The Canal du Midi, which threads through southwestern France and links the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, was an astonishing feat of seventeenth-century engineering--in fact, it was technically impossible according to the standards of its day. Impossible Engineering takes an insightful and entertaining look at the mystery of its success as well as the canal's surprising political significance. The waterway was a marvel that connected modern state power to human control of nature just as surely as it linked the ocean to the sea. The Canal du Midi is typically characterized as the achievement of Pierre-Paul Riquet, a tax farmer and entrepreneur for the canal. Yet Chandra Mukerji argues that it was a product of collective intelligence, depending on peasant women and artisans--unrecognized heirs to Roman traditions of engineering--who came to labor on the waterway in collaboration with military and academic supervisors. Ironically, while Louis XIV and his treasury minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert used propaganda to present France as a new Rome, the Canal du Midi was being constructed with unrecognized classical methods. Still, the result was politically potent. As Mukerji shows, the project took land and power from local nobles, using water itself as a silent agent of the state to disrupt traditions of local life that had served regional elites. Impossible Engineering opens a surprising window into the world of seventeenth-century France and illuminates a singular work of engineering undertaken to empower the state through technical conquest of nature.

Written by the renowned authority on ancient ships and seafaring Lionel Casson, The Ancient Mariners has long served the needs of all who are interested in the sea, from the casual reader to the professional historian. This completely revised edition takes into account the fresh information that has appeared since the book was first published in 1959, especially that from archaeology's newest branch, marine archaeology. Casson does what no other author has done: he has put in a single volume the story of all that the ancients accomplished on the sea from the earliest times to the end of the Roman Empire. He explains how they perfected trading vessels from mere rowboats into huge freighters that could carry over a thousand tons, how they transformed warships from simple oared transports into complex rowing machines holding hundreds of marines and even heavy artillery, and how their maritime commerce progressed from short cautious voyages to a network that reached from Spain to India.

Directors' and officers' (D&O) liability insurance policy is one of the fastest growing areas in the world insurance market. D&O insurance possesses its own rules of law, principles, and features, making it unique in both its nature and operation. Despite being both commonplace and extremely complex, very little has been published to date on this vast topic. This book scrutinizes the rationale behind D&O insurance and provides a clear and comprehensive analysis of how and to what extent company directors are protected against the myriad of potential liabilities they may face. Contents include: the nature and legality of D&O liability insurance sources of directors' and officers' liability liability to third parties liability at civil law persons covered by D&O insurance D&O exclusions defense costs cover and allocation aggregation principles and D&O cover reinsurance of D&O policies.

"NAVIGATING AND ENGINEERING OFFICERS REQUIRED IMMEDIATELY FOR VERY LARGE CRUDE OIL CARRIER. TANKER EXPERIENCE PREFERRED." - Lloyd's List and Shipping Gazette The advertisement captured Ray Solly's attention whilst he was on leave and demanded direct action! Viewed from the bridge of dry-cargo ships, the sleek lines of VLCCs and their potential navigational challenges always intrigued Ray - so, without hesitation, he grabbed the chance, leaving his current employer, and setting out to fulfil a dream. Supertanker examines life at sea aboard a 1970s monster where reader and author meet on board, encountering and overcoming exciting new challenges in navigation, ship handling, and cargo control. All the while, overshadowing everything else, is the awareness that this loaded ship carries around 80 million gallons of oil every day. But Supertanker is more than just the record of a new adventure. It lifts the lid on the realities of life far out at sea handling such behemoths and reveals why international safety and competency bars had to be raised.

