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Books > Humanities > History > History of specific subjects > Maritime history
Maritime archaeology, the study of man's early encounter with the rivers and seas of the world, only came to the fore in the last decades of the twentieth century, long after its parent discipline, terrestrial archaeology, had been established. Yet there were seamen long before there were farmers, navigators before there were potters, and boatbuilders before there were wainwrights. In this book Professor McGrail attempts to correct some of the imbalance in our knowledge of the past by presenting the evidence for the building and use of early water transport: rafts, boats, and ships.
When Newfoundland entered the Canadian Confederation in 1949, it was hoped it would promote greater unity between the Maritime provinces, as Term 29 of the Newfoundland Act explicitly linked the region's economic and political fortunes. On the surface, the union seemed like an unprecedented opportunity to resurrect the regional spirit of the Maritime Rights movement of the 1920s, which advocated a cooperative approach to addressing regional underdevelopment. However, Newfoundland's arrival did little at first to bring about a comprehensive Atlantic Canadian regionalism.Inventing Atlantic Canada is the first book to analyse the reaction of the Maritime provinces to Newfoundland's entry into Confederation. Drawing on editorials, government documents, and political papers, Corey Slumkoski examines how each Maritime province used the addition of a new provincial cousin to fight underdevelopment. Slumkoski also details the rise of regional cooperation characterized by the Atlantic Revolution of the mid-1950s, when Maritime leaders began to realize that by acting in isolation their situations would only worsen.
This is the first comprehensive study of the archaeology of rafts, boats, and ships from the Stone Age to Medieval times. All the regions of the world are covered, from Atlantic Europe and the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, the China Sea, and the Pacific.
He knew nothing of celestial navigation or of the existence of the Pacific Ocean. He was a self-promoting and ambitious entrepreneur. His maps were a hybrid of fantasy and delusion. When he did make land, he enslaved the populace he found, encouraged genocide, and polluted relations between peoples. He ended his career in near lunacy. But Columbus had one asset that made all the difference, an inborn sense of the sea, of wind and weather, and of selecting the optimal course to get from A to B. Laurence Bergreen's energetic and bracing book gives the whole Columbus and most importantly, the whole of his career, not just the highlight of 1492. Columbus undertook three more voyages between 1494 and 1504, each designed to demonstrate that he could sail to China within a matter of weeks and convert those he found there to Christianity. By their conclusion, Columbus was broken in body and spirit, a hero undone by the tragic flaw of pride. If the first voyage illustrates the rewards of exploration, this book shows how the subsequent voyages illustrate the costs - political, moral, and economic.
Tales of the intrepid early naturalists who set sail on dangerous voyages of discovery in the vast, unknown Pacific On the great Pacific discovery expeditions of the "long eighteenth century," naturalists for the first time were commonly found aboard ships sailing forth from European ports. Lured by intoxicating opportunities to discover exotic and perhaps lucrative flora and fauna unknown at home, these men set out eagerly to collect and catalogue, study and document an uncharted natural world. This enthralling book is the first to describe the adventures and misadventures, discoveries and dangers of this devoted and sometimes eccentric band of explorer-scholars. Their individual experiences are uniquely their own, but together their stories offer a new perspective on the extraordinary era of Pacific exploration and the achievements of an audacious generation of naturalists. Historian Glyn Williams illuminates the naturalist's lot aboard ship, where danger alternated with boredom and quarrels with the ship's commander were the norm. Nor did the naturalist's difficulties end upon returning home, where recognition for years of work often proved elusive. Peopled with wonderful characters and major figures of Enlightenment science-among them Louis Antoine de Bouganville, Joseph Banks, John Reinhold Forster, Captain Cook, and Charles Darwin-this book is a gripping account of a small group of scientific travelers whose voyages of discovery were to change perceptions of the natural world.
