Much has been written about Titanic, the British passenger liner that sank on her maiden voyage after a collision with an iceberg in 1912; however, until now little mention has been made about the intricate world of the ship’s complement, which comprised more than the total of third-class passengers alone. Titanic researcher Günter Bäbler examines in detail the working structure of the crew, including the complex arrangement of the engineering department and information on tips, salaries and hidden bonuses, while each of the 899 crew members on board is mentioned. This valuable study breathes life into the forgotten but significant story of the ship and its relationship to its crew, of whom over 75 per cent died when Titanic sank.

Constructed on the Clyde in 1869 for the Jock Willis Shipping Line, Cutty Sark was one of the last tea clippers to be built and one of the fastest. Cutty Sark spent just a few years on the tea routes before the opening of the Suez Canal and the increasing use of steamships made clippers unprofitable on shorter routes. She was turned to the trade in wool from Australia, where for ten years she held the record time for a journey to Britain. As steamships also came to dominate the longer sailing route to Australia, the ship was sold to the Portuguese company Ferreira and Co. in 1895, and renamed Ferreira. She continued as a cargo ship until she was sold as a training and cadet ship, a role in which she continued until 1954 when she was transferred to permanent dry dock at Greenwich, London, for public display. The handy pocket manual collates original documents to tell the fascinating story of how the legendary Cutty Sark was commissioned, her design and building, life on board and her notable journeys.

This is the only book linked to a practical surveying course. Highly practical in nature, and packed with detailed close-up photography, step by step procedures, and helpful checklists, this definitive handbook will prove a godsend to small craft owners who want to check out defects on their own boats or on boats they are planning to buy, as well as practicing surveyors and surveying students.

Featuring surveying bodies, equipment required, assessing defects (including moisture-related defects, and the use of moisture meters) and their severity, the book guides the reader through conducting a thorough inspection, from keel to topsides, coachroof, stern gear, rigging and much more.

The highly practical approach of this book will be invaluable to students of surveying, qualified surveyors and yacht and boat owners everywhere.

Skeletons on the Zahara chronicles the true story of twelve American sailors who were shipwrecked off the coast of Africa in 1815, captured by desert nomads, sold into slavery, and subjected to a hellish two-month journey through the perilous heart of the Sahara. The western Sahara is a baking hot and desolate place, home only to nomads and their camels, and to locusts, snails and thorny scrub -- and its barren and ever-changing coastline has baffled sailors for centuries. In August 1815, the US brig Commerce was dashed against Cape Bojador and lost, although through bravery and quick thinking the ship's captain, James Riley, managed to lead all of his crew to safety. What followed was an extraordinary and desperate battle for survival in the face of human hostility, starvation, dehydration, death and despair. Captured, robbed and enslaved, the sailors were dragged and driven through the desert by their new owners, who neither spoke their language nor cared for their plight. Reduced to drinking urine, flayed by the sun, crippled by walking miles across burning stones and sand and losing over half of their body weights, the sailors struggled to hold onto both their humanity and their sanity. To reach safety, they would have to overcome not only the desert but also the greed and anger of those who would keep them in captivity. From the cold waters of the Atlantic to the searing Saharan sands, from the heart of the desert to the heart of man, Skeletons on the Zahara is a spectacular odyssey through the extremes and a gripping account of courage, brotherhood, and survival.

Captain William A. Hagelund is uniquely positioned to write a history of HBC's SS Beaver, the ship that did more than any other to explore and open the rugged BC coast. Over more than half a century the tiny, rugged ship was a familiar sight as she chugged up the BC waters, charting, trading, helping administer justice, carrying freight and generally serving as a lifeline and contact between the many isolated coastal communities and the outside world. In 1986, her exact replica, SS Beaver, was launched with Captain Hagelund as master. From then until he retired in 1995, Captain Hagelund, who first went to sea in 1940, and the new Beaver retraced many of the original's coastal voyages.