Most policy makers readily acknowledge the economic, environmental, and social benefits of moving freight and passengers by waterways. However, why do many countries struggle to develop and revive their inland waterways transportation (IWT)? One reason is because of the dearth of successful examples of IWT revival. Aside from the United States and Europe, which have been relatively successful, the experience of many emerging countries has been a tale of intensive use followed by total collapse of the IWT sector. However, the combination of societal, economic, and environmental imperatives is motivating reassessment, as countries look to develop sustainable transport systems and to curb greenhouse gas emissions from the transport sector. China's experience has similarities to the experience of many countries and offers valuable lessons. This report is the result of an in-depth retrospective study of IWT in China and fills a gap in global knowledge. From an IWT system that carried less than 150 million tons in 1978, IWT in China carried 3.74 billion tons of cargo in 2018—six times more than either the European Union or the United States. China now has the busiest IWT system in the world. China's leadership in IWT development started with years of investment in infrastructure that transformed lowgrade waterways, allowing larger vessels to use the waterways, which resulted in higher transport efficiency and lower cost. China also invested in development of skills and technical know-how. To date there are 127,000 km of inland waterways in China that have high-quality navigability and a good safety record. During the period of rapid economic development, China also adopted or developed internationally recognized technical innovations for river classification, vessel replacement, navigation technology, and environmental protection. What China achieved is informative. In particular, how and why China improved IWT provides valuable lessons for other countries

Founded in 1873, the Holland America Line provided services carrying passengers and freight between the Netherlands and North America. When the Second World War ended, only nine of Holland America Line's twenty-five ships had survived and the company set about rebuilding. The pride of HAL's post-war fleet was SS Rotterdam, completed in 1959, which was one of the first ships on the North Atlantic equipped to offer two-class transatlantic crossings and single-class luxury cruising. However, competition from the airlines meant that in the early 1970s Holland America ended their transatlantic passenger services; in 1973 the company sold its cargo-shipping division. Now owned by the American cruise line Carnival, Holland America offers round-the-world voyages and cruises in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean and Asia. In this book, renowned ocean liner historian and author William H. Miller takes a look at the Holland America Line and its post-war fleet up to 2015.

A gripping, groundbreaking biography of the combative man whose genius and force of will created modern capitalism.
Founder of a dynasty, builder of the original Grand Central, creator of an impossibly vast fortune, Cornelius "Commodore" Vanderbilt is an American icon. Humbly born on Staten Island during George Washington's presidency, he rose from boatman to builder of the nation's largest fleet of steamships to lord of a railroad empire. Lincoln consulted him on steamship strategy during the Civil War; Jay Gould was first his uneasy ally and then sworn enemy; and Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president of the United States, was his spiritual counselor. We see Vanderbilt help to launch the transportation revolution, propel the Gold Rush, reshape Manhattan, and invent the modern corporation--in fact, as T. J. Stiles elegantly argues, Vanderbilt did more than perhaps any other individual to create the economic world we live in today.
In "The First Tycoon," Stiles offers the first complete, authoritative biography of this titan, and the first comprehensive account of the Commodore's personal life. It is a sweeping, fast-moving epic, and a complex portrait of the great man. Vanderbilt, Stiles shows, embraced the philosophy of the Jacksonian Democrats and withstood attacks by his conservative enemies for being too competitive. He was a visionary who pioneered business models. He was an unschooled fistfighter who came to command the respect of New York's social elite. And he was a father who struggled with a gambling-addicted son, a husband who was loving yet abusive, and, finally, an old man who was obsessed with contacting the dead.
"The First Tycoon" is the exhilarating story of a man and a nation maturing together: the powerful account of a man whose life was as epic and complex as American history itself.

"From the Hardcover edition."

An interesting and insightful book exploring the author's efforts to follow in his father's footsteps and succeed in the tumultuous fishing industry. The reader is invited to experience the author's life as a Hull trawlerman; from his first trip out as a teenager, to achieving the highest rank of skipper. The intense highs and lows in between are relayed in great detail, with photographs adding to the reading pleasure. This is a story of hard work, courage, and the importance of following your heart. The author's infinite love for his family and high regard for his shipmates add a touching element to the book.

