In the tradition of Dava Sobel's 'Longitude' comes sailing expert David Barrie's compelling and dramatic tale of invention and discovery - an eloquent elegy to one of the most important navigational instruments ever created, and the daring mariners who used it to explore, conquer, and map the world. This is the dramatic story of an instrument that changed history. Built around David Barrie's own transatlantic passage using the very same navigational tools as Captain Cook, Sextant tells how one of the most vital navigational instruments was invented and used - and why the golden age of celestial navigation has now come to an end. From Cook, Bligh and Vancouver to Bougainville, La Perouse, Flinders and FitzRoy, Barrie recounts the fortunes of the explorers who risked their lives in charting the Pacific, as well as the intrepid adventures of Slocum, Shackleton and Worsley. A heady mix of history, science and adventure, this elegy to a lost technology is infused with the wonder of discovery and the sublimity of the cosmos.

In a page-turning tale brimming with adventure, author Richard Sanders tells of the remarkable exploits of Bartholomew Roberts (better known as Black Bart), the greatest of the Caribbean pirates. He drank tea instead of rum. He banned women and gambling on his ships. He never made his prisoners walk the plank, instead inviting them into his cabin for a friendly chat. And during the course of his extraordinary two-and-a-half-year career as a pirate captain, he captured four hundred prizes and brought trade in the eastern Caribbean to a standstill. In If a Pirate I Must Be..., Richard Sanders tells the larger-than-life story of Bartholomew Roberts, a.k.a. Black Bart. Born in a rural town, Roberts rose from third mate on a slave ship to pirate captain in a matter of months. Before long, his combination of audaciousness and cunning won him fame and fortune from the fisheries of Newfoundland to the slave ports of West Africa. Sanders brings to life a fascinating world of theater and ritual, where men (a third of whom were black) lived a close-knit, egalitarian life, democratically electing their officers and sharing their spoils. They were highly (if surreptitiously) popular with many merchants, with whom they struck incredibly lucrative deals. Yet with a fierce team of Royal Navy pirate hunters tracking his every move, Roberts' heyday would prove a brief one, and with his capture, the Golden Age of pirates would pass into the lore and legend of books and movies. Based on historical records, journals and letters from pirates under Roberts' command, and on writings by Roberts himself, If a Pirate I Must Be... is the true story of the greatest pirate ever to sail the Caribbean. Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Yahagi, the second Japanese warship of that name, was the third of the four Agano-class vessels (the other three being Agano, Noshiro and Sakawa). Construction of the Agano-class cruisers was approved by the Japanese parliament (Diet) in March 1939 under the Fourth Naval Armaments Enhancement Program (Dai-Yon-Ji Kaigun Gunbi Jujitsu Keikaku), also known as "Four-in-Circle" Program (Maru Yon Keikaku), or simply Maru 4. Under the terms of the program, the four light cruisers (kei jun'yokan), also referred to as type B cruisers (otsu-gata jun'yokan, or simply otsu jun) and officially classed as second-class cruisers (ni-to jun'yokan), were to fulfill the role of destroyer squadron flagships. At that time destroyer squadrons (DesRon), called literarily torpedo squadrons (suirai sentai), consisted of four four-ship destroyer divisions (DesDiv, or kuchiku-tai).

This book looks to fill the 'blue hole' in Global History by studying the role of the oceans themselves in the creation, development, reproduction and adaptation of knowledge across the Atlantic world. It shows how globalisation and the growth of maritime knowledge served to reinforce one another, and demonstrates how and why maritime history should be put firmly at the heart of global history. Exploring the dynamics of globalisation, knowledge-making and European expansion, Global Ocean of Knowledge takes a transnational approach and transgresses the traditional border between the early modern and modern periods. It focuses on three main periodisations, which correspond with major transformations in the globalisation of the Atlantic World, and analyses how and to what extent globalisation forces from above and from below influenced the development and exchange of knowledge. Davids distinguishes three forms of globalising forces 'from above'; imperial, commercial and religious, alongside self-organisation, the globalising force 'from below'. Exploring how globalisation advanced and its relationship with knowledge changed over time, this book bridges global, maritime, intellectual and economic history to reflect on the role of the oceans in making the world a more connected place.

