Showing titles in Ships & Shipbuilding

As a child Geoff Dyer spent long hours making and blotchily painting model fighter planes. So the adult Dyer jumped at the chance of a residency aboard an aircraft carrier. Another Great Day at Sea chronicles Dyer’s experiences on the USS George H.W. Bush as he navigates the routines and protocols of “carrier-world,” from the elaborate choreography of the flight deck through miles of walkways and hatches to kitchens serving meals for a crew of five thousand to the deafening complexity of catapult and arresting gear.

Ship figureheads resembling deities or women were used by sailors as lucky charms to protect them from harm at sea. A woman's bare breasts will always calm the sea.

This book tells the tale of the fabled schooner, Rouse Simmons, the most famous Christmas story to emerge from the Great Lakes. This ship, loaded with Christmas trees for Chicago, sailed into the year's worst storm and disappeared in Lake Michigan on November 23, 1912, taking with it Captain Herman Schuenemann and about 15 others who were on board.

Shortly after the Titanic sank on the morning of April 15, 1912, author Logan Marshall compiled a history of the tragic event. His narrative reads like a novel, yet every word is true. Bruce Caplan took the original work and edited and abridged the book to include new information and today is a much sought-after public speaker and considered a premier Titanic expert.

The lives of eight deck officers and the chairman of the White Star Line were irrevocably changed when the Titanic collided with an iceberg. Four would not survive the night, and the other five could never escape being forever linked to those events which spanned just a few hours. While it is certainly true that their adrenaline-pumped actions of April 14-15, 1912, have become the focal points of their existences, far more can be said about them. Each of these nine men experienced a lifetime of events which are told here: childhoods, apprenticeships, family life, and what may have seemed ...

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.

2015 saw the worst American maritime disaster in decades. The captain of the SS El Faro commanded his crew to sail straight into a hurricane. The ship sank and all 33 crew members died. The sinking raised troubling questions: Why did the captain choose to sail into the hurricane? Why did no one on board or on shore stop him? And why was such an old and heavily loaded ship even allowed on the water?

RMS Titanic was a British passenger liner, operated by the White Star Line, that sank in the North Atlantic Ocean on April 15, 1912, after striking an iceberg during her maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City. Of the estimated 2,224 passengers and crew aboard, more than 1,500 died, making it the deadliest sinking of a single ship up to that time. It remains the deadliest peacetime sinking of an ocean liner or cruise ship. Frank Prentice, an assistant purser on the Titanic, offers his account of how he survived the sinking of the ship.

This enthralling true story of maritime tragedy and visionary science begins with a disaster to rival the sinking of the Titanic.In September 1857, the S.S. Central America, a side-wheel steamer carrying passengers returning from the gold fields of California, went down during a hurricane off the Carolina coast. More than 400 men--and 21 tons of gold--were lost. In the 1980s, a maverick engineer named Tommy Thompson set out to find the wreck and salvage its treasure from the ocean floor.

Out of the Depths explores all aspects of shipwrecks across four thousand years, examining their historical context and significance, showing how shipwrecks can be time capsules, and shedding new light on long-departed societies and civilizations. Alan G. Jamieson not only informs listeners of the technological developments over the last sixty years that have made the true appreciation of shipwrecks possible, but he also covers shipwrecks in culture and maritime archaeology, their appeal to treasure hunters, and their environmental impacts.

Are you fascinated with the Titanic? Have you wondered what it must have been like to work in those hot boiler rooms, or as a maid to a first class passenger? What about what it would have been like to actually be a first class passenger?

For three decades the Windrush was the maritime Zelig of the 20th century, playing different roles in the most turbulent years in modern times. Designed in 1930 in the Hamburg boatyard of a Jewish shipbuilder to ferry Germans to a new life in South America, it wasn't long before Goebbels requisitioned her as one of his ‘Strength Through Joy’ vessels. However, her duties soon darkened: she became a Nazi troop carrier, a support vessel for the pocket battleship Tirpitz and a prison ship transporting Jews to Auschwitz.

As the 100th anniversary of the fateful night approaches, Palmer follows up innumerable conflicting stories and theories that still, to this day, surround the doomed liner. Charles Herbert Lightoller, Palmer’s great uncle, was the highest-ranking surviving officer from the disaster. It was only after the great man’s death in 1952 that his sister, Gertrude, Palmer’s eccentric grandmother, began to hint to her young grandson of the contradictory accounts of both her brother’s supposed heroism and his suspect testimonies at the investigations into the sinking.

The story of the Titanic may be very well known, but not so well-known is that there were 29 people on board with a close connection to the Channel Islands. There were a higher number of passengers from Guernsey because a dozen Islanders had decided to travel together in a companionable grouping. They were either related or friends and they were mostly young. Some of them were emigrating, others, who had emigrated some years previously, had returned to Guernsey on a home visit and were now returning to their new homes in the New York area. Only three women passengers of the group survived. ...

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.

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.

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.

Set against the backdrop of the first world's fair in London, America's Victory takes listeners into a world rich in adventure and history in an unforgettable story of skill, daring, and honor at the heart of our national identity

The original 1912 news accounts of the Titanic disaster include the first-hand accounts of survivors as told to reporters who met the ship bringing them from where they were saved from lifeboats. The surviving crew describes the crucial moments after the ship hit the iceberg. A crewman testifies just three days after the sinking that the ship had a fire in its coal bunkers from the time it set sail.

Was it the captain's fault, as many said? Or did the company, the Coast Guard, and the American Bureau of Shipping all have a hand on the helm of the SS El Faro as she steered too close to Hurricane Joaquin? This is an examination of a tragedy that has been well-researched and investigated - heroically so at times - by the United States Coast Guard and the National Transportation Safety Board. My main goal here is to show how the SS El Faro fit into a larger system and culture - one that I have been covering off and on as a journalist and author for 38 years.