Snow in the Tropics by Thomas Taro Lennerfors and Peter Birch offers the first comprehensive history of the independent reefer operators. These shipping companies, such as Lauritzen, Salen, Seatrade, Star Reefers, and NYK Reefer, developed the dedicated transport of refrigerated products like meat, fish, and fruit by ship, from the early 20th century to the present. Snow in the Tropics describes how the history of the reefer operators has been formed in relation to shippers, such as Dole and Chiquita, in a constant struggle with the liner companies, such as Maersk, and in relation to global economic and political trends. It also covers how the industry is discursively constructed and the psychological drivers of the business decisions in it.

Steamboats and Sailors of the Great Lakes traces the evolution of the Great Lakes shipping industry over the last three centuries.

A monumental, wholly accessible work of scholarship that retells human history through the story of mankind's relationship with the sea. An accomplishment of both great sweep and illuminating detail, The Sea and Civilization is a stunning work of history that reveals in breathtaking depth how people first came into contact with one another by ocean and river, and how goods, languages, religions, and entire cultures spread across and along the world's waterways. Lincoln Paine takes us back to the origins of long-distance migration by sea with our ancestors' first forays from Africa and Eurasia to Australia and the Americas. He demonstrates the critical role of maritime trade to the civilizations of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley. He reacquaints us with the great seafaring cultures of antiquity like those of the Phoenicians and Greeks, as well as those of India, Southeast and East Asia who parlayed their navigational skills, shipbuilding techniques, and commercial acumen to establish vibrant overseas colonies and trade routes in the centuries leading up to the age of European overseas expansion. His narrative traces subsequent developments in commercial and naval shipping through the post-Cold War era. Above all, Paine makes clear how the rise and fall of civilizations can be traced to the sea.

In 1968 a Soviet G-class submarine mysteriously exploded and sank to the bottom of the Pacific. With Cold War secrecy and speed, U.S. military intelligence raced to find a way to raise the sub. In the new preface to this edition of "The Jennifer Project," which was first published in 1977, author Clyde Burleson discusses some of the sources he could not reveal twenty years ago and provides an interesting swords-to-plowshares update.
In one of the more remarkable episodes of high-tech espionage and engineering of the Cold War, the effort to raise the Soviet sub, code-named the "Jennifer Project," assembled a cast of players that included top military brass, the CIA, and the eccentric millionaire and inventor Howard Hughes.
The Project was a monumental effort to create a tool that could reach three miles below the ocean's surface and pull the sub from primordial muck--in secret. Financed and built by Hughes and Global Marine under contract with the CIA, the ship created to pluck the sub from the ooze was a technological marvel. Two football fields in length and twenty-three stories high, the "Hughes Glomar Explorer" held in its hull a six-"million"-pound submersible "claw" for picking up sections of the submarine.
The project cost the U.S. government hundreds of millions of dollars, but the intelligence community was betting that, if successful, reclamation of the Soviet submarine would mean accessing invaluable military knowledge as the two superpowers neared negotiations in the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty talks. "The Jennifer Project" revisits a fascinating period of high-level intrigue and invention that has remained unknown to many Americans.

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Longshoremen stand at the nexus of the global economy, handling nearly every cargo container that enters or leaves any country. Even in the face of cargo acontainerizationa in the 70s and 80s, a development that decimated longshore unions, they have managed to win contracts that provide health benefits and high wages.

On the Global Waterfront tells the story of how longshoremen in South Carolina confronted attempts to wipe out the stateas most powerful black organization. When a Danish shipping company began to shift their transportation to a nonunion firm in 1999, Local 1422 in Charleston, South Carolina, mobilized to protect their hard-won rights. What followed culminated in a protest in which 660 riot police were deployed against fifty dockworkers, a group that grew to 150 before the night was over. Four black and one white longshoreman -- subsequently known as the Charleston 5 -- were held for twenty months under house arrest on trumped-up felony charges of inciting a riot.

