Captain Carlisle hails from Virginia, a loyal colony of the British Crown. As the clouds of war gather, Carlisle's small frigate is ordered to Toulon on a reconnaissance mission. If battling the winter weather in the Gulf of Lions is not a sufficient challenge, Carlisle must also juggle the delicate diplomatic issues in this period of pre-war tension while contending with an increasingly belligerent French frigate. But Carlisle has additional problems unique to his colonial origins.

After a century of war, revolutions, and imperial conquests, 1790s Europe is still embroiled in a battle for control of the sea and colonies. Tall ships navigate familiar and foreign waters, and ambitious young men without rank or status seek their futures in naval commands. First Lieutenant Alexander Clay of the frigate Agrius is self-made, clever, and ready for the new age. But the old world, dominated by patronage, retains a tight hold on advancement.

1793 and Europe is ablaze with war. Thomas Paine Kydd, a young wig-maker from Guildford, is seized by the press gang to be a part of the crew of the 98-gun line-of-battle ship Duke William. The ship sails immediately and Kydd has to learn the harsh realities of shipboard life fast. Despite all that he goes through in danger of tempest and battle he comes to admire the skills and courage of the seamen - taking up the challenge himself to become a true sailor.

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.

It is 1801, and President Thomas Jefferson has assembled a deep-water navy to fight the growing threat of piracy, as American civilians are regularly kidnapped by Islamist brigands and held for ransom, enslaved, or killed, all at their captors' whim. The Berber States of North Africa, especially Tripoli, claimed their faith gave them the right to pillage anyone who did not submit to their religion.

London: 1793. Young firebrand John Pearce, on the run from the authorities, is illegally press-ganged from the Pelican tavern into brutal life aboard HMS Brilliant, a frigate on her way to war. In the first few days, Pearce discovers the Navy is a world in which he can prosper. And he is not alone; he is drawn to a group of men who eventually form an exclusive gun crew, the Pelicans, with Pearce their elected leader.

The Naval Service of the Honorable East India Company, popularly known as the Bombay Marine, operated in romantic areas in perilous times. From the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea, from Calcutta to Canton, the Company ships were famous for their speed and daring. The "Bombay Buccaneers" who sailed them were the stuff of legend. For Percival Merewether, 1806 would be a year to remember.

Crash Dive: The Complete Series chronicles the adventures of Charlie Harrison as he fights the Imperial Japanese Navy during WW2. Gripping, action-packed, authentic, and filled with larger-than-life men and women of the Greatest Generation, Crash Dive puts you aboard a submarine during the war. You'll stand alongside Charlie as he proves himself time and again by keeping his wits and being decisive in crisis, though each encounter leaves him more heavily scarred for it.

Jack Biddlecomb has much to live up to, being as he is the eldest son of the esteemed Captain Isaac Biddlecomb, wealthy merchant captain, leading light of the War for American Independence, and newly minted congressman. Jack finds himself off to a promising start, however, when he’s given command of the merchant vessel Abigail bound from Philadelphia for Barbados. But even before the dock lines are cast off, the voyage, which should have been routine, begins to look like a stormy passage indeed.

After gaining valuable experience as an aide to Governor Lord Horatio Hornblower, William Brewer is rewarded with a posting as first lieutenant on the frigate HMS Defiant, bound for American waters. Early in their travels, it seems as though Brewer’s greatest challenge will be evading the wrath of a tyrannical captain who has taken an active dislike to him. But when a hurricane sweeps away the captain, the young lieutenant is forced to assume command of the damaged ship, and a crew suffering from low morale.

Shortly after Thomas Marlowe's arrival in Williamsburg, Virginia, all in that newfound capital city are speaking his name. With the bounty from his years as a pirate—a life he intends to renounce and keep forever secret—he purchases a fine plantation from a striking young widow, and soon after kills the favorite son of one of Virginia's most powerful clans while defending her honor. But it is a daring feat of remarkable cunning that truly sets local tongues wagging: a stunning move that wins Marlowe command of Plymouth Prize, the colony's decrepit guardship.

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.

This, the first in the splendid series of Jack Aubrey novels, establishes the friendship between Captain Aubrey, Royal Navy, and Stephen Maturin, ship's surgeon and intelligence agent, against the thrilling backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Details of life aboard a man-of-war in Nelson's navy are faultlessly rendered: the conversational idiom of the officers in the ward room and the men on the lower deck, the food, the floggings, the mysteries of the wind and the rigging, and the road of broadsides as the great ships close in battle.

