Facing an insurmountable deficit in resources compared to the Union navy, the Confederacy resorted to unorthodox forms of warfare to combat enemy forces. Perhaps the most energetic and effective torpedo corps and secret service company organized during the American Civil War, the Singer Secret Service Corps, led by Texan inventor and entrepreneur Edgar Collins Singer, developed and deployed submarines, underwater weaponry, and explosive devices. The group's main government-financed activity, which eventually led to other destructive inventions such as the Hunley submarine and behind-enemy-line railroad sabotage, was the manufacture and deployment of an underwater contact mine. During the two years the Singer group operated, several Union gunboats, troop transports, supply trains, and even the famous ironclad monitor Tecumseh fell prey to its inventions. In Confederate Saboteurs: Building the Hunley and Other Secret Weapons of the Civil War, submarine expert and nautical historian Mark K. Ragan presents the untold story of the Singer corps. Poring through previously unpublished archival documents, Ragan also examines the complex personalities and relationships behind the Confederacy's use of torpedoes and submarines.

Royal Bargemasters have been serving their monarchs for over 800 years, yet their story has never been told. Always working in close proximity to their sovereigns, they have witnessed and played their part in many of the important events in our country's history. They have been close witnesses to rebellions and coronations, to initial courting and grand royal weddings, and added their colourful presence to the splendour of celebrations and pageants. Painstakingly researched by ex-Royal Bargemaster Robert Crouch and professional researcher Beryl Pendley, this beautifully illustrated book offers a colourful insight into the role of the Bargemasters over the centuries, revealing the part they have played in both the day-to-day lives of the Royal Family and their contribution to great ceremonial occasions from the Plantagenets to our present Queen.

A new international maritime order was forged in the early modern age, yet until now histories of the period have dealt almost exclusively with the Atlantic and Indian oceans. "Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants" shifts attention to the Mediterranean, providing a major history of an important but neglected sphere of the early modern maritime world, and upending the conventional view of the Mediterranean as a religious frontier where Christians and Muslims met to do battle.

Molly Greene investigates the conflicts between the Catholic pirates of Malta--the Knights of St. John--and their victims, the Greek merchants who traded in Mediterranean waters, and uses these conflicts as a window into an international maritime order that was much more ambiguous than has been previously thought. The Greeks, as Christian subjects to the Muslim Ottomans, were the very embodiment of this ambiguity. Much attention has been given to Muslim pirates such as the Barbary corsairs, with the focus on Muslim-on-Christian violence. Greene delves into the archives of Malta's pirate court--which theoretically offered redress to these Christian victims--to paint a considerably more complex picture and to show that pirates, far from being outside the law, were vital actors in the continuous negotiations of legality and illegality in the Mediterranean Sea.

"Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants" brings the Mediterranean and Catholic piracy into the broader context of early modern history, and sheds new light on commerce and the struggle for power in this volatile age.

Naval operations and warfare were, and remain, a key element for mapping. Maps were vital for commanders in drawing up plans of attack, and their detail and usefulness have increased over the centuries as the science of mapping has developed. This beautiful book examines stunning original maps from a series of key conflicts from the Spanish Armada, the American Wars of Independence, and the Napoleonic wars to twentieth century conflicts from the First World War to Vietnam, and explains how they were represented through mapping and how the maps produced helped naval commanders to plan their strategy.

Here is an encyclopedia of maritime history that, in scope and depth, rivals the expansiveness of the sea itself. The Encyclopedia covers the entire history of seafaring, from ancient Egyptian shipbuilders to Viking sea-raiders, from Nelson and the Napoleonic Wars to the voyages of Cheng Ho, from the European conquerors of the New World to the nuclear submarines and supertankers of today. Placing maritime affairs in their larger historical context, the Encyclopedia shows how seafaring has both reflected and influenced the major economic, cultural, military, and political developments in world history.
In four volumes and nearly 1,000 signed articles by an international group of historians and naval officers, the Encyclopedia offers a uniquely integrated approach, emphasizing the connections between maritime history and many related fields, including naval history, shipbuilding, navigation and scientific instrumentation, maritime art and literature, commerce and economics, exploration and maritime geography, oceanography and hydrology, and international maritime law. In so doing, the Encyclopedia provides, in a single reference work, a wealth of information that can otherwise be found only with the help of an extensive library.
A-Z organization, intelligible writing, plentiful illustrations, cross-references, bibliographies, a synoptic outline, and topical index all make The Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History an inviting, easy-to-use reference for researchers and enthusiasts alike.

Admiral Cornelis Matelieff de Jonge, a Director in the Rotterdam chamber of the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) for three decades during the early 17th century, set sail from the Dutch Republic in 1605. He launched an attack on Portuguese Melaka in 1606 and signed landmark treaties with the rulers of Johor (1606) and Ternate (1607). After his return to the Netherlands in the autumn of 1608 he wrote a series of epistolary reports and memoranda that were carefully studied by leading policy makers in the Republic, among them the renowned jurist Hugo Grotius, and Johan van Oldenbarnevelt. These materials contributed to the formulation of early VOC policy for the Southeast Asian region in the period 1605?20, and they yield candid insights into key issues of trade, security and the diplomacy of regional polities and their relations with Spain and Portugal. Here translated into English for the first time, and presented with 70 illustrations and maps from the period, this collection of treaties, reports and excerpts from Matelieff's travelogue will be of great interest to students of Southeast Asian and early colonial history and of the history of international law.

