Ship History

On a cold, cloudy day in early February 1985, Shelley Wachsmann, then resident nautical archaeologist for the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums, drove to Kibbutz Ginosar, an agricultural settlement near the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Two brothers, avid amateur archaeologists, had found a boat buried in the lake, its outlines revealed by receding lake waters. The boat was "possibly ancient," according to the handwritten note placed on Wachsmann's desk a day or two before.

People love mysteries, which is a good thing since history is so replete with them. This is especially true among seafaring people, and of all the mysteries of the deep, few rise to the level of the Mary Celeste. In many ways, it is a story more suited for an episode of The X-Files than it is for any history book. There is the unlucky ship that began her sailing career under a cloud of bad fortune and accident.

On December 7, 1941, even as Japanese carrier-launched aircraft flew toward Pearl Harbor, a small American cargo ship chartered by the army reported that it was under attack from a submarine halfway between Seattle and Honolulu. After that one cryptic message, the humble lumber carrier Cynthia Olson and her crew vanished without a trace, sparking one of the most enduring nautical mysteries of the war. What happened to the ill-fated ship? What happened to her crew?

For more than 100 years, a submarine lay buried beneath the ocean floor near Charleston, South Carolina. This Civil War stealth weapon, the H.L. Hunley, made history in 1864 as the first submarine ever to sink an enemy ship. But something went wrong during that daring mission. The Hunley never returned to port.

Shipping out in the 1970s These tales of adventure, told in 10 separate stories, provide a snapshot history of the 1970s from the author’s unique perspective as a merchant seaman traveling around the United States and to ports around the world. Starting in 1969, the first story describes a journey from Seattle to a waterfront resort in Maine, to a vegetable oil factory in New Orleans, and across the Pacific to the red-light district of wartime Saigon. Others describe shoveling coal to power an ore carrier on the Great Lakes, a ship of the same type and on the same run as the ill-fated ...

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.

Perfect for curious young listeners, these eight titles provide exciting details about notable tragedies throughout history. Learn about the impact of catastrophes like the Titanic, Pompeii, the San Francisco Earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, the Hindenburg, the Great Chicago Fire, and Pearl Harbor in this complete collection of iconic historical moments. With an easy-to-listen-to narrative in each book, listeners will be able to quickly learn about the shock and aftermath of these disasters.

The Mystery of the Casement Ship recounts one of the most extraordinary and explosive episodes of the Irish Easter Rising. In 1916, working with the Irish revolutionary Sir Roger Casement, Germany sent a captured British merchant ship disguised as a Norwegian tramp steamer named the Aud to Ireland to deliver guns and ammunition to rebels planning the Easter uprising.

When Oxford archeologist Mensun Bound, dubbed the "Indiana Jones of the Deep" by the Discovery Channel, teamed up with a financier to salvage a sunken trove of 15th-century porcelain, it seemed a dream enterprise. The stakes were high: the Hoi An wreck lay hundreds of feet down in a typhoon-prone stretch of water off the coast of Vietnam known as the Dragon Sea.

Did you know that a newly-designed boat helped win World War II? Learn about Andrew Higgins and his amphibious boat design that revolutionized the war effort. See how Higgins adapted his boat design to help carry soldiers and supplies onto Normandy Beach on D-Day. His craft was amphibious—it worked on land and water. See how one American's invention helped changed the tide of the war.

In 1820 the slave ship Antelope was captured off the Florida coast. Though the slave trade was prohibited, slavery was still legal in half of the United States, and it was left to the Supreme Court to determine whether the nearly 300 Africans onboard were considered slaves - and if so, to whom they belonged.

On December 13, 1944, POW Estel Myers was herded aboard the Japanese prison ship, the Oryoku Maru, with more than 1,600 other American captives. More than 1,100 of them would be dead by journey's end... The son of a Kentucky sharecropper and an enlistee in the Navy's medical corps, Myers arrived in Manilla shortly before the bombings of Pearl Harbor and the other six targets of the Imperial Japanese military.

Talut Forest is a lumberjack on Terra Nova, where life thrives in the crowns of trees twenty kilometers high. After a mistake at work costs him his job, Talut has no choice but to sign up for a suicide mission. The aim of the mission? To investigate an artifact on the unexplored surface, where deep darkness reigns. But when the mission spirals into chaos from the start, Talut's fight to see his family again turns into a battle for the fate of the entire human race.

Young Daniel Arabus and his mother are slaves in the house of Captain Ivers of Stratford, Connecticut. By law they should be free, since Daniel's father fought in the Revolutionary army and earned enough in soldiers' notes to buy his family's freedom. But now Daniel's father is dead, and Mrs. Ivers has taken the notes from his mother. When Daniel bravely steals the notes back, a furious Captain Ivers forces him aboard a ship bound for the West Indies - and certain slavery.

Deepwater archaeology uncovers secrets from the ancient maritime past...Thousands of shipwrecks and archaeological sites lie undiscovered in deep water, potentially holding important clues to our maritime past. Ships from the Depths surveys the dramatic advances in technology over the last few years that have made it possible for scientists to locate, study, and catalogue archaeological sites in waters previously inaccessible to humans. Søreide provides an introduction to and survey of the history, development, and potential of this exciting branch of nautical archaeology.

No one is to be trusted and Donland is to use every trick available to him to succeed. The forces arrayed against him are powerful as well as influential. He must deceive and evade those who attempt to stop him from reaching a wreck on an island in the Indian Ocean. The Admiralty and The Honorable East India Company give him the authority to command any vessel he boards. He uses that authority no matter the objections of the captains of the merchantmen or the naval ships he boards. Having journey from the Mediterranean, across Egyptian deserts then marooned on an island, he finds himself ...

In an alternate timeline, the Titanic survives its fateful voyage but returns as something far more sinister. The ship becomes a spectral enigma, defying the laws of nature and dragging those aboard into a haunting dance between life and death. Passengers and crew alike wrestle with supernatural phenomena, eerie whispers of the drowned, and the crushing weight of secrets buried beneath the waves. As investigators and survivors confront the Titanic's dark legacy, they uncover chilling truths about the ship's curse and its unrelenting hunger for souls.

On 8th June 1940, the British aircraft carrier HMS Glorious and her two destroyer escorts HMS Ardent and Acasta were sighted by the German battle cruiser Scharnhorst and her sister ship Gneisenau. In a brutal gun battle that lasted over an hour, all British ships were sunk and more than 1500 men lost their lives. Why had Glorious left the main troop convoy to proceed independently? Why was she so lightly protected? Why did British Intelligence give no warning that the German battlecruisers were close by?

In his book, Rasmus Rasmussen provides a full account of the Viking's [1893] journey from Norway to Chicago from a crew member's point of view.

Water covers the vast majority of the planet, and people have looked upon the oceans for thousands of years with a mixture of awe and fear. The world’s water offers transportation, connections with distant lands, food, and beauty. Furthermore, the deep seas and oceans remain largely unexplored, especially farther below. All of these factors have led to centuries worth of mysteries and stories. Countless people have ventured out on those vast expanses of water, never to return, while others have plumbed the depths and made strange discoveries.