British Slaves and Barbary Corsairs is the first comprehensive study of the thousands of Britons captured and enslaved in North Africa in the early modern period, an issue of intense contemporary concern but almost wholly overlooked in modern histories of Britain. The study charts the course of victims' lives from capture to eventual liberation, death in Barbary, or, for a lucky few, escape. After sketching the outlines of Barbary's government and society, and the world of the corsairs, it describes the trauma of the slave-market, the lives of galley-slaves and labourers, and the fate of female captives. Most captives clung on to their Christian faith, but a significant minority apostatized and accepted Islam. For them, and for Britons who joined the corsairs voluntarily, identity became fluid and multi-layered. Bernard Capp also explores in depth how ransoms were raised by private and public initiatives, and how redemptions were organised by merchants, consuls, and other intermediaries. With most families too poor to raise any ransom, the state came under intense pressure to intervene. From the mid-seventeenth century, the navy played a significant role in 'gunboat diplomacy' that eventually helped end the corsair threat. The Barbary corsairs posed a challenge to most European powers, and the study places the British story within the wider context of Mediterranean slavery, which saw Moors and Christians as both captors and captives.

With American independence came the freedom to sail anywhere in the world under a new flag. During the years between the Treaty of Paris and the Treaty of Wangxi, Americans first voyaged past the Cape of Good Hope, reaching the ports of Algiers and the bazaars of Arabia, the markets of India and the beaches of Sumatra, the villages of Cochin, China, and the factories of Canton. Their South Seas voyages of commerce and discovery introduced the infant nation to the world and the world to what the Chinese, Turks, and others dubbed the "new people."

Drawing on private journals, letters, ships' logs, memoirs, and newspaper accounts, "True Yankees" traces America's earliest encounters on a global stage through the exhilarating experiences of five Yankee seafarers. Merchant Samuel Shaw spent a decade scouring the marts of China and India for goods that would captivate the imaginations of his countrymen. Mariner Amasa Delano toured much of the Pacific hunting seals. Explorer Edmund Fanning circumnavigated the globe, touching at various Pacific and Indian Ocean ports of call. In 1829, twenty-year-old Harriett Low reluctantly accompanied her merchant uncle and ailing aunt to Macao, where she recorded trenchant observations of expatriate life. And sea captain Robert Bennet Forbes's last sojourn in Canton coincided with the eruption of the First Opium War.

How did these bold voyagers approach and do business with the people in the region, whose physical appearance, practices, and culture seemed so strange? And how did native men and women--not to mention the European traders who were in direct competition with the Americans--regard these upstarts who had fought off British rule? The accounts of these adventurous travelers reveal how they and hundreds of other mariners and expatriates influenced the ways in which Americans defined themselves, thereby creating a genuinely brash national character--the "true Yankee." Readers who love history and stories of exploration on the high seas will devour this gripping tale.

The men of the SBS are the maritime equivalent of their counterparts in the SAS; they are the elite of the British Special Forces and also the most secretive. Although SAS activity has been extensively documented, the SBS has remained in the state it prefers - a shadowy silhouette, with identities protected and missions kept from public view. Formed during the Second World War, when they took part in many daring raids (one of which was filmed as The Cockleshell Heroes), they were active in the jungle campaigns in the Far East, in the Falklands, the Gulf War and Bosnia. Since this seminal book was published in 1997, John Parker has been privy to much more inside information about the SBS's original operations and he brings the book right up to date with accounts of their exploits in East Timor, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Kosovo and most recently in Iraq.

"This volume represents a sea change in educational resources for the history of piracy. In a single, readable, and affordable volume, Lane and Bialuschewski present a wonderfully diverse body of primary texts on sea raiders. Drawn from a variety of sources, including the authors' own archival research and translations, these carefully curated texts cover over two hundred years (1548--1726) of global, early-modern piracy. Lane and Bialuschewski provide glosses of each document and a succinct introduction to the historical context of the period and avoid the romanticized and Anglo-centric depictions of maritime predation that often plague work on the topic." -Jesse Cromwell, The University of Mississippi

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.

An assessment of how important the sea was in the middle ages. How important has the sea been in the development of human history? Very important indeed is the conclusion of this ground-breaking four volume work. The books bring together the world's leading maritime historians, who address the question of what difference the sea has made in relation to around 250 situations ranging from the earliest times to the present. They consider, across the entire world, subjects related to human migration, trade, economic development, warfare, the building of political units including states and empires, the dissemination of ideas, culture and religion, and much more, showing how the sea was crucial to all these aspects of human development. The Sea in History - The Medieval World covers the period from the end of the Roman Empire in the West up to around the year 1500. It demonstrates that for many peoples and states in this period the sea was central to theirexistence - the Vikings, the Hanse, Venice, Genoa, the Normans - and it shows also how important the sea was for states which are not normally thought of as maritime powers, such as Byzantium, the Crusader states and the Mongol Empire. The book is global in its coverage, including material on East and Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean and Africa, with particularly interesting material on China's extensive voyages of exploration in the fifteenth century, the role of the Vikings in the early formation of Russia, and on the building of ships, appropriate to local conditions, in different parts of the world. 40 of the contributions are in English; 34 are inFrench. MICHEL BALARD is Emeritus Professor at the University Paris 1 - Pantheon Sorbonne. CHRISTIAN BUCHET is Professor of Maritime History, Catholic University of Paris, Scientific Director of Oceanides and a member of l'Academie de marine.