At the height of the Second World War this small pocket-book was issued to all ratings on board ships of the Royal Navy. In straight period prose it outlines all the basic expressions and tasks a seaman needed to know to perform his duties efficiently. Chapters are broken down into: Sea Terms; Navigation; Steering the Ship; Rigging; Anchors and Cables; Boatwork; Miscellaneous (which includes details on uniform and folding a hammock, etc); and Ship Safety. Functional black line illustrations are used throughout, as well as a few pages of colour (used sparingly) for flag recognition. Faithfully reproduced, with a short introduction by Brian Lavery, which explains the importance of a book like this to a navy that had to take on vast numbers of civilians or Hostilities Only men to meet the manning needs of the war, this volume provides a real mixture of wartime nostalgia and historical authenticity. It makes a world now lost to us accessible again, explaining as it does the terms, skills and conventions of ship board life, a life that required a common language, and where failure to respond to orders instantly could mean the difference between life and death. The book is sure to appeal to those who served in the war as well as the current generation who are becoming increasingly interested in the role their grandparents, fathers and uncles played during that time.

Although the answer appears obvious, there is far more to the sinking of the Titanic than is popularly understood. On 10 April 1912 Titanic - the largest and most luxurious ocean liner in the world - left Southampton on her maiden voyage. The only headlines she expected to make were on her triumphant arrival in New York. But just five days later, she was a wreck at the bottom of the North Atlantic, taking over 1500 lives with her. Why? The answer to this question is a set of circumstances and a chain of events that came together to seal her fate and that of so many of her passengers and crew. Nature of course played her part in the form of that gigantic iceberg as well as in other less obvious ways. Most of all though there was human error, complacency and an inability to think the unthinkable when designing or sailing the ship. Just one different action at any stage in the chain could have saved the life of Titanic or at least most, if not all, of those aboard her. The world still has much to learn from the loss of the Titanic. This book explains why the largest ship in the world was lost and just how the voyage of a lifetime turned into a nightmare.

'Magnificent' Robert Macfarlane Winner of the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Our lives depend on shipping but it is a world which is largely hidden from us. In every lonely corner of every sea, through every night, every day, and every imaginable weather, tiny crews of seafarers work the giant ships which keep landed life afloat. These ordinary men live extraordinary lives, subject to dangers and difficulties we can only imagine, from hurricanes and pirates to years of confinement in hazardous, if not hellish, environments. Horatio Clare joins two container ships on their epic voyages across the globe and experiences unforgettable journeys. As the ships cross seas of history and incident, seafarers unfold the stories of their lives, and a beautiful and terrifying portrait of the oceans and their human subjects emerges. 'Tremendous' The Times

'Functionality is never an excuse for poor design' said the naval architect Nicolo Costanzi, a man whose synthesis of engineering and artistry created practical ships of sublime beauty. This book tells the story of the four large passenger ships conceived by Costanzi in the late 1950s and early 1960s. These designs incorporated the most celebrated elements of his work and perhaps reflect the man at the very height of his powers. The 'Costanzi Quartet' comprised Lloyd Triestino's stylish emigrant carriers Galileo Galilei and Guglielmo Marconi, Home Lines' groundbreaking Oceanic and Costa's speed queen, Eugenio C. Profusely illustrated throughout, this book considers their designs and varied careers, as well as offering an insight into life on board through the testimony of passengers and crew. It also sheds light on the man who created them and whose foresight and skill continues to influence contemporary cruise ship design.

'The inventions, the innovations, the stories, the surprises. A combination of history, reference and entertainment - something for every seafarer and many others too.' - Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence People have been sailing for thousands of years, but we've come some distance from longboats and clippers. How did we arrive here? In fifty tales of inventors and innovations, Sails, Skippers and Sextants looks at the history of one of our most enjoyable pastimes, from the monarch who pioneered English yachting to the engineer who invented sailboards. The stories are sometimes inspiring, usually amusing and often intriguing - so grab your lifejacket, it's going to be quite an adventure.

In the early 1950s it seemed as if Greek shipping companies were springing up everywhere. For a country almost unknown as a passenger ship-owning state, the likes of the Greek Line, Chandris and Epirotiki burst onto the scene, often using second hand tonnage and ships acquired from the Western European fleets that were being updated. The lines soon took advantage of the mass emigration from Europe to Australia and New Zealand as well as cruising, which was then in its infancy. Although many of the Greek lines such as Royal Olympic Cruises are now gone, the likes of Chandris still survives today as Celebrity Cruises. Bill Miller, the noted maritime historian, brings together a collection of images of his favourite Greek liners and tells of the history of the Greek fleets that made the world of cruising so exciting in the last half century.