This is a major new naval history of the First World War which reveals the decisive contribution of the war at sea to Allied victory. In a truly global account, Lawrence Sondhaus traces the course of the campaigns in the North Sea, Atlantic, Adriatic, Baltic and Mediterranean and examines the role of critical innovations in the design and performance of ships, wireless communication and firepower. He charts how Allied supremacy led the Central Powers to attempt to revolutionize naval warfare by pursuing unrestricted submarine warfare, ultimately prompting the United States to enter the war. Victory against the submarine challenge, following their earlier success in sweeping the seas of German cruisers and other surface raiders, left the Allies free to use the world's sea lanes to transport supplies and troops to Europe from overseas territories, and eventually from the United States, which proved a decisive factor in their ultimate victory.
The aftermath of the Great War brought the most troubled peacetime the world had ever seen. Survivors of the war were not only the soldiers who fought, the wounded in mind and body. They were also the stateless, the children who suffered war's consequences, and later the victims of the great Russian famine of 1921 to 1923. Before the phrases 'universal human rights' and 'non-governmental organization' even existed, five remarkable men and women - Rene Cassin and Albert Thomas from France, Fridtjof Nansen from Norway, Herbert Hoover from the US and Eglantyne Jebb from Britain - understood that a new type of transnational organization was needed to face problems that respected no national boundaries or rivalries. Bruno Cabanes, a pioneer in the study of the aftermath of war, shows, through his vivid and revelatory history of individuals, organizations, and nations in crisis, how and when the right to human dignity first became inalienable.
Fifty years ago-on April 26, 1956-the freighter Ideal X steamed from Berth 26 in Port Newark, New Jersey. Flying the flag of the Pan-Atlantic Steamship Company, she set out for Houston with an unusual cargo: 58 trailer trucks lashed to her top deck. But they weren't trucks-they were steel containers removed from their running gear, waiting to be lifted onto empty truck beds when Ideal X reached Texas. She docked safely, and a revolution was launched-not only in shipping, but in the way the world trades. Today, the more than 200 million containers shipped every year are the lifeblood of the new global economy. They sit stacked on thousands of "box boats" that grow more massive every year. In this fascinating book, transportation expert Brian Cudahy provides a vivid, fast-paced account of the container-ship revolution-from the maiden voyage of the Ideal X to the entrepreneurial vision and technological breakthroughs that make it possible to ship more goods more cheaply than every before. Cudahy tells this complex story easily, starting with Malcom McLean, Pan-Atlantic's owner who first thought about loading his trucks on board. His line grew into the container giant Sea-Land Services, and Cudahy charts its dramatic evolution into Maersk Sealand, the largest container line in the world. Along the way, he provides a concise, colorful history of world shipping-from freighter types to the fortunes of steamship lines-and explores the spectacular growth of global trade fueled by the mammoth ships and new seaborne lifelines connecting Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Masterful maritime history, Box Boats shows how fleets of these ungainly ships make the modern world possible-with both positive and negative effects. It's also a tale of an historic home port, New York, where old piers lie silent while 40-foot steel boxes of toys and televisions come ashore by the thousands, across the bay in New Jersey.
British power and global expansion between 1755 and 1815 have mainly been attributed to the fiscal-military state and the achievements of the Royal navy at sea. Roger Morriss here sheds new light on the broader range of developments in the infrastructure of the state needed to extend British power at sea and overseas. He demonstrates how developments in culture, experience and control in central government affected the supply of ships, manpower, food, transport and ordnance as well as the support of the army, permitting the maintenance of armed forces of unprecedented size and their projection to distant stations. He reveals how the British state, although dependent on the private sector, built a partnership with it based on trust, ethics and the law. This book argues that Britain's military bureaucracy, traditionally regarded as inferior to the fighting services, was in fact the keystone of the nation's maritime ascendancy.
This volume explores the transnational dimensions of mutiny and maritime radicalism during the great cycle of war and revolution that began in the mid-1750s and continued until the 1840s. The central theme of the volume is mutiny - its causes, frequency, forms, patterns and outcomes - charting, linking and comparing maritime insurrections in different oceans, on warships, merchant vessels and convict ships. The contributions concentrate on the mutineers themselves, their social composition, self-organisation, objectives and ideas. Also included is unrest in port cities, sites of international exchange between maritime and landed forms of resistance. Sailors spent significant amounts of time in port, sometimes connecting shipboard unrest and radical movements on land in personal, political and social ways. The contributions cover the age of revolution in its full geographic extent, including the Atlantic with its wars and revolutions, but also the Indian and Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea.