"This volume represents a sea change in educational resources for the history of piracy. In a single, readable, and affordable volume, Lane and Bialuschewski present a wonderfully diverse body of primary texts on sea raiders. Drawn from a variety of sources, including the authors' own archival research and translations, these carefully curated texts cover over two hundred years (1548--1726) of global, early-modern piracy. Lane and Bialuschewski provide glosses of each document and a succinct introduction to the historical context of the period and avoid the romanticized and Anglo-centric depictions of maritime predation that often plague work on the topic." -Jesse Cromwell, The University of Mississippi

In 1998, the Belitung, a ninth-century western Indian Ocean-style vessel, was discovered in Indonesian waters. Onboard was a full cargo load, likely intended for the Middle Eastern market, of over 60,000 Chinese Tang-dynasty ceramics, gold, and other precious objects. It is one of the most significant shipwreck discoveries of recent times, revealing the global scale of ancient commercial endeavors and the centrality of the ocean within the Silk Road story. But this shipwreck also has a modern tale to tell, of how nation-states appropriate the remnants of the past for their own purposes, and of the international debates about who owns-and is responsible for-shared heritage. The commercial salvage of objects from the Belitung, and their subsequent sale to Singapore, contravened the principles of the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage and prompted international condemnation. The resulting controversy continues to reverberate in academic and curatorial circles. Major museums refused to host international traveling exhibitions of the collection, and some archaeologists announced they would rather see the objects thrown back in the sea than ever go on display. Shipwrecks are anchored in the public imagination, their stories of treasure and tragedy told in museums, cinema, and song. At the same time, they are sites of scholarly inquiry, a means by which maritime archaeologists interrogate the past through its material remains. Every shipwreck is an accidental time capsule, replete with the sunken stories of those on board, of the personal and commercial objects that went down with the vessel, and of an unfinished journey. In this moving and thought-provoking reflection of underwater cultural heritage management, Natali Pearson reveals valuable new information about the Belitung salvage, obtained firsthand from the salvagers, and the intricacies in the many conflicts and relationships that developed. In tracing the Belitung's lives and afterlives, this book shifts our thinking about shipwrecks beyond popular tropes of romance, pirates, and treasure, and toward an understanding of how the relationships between sites, objects, and people shape the stories we tell of the past in the present.

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.

The transition to modern war at sea began during the period of the Sino-Japanese War (1894 1895) and the Spanish-American War (1898) and was propelled forward rapidly by the advent of the dreadnought and the nearly continuous state of war that culminated in World War I. By 1922, most of the elements that would define sea power in the 20th century were in place. Written by one of our foremost military historians, this volume acknowledges the complex nature of this transformation, focusing on imperialism, the growth of fleets, changes in shipbuilding and armament technology, and doctrines about the deployment and use of force at sea, among other factors. There is careful attention to the many battles fought at sea during this period and their impact on the future of sea power. The narrative is supplemented by a wide range of reference materials, including a detailed census of capital ships built during this period and a remarkable chronology of actions at sea during World War I."

Erik Petkovic's Lake Erie Technical Wreck Diving Guide is packed with tales of sailing ships and steamers that foundered, succumbed to storms, collided and were engulfed in flames. Ships that sunk more than once, or were involved in wars, slave escapes and catastrophic collisions on the shallowest of the Great Lakes. There are some whose full story is still a mystery waiting to be discovered. The author's original research reveals daring tales of deep salvage, valuable cargo, submarines, experimental engineering, unknown wrecks, and missing, yet-to-be-discovered vessels. This new guide brings to life the lost history of the ships, passengers and crew. Then there are the dives themselves. Some of the wrecks are remarkably intact for their age. Features which can be seen include complete wooden ship's wheels, standing masts, rudders, propellers, portholes, boilers, and steamship hogging arches. As well as a description, each wreck's current condition, location, dimensions, hazards and highlights are given. Photos and archive materials also help bring these rarely dived wrecks to life.

