Inspired by the Wager disaster, The Unknown Shore is an immediate precursor to Patrick O'Brian's acclaimed Aubrey/Maturin series that displays all the splendid prose and attention to detail that delight O'Brian's millions of fans.

In the year 1740, Commodore (later Admiral) George Anson embarked on a voyage that would become one of the most famous exploits in British naval history. Sailing through poorly charted waters, Anson and his men encountered disaster, disease, and astonishing success. They circumnavigated the globe and seized a nearly incalculable sum of Spanish gold and silver, but only one of the five ships survived.

Wallace Stegner's uniquely American classic centers on Lyman Ward, a noted historian who relates a fictionalized biography of his pioneer grandparents at a time when he has become estranged from his own family. Through a combination of research, memory, and exaggeration, Ward voices ideas concerning the relationship between history and the present, art and life, parents and children, and husbands and wives.

From freezing infantrymen huddled in bloodied trenches on the front lines to intricate political maneuvering and tense strategy sessions in European capitals, noted historian John Toland tells of the unforgettable final year of the First World War. In this audiobook, participants on both sides, from enlisted men to generals and prime ministers to monarchs, vividly recount the battles, sensational events, and behind-the-scenes strategies that shaped the climactic, terrifying year.

"You seriously mean to tell me that the ship is doomed?" asked Frank Worsley, commander of the Endurance, stuck impassably in Antarctic ice packs. "What the ice gets," replied Sir Ernest Shackleton, the expedition's unflappable leader, "the ice keeps." It did not, however, get the ship's twenty-five crew members, all of whom survived an eight-hundred-mile voyage across sea, land, and ice to South Georgia, the nearest inhabited island.

From New York Times bestselling author Bernard Cornwell, the first exciting adventure in the world-renowned Sharpe series, chronicling the rise of Richard Sharpe, a Private in His Majesty’s Army at the siege of Seringapatam.

Darting back and forth across the icy North Atlantic, Compass Rose played a deadly cat-and-mouse game with packs of German U-boats lying in wait beneath the ocean waves. Packed with tension and vivid descriptions of agonizing U-boat hunts, this tale of the most bitter and chilling campaign of the war tells of ordinary men who had to master their own fears before they could face a brutal menace - one that would strike without warning from the deep.

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans,” it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia.

The Civil War: A Narrative, Volume 1 begins one of the most remarkable works of history ever fashioned. All the great battles are here, of course, from Bull Run through Shiloh, the Seven Days Battles, and Antietam, but so are the smaller ones: Ball's Bluff, Fort Donelson, Pea Ridge, Island Ten, New Orleans, and Monitor versus Merrimac.

Before the ink was dry on the U.S. Constitution, the establishment of a permanent military had become the most divisive issue facing the new government. Would a standing army be the thin end of dictatorship? Would a navy protect American commerce against the Mediterranean pirates, or drain the treasury and provoke hostilities with the great powers? The founders, particularly Jefferson, Madison, and Adams, debated these questions fiercely and switched sides more than once.

The mutiny on HMS Bounty, in the South Pacific on 28 April 1789, is one of history's truly great stories - a tale of human drama, intrigue and adventure of the highest order - and in the hands of Peter FitzSimons it comes to life as never before. Commissioned by the Royal Navy to collect breadfruit plants from Tahiti and take them to the West Indies, the Bounty's crew found themselves in a tropical paradise. Five months later, they did not want to leave.

A monumental retelling of world history through the lens of maritime enterprise, revealing in breathtaking depth how people first came into contact with one another by ocean and river, lake and stream, and how goods, languages, religions, and entire cultures spread across and along the world's waterways, bringing together civilizations and defining what makes us most human.

A convoy of 37 merchant ships is ploughing through icy, submarine-infested North Atlantic seas during the most critical days of World War II, when the German submarines had the upper hand and Allied shipping was suffering heavy losses. In charge is Commander George Krause, an untested veteran of the US Navy. Hounded by a wolf pack of German U-boats, he faces 48 hours of desperate peril trapped the bridge of the ship. Exhausted beyond measure, he must make countless and terrible decisions as he leads his small fighting force against the relentless U-boats.

For fifteen years FitzChivalry Farseer has lived in self-imposed exile, assumed to be dead by almost all who once cared about him. But now, into his isolated life, visitors begin to arrive: Fitz's mentor from his assassin days; a hedge-witch who foresees the return of a long-lost love; and the Fool, the former White Prophet, who beckons Fitz to fulfill his destiny. Then comes the summons he cannot ignore. Prince Dutiful, the young heir to the Farseer throne, has vanished.

October 1772, Portsmouth. Sixteen-year-old Richard Bolitho waits to join the Gorgon, ordered to sail to the west coast of Africa and to destroy those who challenge the King's Navy. For Bolitho, and for many of the crew, it is a severe and testing initiation into the game of seamanship.