Within the politically conservative, racially charged, and intensely religious climate of the South, the unassuming local union president, Ken Riley -- supported behind the scenes by a militant AFL-CIO staffer -- crafted an international, grassroots campaign in defense of the arrested longshoremen. From Australia to Europe to Korea to the entire west coast of the United States, longshoremen threatened to shut down ports jeopardizing billions of dollars in trade per day. Their ultimate success vaulted Riley, and his reform-minded coworkers, to higher leadership in a notoriously corrupt union, and laid the foundation for successful rebuffs in ports around the world. On the GlobalWaterfront explores in detail a local conflict and in the process exposes the powers that rule the United States and the global economy. This compelling narrative of a local struggle, a transformed union leader, and a newly energized international worker movement highlights the resounding importance of the international labor movement that is not only still vital, but still capable of stopping global commerce on a dime.

In Getting the Goods, Edna Bonacich and Jake B. Wilson focus on the Southern California ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach which together receive 40 percent of the nearly $2 trillion worth of goods imported annually to the United States to examine the impact of the logistics revolution on workers in transportation and distribution. Built around the invention of shipping containers and communications technology, the logistics revolution has enabled giant retailers like Walmart and Target to sell cheap consumer products made using low-wage labor in developing countries. The goods are shipped through an efficient, low-cost, intermodal freight system, in which containers are moved from factories in Asia to distribution centers across the United States without ever being opened.

Bonacich and Wilson follow the flow of imports from Asian factories, exploring the roles of importers, container shipping companies, the ports, railroad and trucking companies, and warehouses. At each stage, Getting the Goods raises important questions about how the logistics revolution affects logistics workers. Drawing extensively on interviews with workers and managers at all levels of the supply chain, on industry reports, and on economic data, Bonacich and Wilson find that, in general, conditions have deteriorated for workers. But they also discover that changes in the system of production and distribution provide new strategic opportunities for labor to gain power. A much-needed corrective to both uncritical celebrations of containerization and the global economy and pessimistic predictions about the future of the U.S. labor movement, Getting the Goods will become required reading for scholars and students in sociology, political economy, and labor studies."

In this terrifically entertaining history, Kristoffer A. Garin chronicles the cruise-ship industry, from its rise in the early sixties, to its explosion in the seventies with the hit show The Love Boat, to the current vicious consolidation wars and brazen tax dodges. Entrepreneurial genius and bare-knuckle capitalism mate with cultural kitsch as the cruise lines dodge U.S. tax, labor, and environmental laws to make unimaginable profits while bringing the world a new form of leisure.

A colorful and compelling behind-the-scenes narrative, Devils on the Deep Blue Sea is a definitive look at the industry and its robber barons who created floating empires.

When, as a young man in the 1880s, Benjamin Lundy signed up for duty aboard a square-rigged commercial sailing vessel, he began a journey more exciting, and more terrifying, than he could have ever imagined: a treacherous, white-knuckle passage around that notorious "graveyard of ships," Cape Horn.

A century later, Derek Lundy, author of the bestselling "Godforsaken Sea" and an accomplished amateur seaman himself, set out to recount his forebear's journey. "The Way of a Ship" is a mesmerizing account of life on board a square-rigger, a remarkable reconstruction of a harrowing voyage through the most dangerous waters. Derek Lundy's masterful account evokes the excitement, romance, and brutality of a bygone era -- "a fantastic ride through one of the greatest moments in the history of adventure" ("Seattle Times").

What is being done to counter threats of maritime terrorism and how effective are the safeguards? The author presents evidence that Al-Qaeda aims to disrupt the seaborne trading system, the backbone of the model global economy, and would use a crude nuclear explosive device or radiological bomb to do so if it could obtain one and position it to go off in a port-city, shipping strait or waterway that plays a key role in international trade. Improving maritime trade is especially important for the US and Canada, member states of the EU, Australia and New Zealand and for China, Japan and South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia and other East Asian economies that have extensive direct seaborne trade. It is doubly vital for places like Singapore, Hong Kong and Rotterdam that are not only very large global seaports but also giant giant container transshipment hubs. This book discusses some major threats to seaborne trade and its land links in the global supply chain, their potential impact and the new security measures in place or pending for ships, ports and cargo containers, and recommendations for preventing or handling a catastrophic terrorist attack designed to disrupt world trade.