Erik Petkovic's Lake Erie Technical Wreck Diving Guide is packed with tales of sailing ships and steamers that foundered, succumbed to storms, collided and were engulfed in flames. Ships that sunk more than once, or were involved in wars, slave escapes and catastrophic collisions on the shallowest of the Great Lakes. There are some whose full story is still a mystery waiting to be discovered. The author's original research reveals daring tales of deep salvage, valuable cargo, submarines, experimental engineering, unknown wrecks, and missing, yet-to-be-discovered vessels. This new guide brings to life the lost history of the ships, passengers and crew. Then there are the dives themselves. Some of the wrecks are remarkably intact for their age. Features which can be seen include complete wooden ship's wheels, standing masts, rudders, propellers, portholes, boilers, and steamship hogging arches. As well as a description, each wreck's current condition, location, dimensions, hazards and highlights are given. Photos and archive materials also help bring these rarely dived wrecks to life.

Islands are not just geographical units or physical facts; their importance and significance arise from the human activities associated with them. The maritime routes of sailing ships, the victualling requirements of their sailors, and the strategic demands of seaborne empires in the age of sail - as well as their intrinsic value as sources of rare commodities - meant that islands across the globe played prominent parts in imperial consolidation and expansion. This volume examines the various ways in which islands (and groups of islands) contributed to the establishment, extension, and maintenance of the British Empire in the age of sail. Thematically related chapters explore the geographical, topographical, economic, and social diversity of the islands that comprised a large component of the British Empire in an era of rapid and significant expansion. Although many of these islands were isolated rocky outcrops, they acted as crucial nodal points, providing critical assistance for ships and men embarked on the long-distance voyages that characterised British overseas activities in the period. Intercontinental maritime trade, colonial settlement, and scientific exploration and experimentation would have been impossible without these oceanic islands. They also acted as sites of strategic competition, contestation, and conflict for rival European powers keen to outstrip each other in developing and maintaining overseas markets, plantations, and settlements. The importance of islands outstripped their physical size, the populations they sustained, or their individual economic contribution to the imperial balance sheet. Standing at the centre of maritime routes of global connectivity, islands offer historians of the British Empire fresh perspectives on the intercontinental communication, commercial connections, and territorial expansion that characterised that empire.

This collection piques the imagination with historical evidence about the actual exploits of pirates as revealed in the archaeological record. The recent discovery of the wreck of Blackbeard's "Queen Anne's Revenge," off Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina, has provoked scientists to ask, What is a pirate? Were pirates sea-going terrorists, lawless rogues who plundered, smuggled, and illegally transported slaves, or legitimate corsairs and privateers? Highlighting such pirate vessels as the "Speaker," which sailed in the Indian Ocean, and the "Whydah," the first pirate ship discovered in North America (near the tip of Cape Cod), the contributors analyze what constitutes a pirate ship and how it is different from a contemporary merchant or naval vessel. Examining excavated underwater "treasure sites" and terrestrial pirate lairs found off the coast of Madagascar, throughout the Caribbean, and within the United States, the authors explore the romanticized "Golden Age of Piracy," a period brimming with the real-life exploits of Captain Kidd, Blackbeard, Henry Morgan, and the "gentleman pirate" Jean Lafitte. This book will appeal to the general public, with special interest to anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and divers.

Two of the questions most frequently asked by archaeologists of sites and the objects that populate them are 'How old are you?' and 'Where are you from?' These questions can often be answered through archaeometric dating and provenance analyses. As both archaeological sites and objects, shipwrecks pose a special problem in archaeometric dating and provenance because when they sailed, they often accumulated new construction material as timbers were repaired and replaced. Additionally, during periods of globalization, such as the so-called Age of Discovery, the provenance of construction materials may not reflect where the ship was built due to long-distance timber trade networks and the global nature of these ships' sailing routes. Accepting these special challenges, nautical archaeologists must piece together the nuanced relationship between the ship, its timbers, and the shipwreck, and to do so, wood samples must be removed from the assemblage. Besides the provenance of the vessel's wooden components, selective removal and analysis of timber samples can also provide researchers with unique insights relating to environmental history. For this period, wood samples could help produce information on the emergent global economy; networks of timber trade; forestry and carpentry practices; climate patterns and anomalies; forest reconstruction; repairs made to ships and when, why, and where those occurred; and much more. This book is a set of protocols to establish the need for wood samples from shipwrecks and to guide archaeologists in the removal of samples for a suite of archaeometric techniques currently available to provenance the timbers used to construct wooden ships and boats. While these protocols will prove helpful to archaeologists working on shipwreck assemblages from any time period and in any place, this book uses Iberian ships of the 16th to 18th centuries as its case studies because their global mobility poses additional challenges to the problem at hand. At the same time, their prolificacy and ubiquity make the wreckage of these ships a uniquely global phenomenon.