Shaking off this label, a shy and lonely 17-year-old, Horatio Hornblower, embarks on a memorable career in Nelson's navy on HMS Justinian. In action, adventure, and battle he is forged into one of the most formidable junior officers in the service.

At the time of the French Revolution, one of Britain's most skillful naval officers, Charles Saunders Hayden, is a young lieutenant, the son of an English father and a French mother. His abilities and his loyalty to the king of England are beyond dispute, yet his career seems doomed by his "mixed" heritage and lack of political connections. Consequently, Hayden is assigned to an aging frigate, the Themis, under the command of Captain Josiah Hart, a man known as "Faint Hart" throughout the service.

In a daring foray, under the very nose of the French Mediterranean fleet, Lieutenant Lord Nicholas Ramage is to sail his tiny cutter close in to the Italian shore and rescue a party of stranded aristocrats from Napoleon's fast-advancing army.

October 1772, Portsmouth. Sixteen-year-old Richard Bolitho waits to join the Gorgon, ordered to sail to the west coast of Africa and to destroy those who challenge the King's Navy. For Bolitho, and for many of the crew, it is a severe and testing initiation into the game of seamanship.

Charles Lenox, Victorian gentleman and armchair explorer, likes nothing more than to relax in his private study with a cup of tea, a roaring fire and a good book. But when his lifelong friend Lady Jane asks for his help, Lenox cannot resist the chance to unravel a mystery. Prudence Smith, one of Jane's former servants, is dead of an apparent suicide. But Lenox suspects something far more sinister: murder, by a rare and deadly poison.

Merle Johnson has here gathered together in one volume all of the nineteenth-century author-artist's classic pirate stories that had been scattered through many magazines and books. Well researched and with richly drawn characters, Pyle's work will appeal to students of history and adventure lovers alike.

The mutiny on HMS Bounty, in the South Pacific on 28 April 1789, is one of history's truly great stories - a tale of human drama, intrigue and adventure of the highest order - and in the hands of Peter FitzSimons it comes to life as never before. Commissioned by the Royal Navy to collect breadfruit plants from Tahiti and take them to the West Indies, the Bounty's crew found themselves in a tropical paradise. Five months later, they did not want to leave.

It is 1780, and 17-year-old Alan Lewrie is a brash, rebellious young libertine. So much so that his callous father believes a bit of naval discipline will turn the boy around. Fresh aboard the tall-masted Ariadne, Midshipman Lewrie heads for the war-torn Americas, finding - rather unexpectedly - that he is a born sailor, equally at home with the randy pleasures of the port and the raging battles on the high seas. But in a hail of cannonballs comes a bawdy surprise.

The rulers of tiny, impoverished Swansgaard have twelve daughters and one son. While the prince’s future is assured, his twelve sisters must find their own fortunes. Disguising herself as Clarence, Princess Clarice intends to sail to the New World. When the crew rebels, Clarice/Clarence, an expert with rapier and dagger, sides with the handsome navigator, Dominick, and kills the cruel captain. Dominick leads the now - outlawed crew in search of treasure in the secret pirate haven known as The House of the Four Winds.

Young Jim Hawkins quiet life as the son of an innkeeper changes when an ancient sailor takes up lodging at the inn. When the old man dies without paying his bill, Jim must search the sailor's one possession, a large sea-chest, for payment. He finds a map that is the key to a fortune. This commences a Caribbean treasure hunt, with pirate Long John Silver only steps behind!

Life has lost its savor for Mr. Pathurst. New York, fame, women, the arts, have all become tedious. Searching for excitement, he books passage on a cargo vessel sailing from Baltimore to Seattle on a route that travels around the treacherous Cape Horn.

On one level...Melville’s tale is an historical adventure telling the story of life aboard ship shortly after the mutiny at Spithead in 1797. Billy is taken from a homeward bound merchantman to serve on the ‘Seventy Four’ HMS Indomitable. He falls foul of Claggart, the ‘Master at Arms’, and the final confrontation results in death. Billy becomes an unwilling martyr - what passes for justice must be implemented because of the rebellious climate of the time.

At the heart of this vibrant saga is an immense ship, the Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean, its purpose to fight China's vicious 19th-century Opium Wars. As for the crew, they are a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts.

It was an age of empire, an age of contrast, and an age of dramatic change - and one which would determine the destinies of nations as well as of men. Captain Philip Blackwood of the Royal Marines rejoins his ship, HMS Audacious, in August of 1850, anxious to get back into action. "Per Mare - Per Terram" is the marines' motto. In the torturous heat of Africa, where they are sent to stamp out the remaining strongholds of slavery, and later, in the bitter war of the Crimea, Philip Blackwood and his men learn to obey it without question.

A swashbuckling triumph of storytelling, Flint and Silver provides a thrilling ride back to the rich and wondrous world of Long John Silver and his fiendish nemesis Joseph Flint in this prequel to the beloved classic Treasure Island.