Showing titles in Ships & Shipbuilding

From best-selling author John U. Bacon, a gripping narrative history of the largest manmade detonation prior to Hiroshima. On Monday, December 3, 1917, the French freighter SS Mont-Blanc set sail from Brooklyn carrying the largest cache of explosives ever loaded onto a ship, including 2,300 tons of picric acid, an unstable, poisonous chemical more powerful than TNT.

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. As the Soviet navy searched in vain for the lost vessel, a small, highly classified American operation using sophisticated deep-sea spy equipment found it - wrecked on the sea floor at a depth of 16,800 feet, far beyond the capabilities of any salvage that existed.

It was a mild May morning in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1862, the second year of the Civil War, when a 23-year-old slave named Robert Smalls did the unthinkable and boldly seized a Confederate steamer. With his wife and two young children hidden on board, Smalls and a small crew ran a gauntlet of heavily armed fortifications in Charleston Harbor and delivered the valuable vessel and the massive guns it carried to nearby Union forces.

In March of 1984, the commercial fishing boat Wind Blown left Montauk Harbor on what should have been a routine offshore voyage. Its captain, a married father of three young boys, was the boat’s owner and leader of the four-man crew, which included two locals and the blue-blooded son of a well-to-do summer family. After a week at sea, the weather suddenly turned, and the foursome collided with a nor’easter. They soon found themselves in the fight of their lives. Tragically, it was a fight they lost. Neither the boat nor the bodies of the men were ever recovered.

Endeavour is the story of a ship, an idea, and a way of looking at the world. It is grounded in the Enlightenment, an age of endeavors, with Britain consumed by the impulse for grand projects undertaken at speed. Endeavour was also the name given to a collier - a commonplace coal-carrying vessel - made of oak, bought by the Royal Navy in 1768. No one could have guessed it would go on to become the most significant ship in the chronicle of British exploration. Endeavour also had a role in American history, witnessing the bloody birth of the republic.

The voyage of the Mayflower and the founding of Plymouth Colony is one of the seminal events in world history. But the poorly equipped group of English Puritans who ventured across the Atlantic in the early autumn of 1620 had no sense they would pass into legend. They had 80 casks of butter and two dogs but no cattle for milk, meat, or ploughing. They were ill prepared for the brutal journey and the new land that few of them could comprehend.

Tip the Empire State Building onto its side and you’ll have a sense of the length of the United States Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, the most powerful in the world: the USS John F. Kennedy. Weighing 100,000 tons, Kennedy features the most futuristic technology ever put to sea, making it the most agile and lethal global weapon of war.

The Great Lakes shipping industry can trace its lineage to 1679 with the launching on Lake Erie of the Griffon, a 60-foot galley weighing nearly 50 tons. Built by LaSalle, a French explorer who had been commissioned to search for a passage through North America to China, it was the first sailing ship to operate on the upper lakes, signaling the dawn of the Great Lakes shipping industry as we know it today. Steamboats and Sailors of the Great Lakes is the most thorough and factual study of the Great Lakes shipping industry written this century.

Why did Titanic sink as quickly as it did? Two of the greatest wreck divers in the world, the heroes of Shadow Divers, solve the mystery of history's greatest wreck. Titanic's Last Secrets peers into the lives of scientists, financiers, adventurers, and industrialists to bring listeners a thrilling and revelatory work of history and contemporary adventure.

Rescue of the Bounty is the harrowing story of the sinking and rescue of Bounty - the tall ship used in the classic 1962 film Mutiny on the Bounty - which was caught in the path of Hurricane Sandy with 16 aboard.

Since we first set sail on the open sea, ships and their wrecks have been an inevitable part of human history. Archaeologists have made spectacular discoveries excavating these sunken ships, their protective underwater cocoon keeping evidence of past civilizations preserved. World renowned maritime archeologist David Gibbins ties together the stories of some of the most significant shipwrecks in time to form a single overarching narrative of world history.

In the best-selling tradition of The Devil in the White City, award-winning author Brian Hicks tells the explosive story of the Morro Castle, the elegant luxury liner that burned off the coast of New Jersey on September 7, 1934. The captain died under mysterious circumstances seven hours before his ship caught fire off the New Jersey coast.

Samuel Leech provides a fascinating account of life as a sailor in the War of 1812 and through early 19th century. It is a remarkable account of a man who, until the conflict with the USS United States, had fought British Navy but after that battle changed allegiance to the United States and continued sailing with her navy for a further four years. A perfect addition to any sailor's library, A Voice from the Main Deck is a vivid account of life at sea in the early 19th century.

USS Nevada (BB-36) was America's first modern battleship. When its keel was laid in 1912, kings and emperors still ruled much of the world. When it finally slipped beneath the waves in 1948, America was the undisputed global superpower.

In early May of 2005, Captain Tom Tighe and first mate, Loch Reidy, of the sailboat Almeisan welcomed three new crew members, two men and a woman, for a five-day voyage from Connecticut to Bermuda. While Tighe and Reidy had made the journey countless times, the rest of the crew were paying passengers learning about offshore sailing—and looking for adventure. Four days into their voyage, they got adventure but nothing that they had expected or had any training to handle.

On November 10, 1975, SS Edmund Fitzgerald, a giant freighter, sank with its entire crew of 29 aboard, in one of the most violent storms ever witnessed on Lake Superior. In 29 Missing, Kantar tells the Fitz's story from the christening in 1958 as the largest ship on the Great Lakes to the expedition in 1995 to recover the ship's bell in what proved to be a moving memorial to the lost crew.

The Gulf of Mexico presents a compelling, salt-streaked narrative of the Earth's 10th-largest body of water. In this beautifully written volume, John S. Sledge explores the people, ships, and cities that have made the Gulf's human history and culture so rich. Many famous figures who sailed the Gulf's viridian waters are highlighted, including Ponce de Leon, Robert Cavelier de La Salle, Francis Drake, Elizabeth Agassiz, Ernest Hemingway, and Charles Dwight Sigsbee. Sledge also introduces a fascinating array of people connected to maritime life in the Gulf.

For more than half a century, a shared love of canals and narrowboats has been inseparable from the marriage of Timothy West and Prunella Scales. The two iconic actors have spent many of the happiest days of their life together enjoying the calming pleasures of watching land and nature unfold before them at four miles an hour.

In 1895, when Captain Joshua Slocum completed the first solo circumnavigation on his 37-foot sloop, the Spray, no one believed it could be done. This firsthand account of Captain Slocum's remarkable voyage - 3 years and 46,000 miles - is full of adventures, dangers, and triumphs. Stormy seas, hostile natives, Moorish pirates, and even a bizarre meeting with President Paul Kruger of the Transvaal, who insisted that Slocum could never have sailed "around the world," since everyone with the meanest intelligence knew the world was flat, make up the fabric of the most wonderful travelogue of all.

In one of the most spellbinding accounts of men who go down to the sea in ships, 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. The account of how the Essex was wrecked inspired the infamous book Moby Dick and countless movies, including In the Heart of the Sea.