China's status in the world of expanding European empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has long been under dispute. Its unequal relations with multiple powers, secured through a system of treaties rather than through colonization, has invited debate over the degree and significance of outside control and local sovereignty. Navigating Semi-Colonialism examines steam navigation-introduced by foreign powers to Chinese waters in the mid-nineteenth century-as a constitutive element of the treaty system to illuminate both conceptual and concrete aspects of this regime, arguing for the specificity of China's experience, its continuities with colonialism in other contexts, and its links to global processes. Focusing on the shipping network of open treaty ports, the book examines the expansion of steam navigation, the growth of shipping enterprise, and the social climate of the steamship in the late nineteenth century as arenas of contestation and collaboration that highlight the significance of partial Chinese sovereignty and the limitations imposed upon it. It further analyzes the transformation of this regime under the nationalism of the Republican period, and pursues a comparison of shipping regimes in China and India to provide a novel perspective on China under the treaty system.
In the middle of the night, October 1850, three British sailors searching for lost countrymen are set upon the rugged shore on the far edge of the vast Russian Empire. Only two will return from this cruel and harsh land called Alyaksa. Edward Adams, a young Victorian-era doctor, was part of an expedition sent to Russian Alaska in search of explorer John Franklin and his crew. As the mission's naturalist, Adams filled a journal with observations, recordings and drawings of his excursion, revealing a person who thrived on new experiences and had a true gift for recording what he observed.Full of drama and adventure, "Into the Savage Land" takes reader back to the Alaska of 1850. Reminiscent of the popular serialised stories that appeared in British papers at the time, the journal presents a first-person account of travels into the interior of the colony and the inherent dangers involved, including freezing temperatures, suspicious Russians and warring Natives. Edited and annotated by Ernest Sipes, this publication offers an exceptional opportunity for students of the literature of Alaska and anyone interested in the region's colourful history.
The historian R. H. Tawney famously wrote, 'The sixteenth century lives in terror of the tramp.' The eighteenth century lived in terror of the tramps of the seas - pirates. Pirates have fascinated people ever since. It was a harsh life for those who went 'on the account', constantly overshadowed by the threat of death - through violence, illness, shipwreck, or the hangman's noose. The lure of gold, the excitement of the chase and the freedom that life aboard a pirate ship offered were judged by some to be worth the risk. Helen Hollick explores both the fiction and fact of the Golden Age of piracy, and there are some surprises in store for those who think they know their Barbary Corsair from their boucanier.Everyone has heard of Captain Morgan, but who recognises the name of the aristocratic Frenchman Daniel Montbars? He killed so many Spaniards he was known as 'The Exterminator'. The fictional world of pirates, represented in novels and movies, is different from reality. What draws readers and viewers to these notorious hyenas of the high seas? What are the facts behind the fantasy? Helen Hollick reveals all, weaving into the history her own fictional creations.
A childhood fascination of shipwrecks and a meeting with Millvina Dean, the youngest Titanic survivor, inspired the author to meet more survivors of both the titanic and other disasters. They are the people who tell the stories here - all tales of overcoming adversity and personal loss and living and moving on in the aftermath.
"Now for the Contest" tells the story of the Civil War at sea in
the context of three campaigns: the blockade of the southern coast,
the raiding of Union commerce, and the projection of power ashore.
The Civil War at sea was profoundly influenced by innovation and
asymmetry--both sides embraced innovation, but differences in their
resources and their strategic objectives pushed them down different
paths. At its peak the Union navy boasted over fifty thousand men
and nearly seven hundred ships. The Confederate navy was far
smaller, never exceeding some five thousand men, and it numbered
its ships in the tens rather than the hundreds. The Confederacy's
"technology strategy" and its overseas programs formed the main
counterweight to the Union's numerical force.