With the opening of sea routes in the fifteenth century, groups of men and women left Portugal to establish themselves across the ports and cities of the Atlantic or Ocean Sea. They were refugees and migrants, traders and mariners, Jews, Catholics, and the Marranos of mixed Judaic-Catholic culture. They formed a diasporic community known by contemporaries as the Portuguese Nation. By the early seventeenth century, this nation without a state had created a remarkable trading network that spanned the Atlantic, reached into the Indian Ocean and Asia, and generated millions of pesos that were used to bankroll the Spanish empire. A Nation Upon The Ocean Sea traces the story of the Portuguese Nation from its emergence in the late fifteenth century to its fragmentation in the middle of the seventeenth and situates it in relation to the parallel expansion and crisis of Spanish imperial dominion in the Atlantic. Against the backdrop of this relationship, the book reconstitutes the rich inner life of a community based on movement, maritime trade, and cultural hybridity. We are introduced to mariners and traders in such disparate places as Lima, Seville and Amsterdam, their day-to-day interactions and understandings, their houses and domestic relations, their private reflections and public arguments.
This finely-textured account reveals how the Portuguese Nation created a cohesive and meaningful community despite the mobility and dispersion of its members; how its forms of sociability fed into the development of robust transatlantic commercial networks; and how the day-to-day experience of trade was translated into the sphere of Spanish imperial politics as merchants of the Portuguese Nationtook up the pen to advocate a program of commercial reform based on religious-ethnic toleration and the liberalization of trade.
A microhistory, A Nation Upon The Ocean Sea contributes to our understanding of the broader histories of capitalism, empire, and diaspora in the early Atlantic.

Both the Christian Bible and Aristotle's works suggest that water should entirely flood the earth. Though many ancient, medieval, and early modern Europeans relied on these works to understand and explore the relationships between water and earth, sixteenth-century Europeans particularly were especially concerned with why dry land existed. This book investigates why they were so interested in water's failure to submerge the earth when their predecessors had not been. Analyzing biblical commentaries as well as natural philosophical, geographical, and cosmographical texts from these periods, Lindsay Starkey shows that European sea voyages to the southern hemisphere combined with the traditional methods of European scholarship and religious reformations led sixteenth-century Europeans to reinterpret water and earth's ontological and spatial relationships. The manner in which they did so also sheds light on how we can respond to our current water crisis before it is too late.

This fast-paced narrative traces the emergence of the United States Navy as a global power from its birth during the American Revolution through to its current superpower status. The story highlights iconic moments of great drama pivotal to the nation's fortunes: John Paul Jones' attacks on the British during the Revolution, the Barbary Wars, and the arduous conquest of Iwo Jima. The book illuminates the changes-technological, institutional, and functional-of the U.S. Navy from its days as a small frigate navy through the age of steam and steel to the modern era of electronics and missiles. Historian Craig L. Symonds captures the evolving culture of the navy and debates between policymakers about what role the institution should play in world affairs. Internal and external challenges dramatically altered the size and character of the navy, with long periods of quiet inertia alternating with rapid expansion emerging out of crises. The history of the navy reflects the history of the nation as a whole, and its many changes derive in large part from the changing role of the United States itself.

England's Islands in a Sea of Troubles examines the jurisdictional disputes and cultural complexities in England's relationship with its island fringe from Tudor times to the eighteenth century, and traces island privileges and anomalies to the present. It tells a dramatic story of sieges and battles, pirates and shipwrecks, prisoners and prophets, as kings and commoners negotiated the political, military, religious, and administrative demands of the early modern state. The Channel Islands, the Isle of Wight, the Isles of Scilly, the Isle of Man, Lundy, Holy Island and others emerge as important offshore outposts that long remained strange, separate, and perversely independent. England's islands were difficult to govern, and were prone to neglect, yet their strategic value far outweighed their size. Though vulnerable to foreign threats, their harbours and castles served as forward bases of English power. In civil war they were divided and contested, fought over and occupied. Jersey and the Isles of Scilly served as refuges for royalists on the run. Charles I was held on the Isle of Wight. External authority was sometimes light of touch, as English governments used the islands as fortresses, commercial assets, and political prisons. London was often puzzled by the linguistic differences, tangled histories, and special claims of island communities. Though increasingly integrated within the realm, the islands maintained challenging peculiarities and distinctive characteristics. Drawing on a wide range of sources, and the insights of maritime, military, and legal scholarship, this is an original contribution to social, cultural, and constitutional history.