More than one hundred years after Columbus blundered onto Hispaniola, the West Indies are held in Spain's iron fist, and no threat to that absolute rule is tolerated. But such total control cannot last, and one threat will emerge as the most dangerous of all: the buccaneers. Camped on the shore of Hispaniola, these half-wild men eke out a living hunting the island's feral livestock. Among them, Jean-Baptiste LeBoeuf lives out his exile, content that no one in the hunters' camp is curious about his past. But when a hurricane sweeps through the Caribbean, it upends their rough existence.

April 12, 1861. With one jerk of a lanyard, one shell arching into the sky, years of tension exploded into civil war. And for those men who did not know in which direction their loyalty called them, it was a time for decisions. Such a one was Lieutenant Samuel Bowater, an officer of the United States Navy, a native of Charleston, South Carolina. Hard pressed to abandon the oath he swore to the United States, but unable to fight against his home state, Bowater accepts a commission in the nascent Confederate navy.

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.

This, the first in the splendid series of Jack Aubrey novels, establishes the friendship between Captain Aubrey, Royal Navy, and Stephen Maturin, ship's surgeon and intelligence agent, against the thrilling backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Details of life aboard a man-of-war in Nelson's navy are faultlessly rendered: the conversational idiom of the officers in the ward room and the men on the lower deck, the food, the floggings, the mysteries of the wind and the rigging, and the road of broadsides as the great ships close in battle.

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.

As the Confederacy felt itself slipping beneath the Union juggernaut in late 1864, the South launched a desperate counteroffensive to force a standoff. Its secret weapon? A state-of-the-art raiding ship whose mission was to sink the U.S. merchant fleet. The raider's name was Shenandoah, and her executive officer was Conway Whittle, a 24-year-old warrior.

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.

London: 1793. Young firebrand John Pearce, on the run from the authorities, is illegally press-ganged from the Pelican tavern into brutal life aboard HMS Brilliant, a frigate on her way to war. In the first few days, Pearce discovers the Navy is a world in which he can prosper. And he is not alone; he is drawn to a group of men who eventually form an exclusive gun crew, the Pelicans, with Pearce their elected leader.

On June 19, 1864, just off the coast of France, one of the most dramatic naval battles in history took place. On a clear day with windswept skies, the dreaded Confederate raider Alabama faced the Union warship Kearsarge in an all-or-nothing fight to the finish, the outcome of which would effectively end the threat of the Confederacy on the high seas.

No single sea battle has had more far-reaching consequences than the one fought in the harbor at Hampton Roads, Virginia, in March 1862. The Confederacy, with no fleet of its own, built an iron fort containing 10 heavy guns on the hull of a captured Union frigate named the Merrimack. The North got word of the project when it was already well along, and, in desperation, commissioned an eccentric inventor named John Ericsson to build the Monitor, an entirely revolutionary iron warship.

Acclaimed author James Tertius de Kay recounts the lifeof Commodore Stephen Decatur in the first new biography of the great naval hero in almost 70 years. De Kay draws on material unavailable to previous biographers to explore Decatur’s extraordinary life. From his burning of the Philadelphia to his capture of the HMS Macedonian, Decatur demonstrated his legendary bravery at every turn.

John Paul Jones is more than a great sea story. Jones is a character for the ages. John Adams called him the "most ambitious and intriguing officer in the American Navy." The renewed interest in the Founding Fathers reminds us of the great men who made this country, but John Paul Jones teaches us that it took fighters as well as thinkers, men driven by dreams of personal glory as well as high-minded principle to break free of the past and start a new world. Jones' spirit was classically American.

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.

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.

America's first frontier was not the West; it was the sea, and no one writes more eloquently about that watery wilderness than Nathaniel Philbrick. In his best-selling In the Heart of the Sea, Philbrick probed the nightmarish dangers of the vast Pacific. Now, in an epic sea adventure, he writes about one of the most ambitious voyages of discovery the Western world has ever seen - the US Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842.

Captain James Cook is one of the greatest maritime explorers of all time. Over three remarkable voyages of discovery into the Pacific in the latter part of the 18th century, Cook unravelled the oldest mystery surrounding the existence of Terra Australis Incognita - the Great South Land. He became the first explorer to circumnavigate New Zealand and establish that it was two main islands; discover the Hawaiian Islands for the British Empire; and left an enduring legacy.

In July 1862, Confederate Captain Raphael Semmes took command of a secret new warship. At the helm of the Alabama, he became the most hated and feared man along the Union coast, as well as a Confederate legend. Now, with unparalleled authority, depth, and a vivid sense of the excitement and danger of the time, Stephen Fox describes Captain Semmes's remarkable wartime exploits.