Maritime archaeology deals with shipwrecks and is carried out by divers rather than diggers..It embraces maritime history and analyzes changes in ship-building, navigation, and seamanship, and offers fresh perspectives on the cultures and societies that produced the ships and sailors. Drawing on detailed past and recent case studies, Richard A. Gould provides an up-to-date review of the field that includes dramatic new findings arising from improved undersea technologies. This second edition of Archaeology and the Social History of Ships has been updated throughout to reflect new findings and new interpretations of old sites. The new edition explores advances in undersea technology in archaeology, especially remotely operated vehicles. The book reviews many of the major recent shipwreck findings, including the Vasa in Stockholm, the Viking wrecks at Roskilde Fjord, and the Titanic.
Overshadowed by the better known Spanish Armada of 1588, three centuries ago, the final Spanish Armada set sail against England and Scotland. This little known invasion is often treated as part of the little known Jacobite campaign of 1719. However, this invasion and the subsequent campaign in Scotland were part of the virtually unknown War of the Quadruple Alliance. This conflict has never been hitherto covered in a book in the English language. This book is a study of war and diplomacy involving several of the European powers, with fighting on the high seas, in Scotland, Spain, Sardinia, and Sicily. It is a tale of a once great power taking advantage of apparently favourable international circumstances to regain parts of its lost empire. Success seemed possible, but the fortunes of war are fluctuating and luck only goes so far. Eventually the realities of military power reasserted themselves with bloody results. This book presents an account of this little known war. The emphasis is on Britain's naval, diplomatic and military efforts, whilst not neglecting those of its allies and enemies, both abroad and at home. It draws on a variety of little or unused primary sources held at the National Archives and elsewhere and boasts a cast of interesting and unusual characters.
Ordered to join the Pacific Squadron in 1854, the sloop of war Decatur sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, through the Strait of Magellan to Valparaiso, Honolulu, and Puget Sound, then on to San Francisco, Panama, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, while serving in the Pacific until 1859, the eve of the Civil War. Historian Lorraine McConaghy presents the ship, its officers, and its crew in a vigorous, keenly rendered case study that illuminates the forces shaping America's antebellum navy and foreign policy in the Pacific, from Vancouver Island to Tierra del Fuego. One of only five ships in the squadron, the Decatur participated in numerous imperial adventures in the Far West, enforcing treaties, fighting Indians, suppressing vigilantes, and protecting commerce. With its graceful lines and towering white canvas sails, the ship patrolled the sandy border between ocean and land. "Warship under Sail" focuses on four episodes in the Decatur's Pacific Squadron mission: the harrowing journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean through the Strait of Magellan; a Seattle war story that contested American treaties and settlements; participation with other squadron ships on a U.S. State Department mission to Nicaragua; and more than a year spent anchored off Panama as a hospital ship. In a period of five years, more than 300 men lived aboard ship, leaving a rich record of logbooks, medical and punishment records, correspondence, personal journals, and drawings. Lorraine McConaghy has mined these records to offer a compelling social history of a warship under sail. Her research adds immeasurably to our understanding of the lives of ordinary men at sea and American expansionism in the antebellum Pacific West. Lorraine McConaghy is the historian at the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle. "The world that Dr. McConaghy has captured, both aboard the Decatur and in the ports it visited, will be unfamiliar to almost everyone who reads this book; indeed, that strangeness or lost-ness is one of her major points. The maps and historic images help to make that world more concrete." - Coll Thrush, author of "Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place" "The story the author tells is fresh and original and relates to a number of significant subjects, including the history of the Old Navy, the Pacific Northwest, antebellum national politics, the Manifest Destiny movement, and the lore of the sea." - James Valle, Delaware State University "In "Warship under Sail," McConaghy has found a lens through which to examine anew the founding of Seattle. The vessel participated in the iconic 'Battle of Seattle, ' that day-long skirmish during January 1856 between 'Natives' and 'non-Natives' that looms so large in historical accounts of the city." - John M. Findlay, University of Washington Listen to Lorraine McConaghy talk about the book: http: //www.spl.org/default.asp?pageID=collection_podcasts
The story of Britain's colourful maritime past seen through the changing fortunes of the Cornish port of Falmouth. Within the space of few years, during the 1560s and 1570s, a maritime revolution took place in England that would contribute more than anything to the transformation of the country from a small rebel state on the fringes of Europe into a world power. Until then, it was said, there was only one Englishman capable of sailing across the Atlantic. Yet within ten years an English ship with an English crew was circumnavigating the world. At the same time in Cornwall, in the Fal estuary, just a single building - a lime kiln - existed where the port of Falmouth would emerge. Yet by the end of the eighteenth century, Falmouth would be one of the busiest harbours in the world. 'The Levelling Sea' uses the story of Falmouth's spectacular rise and fall to explore wider questions about the sea and its place in history and imagination. Drawing on his own deep connection with Cornwall, award-winning author Philip Marsden writes unforgettably about the power of the sea and its ability to produce greed on a piratical scale, dizzying corruption, and grand and tragic aspirations.