Atlantic Kingdom pays tribute to the Americans who challenged Cunard, the shipping company that held a monopoly on North Atlantic trade routes in the nineteenth century. In an era when civilisation first grappled with large-scale technology and creative industries promised a new standard of living, competition for control over maritime trade was fierce. Cornelius Vanderbilt and P. T. Barnum were among those who battled like mythical gods for control of their domains. These titans of the Atlantic left behind them a wreckage of human lives, lost ships, and squandered fortunes in their failed bids for supremacy of the seas. This book is a clear, succinct, lively, and sure-handed evocation of American maritime enterprise at its zenith.

Nelson French joined the Orient Line as an Assistant Purser when he was released from the Army in 1947. He was appointed Purser in 1954 and thereafter served in every ship of the Orient fleet. He was involved in the commissioning and the Maiden Voyage of the last great Orient Liner, ORIANA. On leaving the sea, Nelson French became a Bursar at St. Catherine's College, Oxford. He retired in 1981 and now lives in Oxfordshire.

Since 1871 the Cape Hatteras lighthouse has been a welcome sight for sailors entering the treacherous region off North Carolina's Outer Banks known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic. At 208 feet high, it is the tallest lighthouse in the country and one of the state's most famous landmarks. Through the years, it has withstood the ravages of both humans and nature, weathering numerous violent storms and two wars. But perhaps the gravest threat the structure faced in recent history was the erosion of several hundred yards of beach that once stood between it and the ocean. As powerful tides and rising sea levels increasingly endangered the lighthouse's future, North Carolinians debated fiercely over how best to save it, eventually deciding on a controversial plan to move the beacon inland to safety. First published by UNC Press in 1991, this book tells the story of the noble lighthouse from its earliest history to the present day. In this new edition, Dawson Carr details the recent relocation of the treasured landmark. For now, it seems, North Carolinians have succeeded in protecting their lighthouse, as it has protected them for over a century. |This new edition includes the amazing story of the 1999 relocation of the Cape Hatteras lighthouse, the famous North Carolina landmark that has guarded the Graveyard of the Atlantic since 1871. The tallest brick lighthouse in the U.S., it has survived two wars and numerous violent storms--and a carefully engineered relocation to a spot less threatened by beach erosion.

Sailing on Friday recounts the growth and decline of what twice became the world's most powerful maritime flect. This is a tale of operatic dimension, peopled with patriots, politicians, industrial geniuses, fearless seamen, and gallant swashbucklers. It includes accounts of little-noted innovations that had long-lasting effects, daring ocean rescues, sea battles, and financial gambles that won or lost millions. Growing stress among diverse forces of mer-chants, shipowners, seafarers, and federal agencies brings this exciting story to an appalling climax.

In this firsthand account of life aboard the ships of the Great Lakes, Mark Thompson weaves together the threads of a story that relives a centuries-old tradition. Thompson began his logbook after he reported for duty aboard the Calcite II at Fraser Shipyard in Superior, Wisconsin, for the 1996 shipping season. A Sailor's Logbook is the first such book to chronicle a sailor's life at the end of the twentieth century. Not just a detailing of weather, cargo, and crew relations, A Sailor's Logbook is also an account of the daily lives of a diverse group of crewmembers as they share their sailing knowledge, "sea stories," and the many memories that accompany the pictures. Although there are ample resources in museums, archival collections, and company files regarding statistical logbook information, A Sailor's Logbook details the intricacies of daily life on a Great Lakes freighter. Thompson navigates the reader through the waters of the Great Lakes and his own life in this very special narrative.