disaster are legion: besides icebergs and enemy torpedoes, ships have been sunk by fire, explosions, flooding, capsizing, storms, collisions and human error.

The 16th and 17th centuries saw the emergence of a new threat to government and organized society. Privateers and pirates raided along the coast of powerful countries and were, at times, at war with England, France, and Spain. They developed their own system of rules, a code of morality, and a very rough form of government. Pirates were eventually able to organize behind a captain who eventually would become like a governor with judicial power over all the pirates and control over settlements taken by the pirates in raids.

This book tells the true stories of mariners who became marauders, attacking, hiding, recruiting and disputing in and around Mauritius in the 17th and 18th centuries. Pirates stopped here to rest their crews, provision their ships, offload their captives, and occasionally to maroon their own men. It is also the location for the Christmas Day shipwreck and the first official salvage operation of a pirate ship in history. Read the real, authenticated accounts of pirates like John Bowen and Olivier La Buse who once haunted these shores.

Freedom of expression and individual enterprise have distinguished the societies of powers dominant at sea, and since supreme maritime nations have prevailed over their territorial rivals in the great wars of the modern era, it is they who have created today's world. In this final volume of his masterful trilogy, Padfield carries the theme through the terrible wars of the last century to the present, with vivid descriptions of the naval battles that have shaped our world.

There was one submarine that outfought all other boats in the Silent Service in World War II: the USS Tang. Captain Richard Hetherington O’Kane commanded the attack submarine that sunk more tonnage, rescued more downed aviators, and successfully completed more surface attacks than any other American submarine. These undersea predators were the first to lead the offensive rebound against the Japanese, but at great cost: Submariners would have six times the mortality rate as the sailors who manned surface ships.

The SS Portland was a solid and luxurious ship, and its loss in 1898 in a violent storm with some 200 people aboard was later remembered as “New England’s Titanic.” The Portland was one of New England's largest and most luxurious paddle steamers, and after nine years' solid performance, she had earned a reputation as a safe and dependable vessel. In November 1898, a perfect storm formed off the New England coast. Conditions would produce a blizzard with 100 miles per hour winds and 60-foot waves that pummeled the coast.

This audiobook attempts to answer as many of those questions as possible through an informal, narrative style. It focuses on the overall experience and the feelings and emotions of the people going through it rather than just on facts and figures. It covers every aspect of the Titanic saga from inception and construction to the recent rediscovery of the ship. It also examines the impact of the disaster on society and culture.

Ruim vier eeuwen geleden zwermden Nederlandse schepen en hun bemanningen uit over de wereldzeeën. Ze voeren naar het noorden, over de Atlantische Oceaan naar het westen en rond Kaap Hoorn en voorbij Kaap de Goede Hoop naar Azië. Ze dreven handel, gingen de strijd aan met Europese concurrenten, onderwierpen goed- of kwaadschiks inheemse volken en stichtten nederzettingen en koloniën. Het vervoer van goederen en mensen via het water was in veel opzichten bepalend voor de ontwikkeling van scheepstypen, navigatiemiddelen en handelsnetwerken.

Calais-born Olivier Le Vasseur aka La Buse is infamous for his 1721 attack on a Portuguese ship docked at Bourbon (modern day Réunion), the island where he eventually met his fate on the gallows in 1730. The raid yielded one of the most spectacular treasure hauls in the recorded history of piracy. The value of the plunder taken - and a fabled incident that occurred on the day La Buse was hanged - have led to enduring claims about the supposed buried treasure of this ill-fated pirate. The recorded facts of Le Vasseur’s life – and their importance in debunking the legend- are the subject...

Jeremy Black takes the listener through its evolution to becoming one of the most important oceans in the world. He discusses the importance of the Atlantic in relation to world history as well as addressing topics such as those bravest to attempt to cross the ocean before Columbus, the beginnings of slavery from 1400-1600, the struggle for control between empires in the 1600s, the way technology adapted with steamships to telegraph cables, the battle of the Falkland and the Cold War.

A Short History of Seafaring tells the 5,000 year history of the remarkable individuals who sailed seas, for trade, to conquer new lands, to explore the unknown. From the early Polynesians to the first circumnavigations by the Portuguese and the British, these are awe-inspiring tales of epic sea voyages involving great feats of seamanship, navigation, endurance, and ingenuity. Explore the lives and maritime adventures, many with first person narratives, of land seekers and globe charters such as Christopher Columbus, Captain James Cook and Vitus Bering.

Sailing on a boat by yourself out at sea and out of sight of land can be exhilarating or terrifying, compelling or tedious - sometimes it can be all of these things just in one morning. It is an adventure at odds with our normal, sociable lives, carried out floating on a medium wholly inimical to our existence. But the deep ocean is also a remarkable place on which to think. Richard King's enormously engaging and curious book is about the debt we owe to solo sailors: women and men, young and old, who have set out alone.

The Outlaw Ocean is a riveting, adrenalin-fuelled tour of a vast, lawless and rampantly criminal world that few have ever seen: the high seas. There are few remaining frontiers on our planet. But perhaps the wildest, and least understood, are the world’s oceans: too big to police, and under no clear international authority, these immense regions of treacherous water play host to the unbridled extremes of human behaviour and activity.

Im Januar 1742 wird ein windschiefes Segelboot an die Küste Brasiliens gespült. An Bord 30 Männer, die einzigen Überlebenden des königlichen Eroberungsschiffs »The Wager«, das in einem Sturm zerschellt ist. Sechs Monate später landen drei Schiffbrüchige an der Küste Chiles und behaupten, die 30 Männer seien Meuterer, die sich den königlichen Befehlen widersetzt und skrupellos gemordet hätten... Wer lügt, wer sagt die Wahrheit? Das soll ein britisches Kriegsgericht entscheiden. Es geht um Leben oder Tod.

The Mediterranean has always been a leading stage for world history, and it is also visited each year by tens of millions of tourists. Jeremy Black provides an account in which the experience of travel is foremost: travel for tourism, trade, war, migration, culture, or, as so often, a variety of reasons. Throughout the audiobook the emphasis is on the sea, on coastal regions and on port cities visited by cruise liners, but it also looks beyond, notably to the other waters that flow into the Mediterranean.

Jacques Cartier prépare minutieusement son premier voyage. Comme il est soutenu par le roi de France, il parvient à lever son équipage. Le 20 avril 1534, il assiste à la messe et au sortir de l’église, toute la ville l’accompagne sur les quais. La foule en liesse veut assister au départ de ce grand personnage auquel rien ne résiste. Il appareille avec deux navires ornés du drapeau fleurdelisé, symbole de la royauté. C’est le départ pour la grande aventure. En moins de trois semaines d’une traversée assez tranquille, Jacques Cartier passe au large de Terre-Neuve.