The result is a portrait of the battle between men and the sea. In many cases it was the sea that won. It is also a tribute to those of the lifeboat service who risked their lives so that others in distress might be saved.
The raising of the _Mary Rose_ in 1982 was a remarkable feat of archaeology and her subsequent preservation and display at Portsmouth a triumph of technical skill and imagination. She is more than a relic, however. She has a story to tell, and her sinking in the Solent in 1545, when under attack by the French, and the reasons for it, have intrigued historians for generations. With the benefit of access to her remains, archaeologists have been able to slowly unravel the mystery of her foundering on a calm summer's day in July 1545. This new book by one of the country's leading experts on the _Mary Rose_ contains much that is published for the first time. It has the first full account of the battle in which Henry VIII's warship was sunk, and tells the stories of the English and French admirals. It examines the design and construction of the ship and how she was used, and develops themes begun when he was earlier commissioned by the Mary Rose Trust to write the multi-volume history of the ship. He shows for the first time conclusively that the French fleet arrived unexpectedly to seize the Isle of Wight and Portsmouth a day later than was once believed, that the many bodies found in the wreck reflect her at action stations, and that the ship had had an extra deck added and was therefore more unstable than was previously thought. Finally, the author makes it clear who was responsible for the loss of the _Mary Rose_, after describing what happened onboard, deck by deck, in her last moments afloat. The fascinating revelation will intrigue the general reader as well as the historian and archaeologist and the book is set to become the last word on the career of this most famous of ships.
A detailed study of the origins and demise of schooner-based pearling in Australia. For most of its history, Australian pearling was a shore-based activity. But from the mid-1880s until the World War I era, the industry was dominated by highly mobile, heavily capitalized, schooner-based fleets of pearling luggers, known as floating stations, that exploited Australia's northern continental shelf and the nearby waters of the Netherlands Indies. Octopus Crowd:Maritime History and the Business of Australian Pearling in Its Schooner Age is the first book-length study of schooner-based pearling and explores the floating station system and the men who developed and employed it. Steve Mullins focuses on the Clark Combination, a syndicate led by James Clark, Australia's most influential pearler. The combination honed the floating station system to the point where it was accused of exhausting pearling grounds, elbowing out small-time operators, strangling the economies of pearling ports, and bringing the industry to the brink of disaster. Combination partners were vilified as monopolists-they were referred to as an ""octopus crowd""-and their schooners were stigmatized as hell ships and floating sweatshops. Schooner-based floating stations crossed maritime frontiers with impunity, testing colonial and national territorial jurisdictions. The Clark Combination passed through four fisheries management regimes, triggering significant change and causing governments to alter laws and extend maritime boundaries. It drew labor from ports across the Asia-Pacific, and its product competed in a volatile world market. Octopus Crowd takes all these factors into account to explain Australian pearling during its schooner age. It argues that the demise of the floating station system was not caused by resource depletion, as was often predicted, but by ideology and Australia's shifting sociopolitical landscape. |
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