The 'ShipCraft' series provides in-depth information about building and modifying model kits of famous warship types. Lavishly illustrated, each book takes the modeller through a brief history of the subject class, then moves to an extensive photographic survey of either a high-quality model or a surviving example of the ship. Hints on building the model, and on modifying and improving the basic kit, are followed by a section on paint schemes and camouflage, featuring numerous colour profiles and highly-detailed line drawings. The strengths and weaknesses of available kits of the ships are reviewed, and the book concludes with a section on research references - books, monographs, large-scale plans and relevant websites.The Yamato class battleships of the Imperial Japanese Navy were the largest warships of the Second World War and the largest battleships ever constructed, displacing 78,800 tonnes. They also carried the largest naval artillery ever fitted to a warship - 18in guns. Neither Yamato nor her sistership Musashi made much impact on the War. Musashi was sunk during the battle of Leyte Gulf while Yamato, deployed in a deliberate suicide attack on Allied forces at the battle of Okinawa, was finally sunk by US carrier-based aircraft; Not 300 of her 3,330 crew survived.

The first close-up look at the hidden world of Somali pirates by a young journalist who dared to make his way into their remote havens and spent a year infiltrating their lives.
For centuries, stories of pirates have captured imaginations around the world. The recent ragtag bands of pirates off the coast of Somalia, hijacking multimillion-dollar tankers owned by international shipping conglomerates, have brought the scourge of piracy into the modern era. Jay Bahadur's riveting narrative expose--the first of its kind--looks at who these men are, how they live, the forces that created piracy in Somalia, how the pirates spend the ransom money, how they deal with their hostages, among much, much more. It is a revelation of a dangerous world at the epicenter of political and natural disaster.

Lost Sounds visits a number of lighthouses at different times over the last 130 years to reveal the philanthropic, scientific and romantic story of the fog signal - how it came about, how the machinery worked and, for the mariner and the keeper, what it sounded like! The development of fog signals complemented the expansion of lighthouse construction worldwide from the last quarter of the 19th century and represented the attempt to provide a vital navigation aid to mariners when the beam of light from the lighthouses lens was obscured by fog. Lost Sounds reveals the practical development of sound signals from the early percussion instruments to the later succession of compressed-air sirens and diaphones through to the last remaining electric emitters. However, it is much more than that - it is a record of another part of maritime history.

Metals have been used in boats for thousands of years, as components of the vessel's construction, as load-bearing parts of the rigging and steering systems, and for a wide variety of domestic and service duties. Due to misunderstandings of the properties of the metals used, and in some cases to questionable design and manufacture, there have been spectacular and sometimes tragic failures of boats' metalworking. These continue even today. This new book explains in layman's terms how a wide variety of metal alloys may best be selected, formed and manufactured to give optimum performance in the typical conditions of a sailing or powered vessel. Subjects as wide-ranging as anodes, batteries, hulls, skin fittings and rigging components are described in detail, enabling the boat owner to select the preferred material for his vessel.

Written to replace and extend Torr's Ancient Ships, this generously illustrated underwater Bible" traces the art and technology of Mediterranean ships and seamanship from their first crude stages (about 3000 B.C.) to the heyday of the Byzantine fleets. Originally published in 1971. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Written to replace and extend Torr's Ancient Ships, this generously illustrated underwater Bible" traces the art and technology of Mediterranean ships and seamanship from their first crude stages (about 3000 B.C.) to the heyday of the Byzantine fleets.

Originally published in 1986.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This history book tells the story of RMS Queen Elizabeth, the ship which, along with her running mate Queen Mary, successfully worked Cunard's transatlantic service for much of the twentieth century. She was launched in September 1938, the largest passenger liner built at the time and for many years after. Entering service as a troopship in the Second World War, she had a successful career before retiring in 1968, after which she was sold to a Hong Kong businessman with plans to convert her into a floating university. But it was not to be and she was capsized in a mysterious fire in the harbour in 1972, a bizarre and unbecoming end for one of Cunard's most faithful servants. Andrew Britton delves into his comprehensive maritime collection to present a wealth of unpublished photography and ephemera, aerial photography and even Queen Elizabeth's original purchase receipt, to cover every detail of this historic liner.