This is the story of Rupert T. Gould (1890-1948), the polymath and horologist. A remarkable man, Lt Cmdr Gould made important contributions in an extraordinary range of subject areas throughout his relatively short and dramatically troubled life. From antique clocks to scientific mysteries, from typewriters to the first systematic study of the Loch Ness Monster, Gould studied and published on them all. With the title The Stargazer, Gould was an early broadcaster on the BBC's Children's Hour when, with his encyclopaedic knowledge, he became known as The Man Who Knew Everything. Not surprisingly, he was also part of that elite group on BBC radio who formed The Brains Trust, giving on-the-spot answers to all manner of wide ranging and difficult questions. With his wide learning and photographic memory, Gould awed a national audience, becoming one of the era's radio celebrities.
During the 1920s Gould restored the complex and highly significant marine timekeepers constructed by John Harrison (1693-1776), and wrote the unsurpassed classic, The Marine Chronometer, its History and Development. Today he is virtually unknown, his horological contributions scarcely mentioned in Dava Sobel's bestseller Longitude. The TV version of Longitude, in which Jeremy Irons played Rupert Gould, did at least introduce Gould's name to a wider public.
Gould suffered terrible bouts of depression, resulting in a number of nervous breakdowns. These, coupled with his obsessive and pedantic nature, led to a scandalously-reported separation from his wife and cost him his family, his home, his job, and his closest friends.
In this first-ever biography of Rupert Gould, Jonathan Betts, the RoyalObservatory Greenwich's Senior Horologist, has given us a compelling account of a talented but flawed individual. Using hitherto unknown personal journals, the family's extensive collection of photographs, and the polymath's surviving records and notes, Betts tells the story of how Gould's early life, his naval career, and his celebrity status came together as this talented Englishman restored part of Britain's--and the world's--most important technical heritage: John Harrison's marine timekeepers.

In this innovative legal history of economic life in the Western Indian Ocean, Bishara examines the transformations of Islamic law and Islamicate commercial practices during the emergence of modern capitalism in the region. In this time of expanding commercial activity, a melange of Arab, Indian, Swahili and Baloch merchants, planters, jurists, judges, soldiers and seamen forged the frontiers of a shared world. The interlinked worlds of trade and politics that these actors created, the shared commercial grammars and institutions that they developed and the spatial and socio-economic mobilities they engaged in endured until at least the middle of the twentieth century. This major study examines the Indian Ocean from Oman to India and East Africa over an extended period of time, drawing together the histories of commerce, law and empire in a sophisticated, original and richly textured history of capitalism in the Islamic world.

A fascinating new study in which John McAleer explores the maritime gateway to Asia around the Cape of Good Hope and its critical role in the establishment, consolidation and maintenance of the British Empire in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Situated at the centre of a maritime chain that connected seas and continents, this gateway bridged the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, which, with its commercial links and strategic requirements, formed a global web that reflected the development of the British Empire in the period. The book examines how contemporaries perceived, understood and represented this area; the ways in which it worked as an alternative hub of empire, enabling the movement of people, goods, and ideas, as well as facilitating information and intelligence exchanges; and the networks of administration, security and control that helped to cement British imperial power.

Just before midnight on April 14, 1912, the ocean liner Titanic struck an iceberg. Less than three hours later, she lay at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, having taken with her more than 1,500 of the roughly 2,200 people on board. Even now, a century later, no other ship in history has attracted so much attention, stirred up such powerful emotion, or accumulated as many legends. Unsinkable" provides a fresh look at the Titanic 's incredible story. Following the great ship from her conception to her fateful collision to the ambitious attempts to salvage her right up to the present day, Daniel Allen Butler draws on thirty years of research to explore the tragedy and its aftermath in remarkable depth and detail. The result is a must-read for anyone interested in the Titanic .

The notion of a Pax Britannica--a concept implying that Britain's overwhelming strength enforced global peace in the era that began with Napoleon's defeat in 1815--largely ended with the British Empire itself. Although most historians still view this period as a departure from the eighteenth century, when lengthy coalition wars were commonplace, critics argue that Britain had only limited means of exercising power in the nineteenth century and that British military or naval strength played an insignificant role in preserving peace. In "Deterrence through Strength," Rebecca Berens Matzke reveals how Britain's diplomatic and naval authority in the early Victorian period was not circumstantial but rather based on real economic and naval strength as well as on resolute political leadership. The Royal Navy's main role in the nineteenth century was to be a deterrent force, a role it skillfully played. With its intimidating fleet, enhanced by steam technology, its great reserves and ship-building capacity, and its secure financial, economic, and political supports, British naval power posed a genuine threat. In examining three diplomatic crises--in North America, China, and the Mediterranean--Matzke demonstrates that Britain did indeed influence other nations with its navy's offensive capabilities but always with the goal of preserving peace, stability, and British diplomatic freedom.

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.

Oxford Textual Perspectives is a series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures, and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works. The Aesthetics of Island Space discusses islands as central figures in the modern experience of space. It examines the spatial poetics of islands in literary texts, from Shakespeare's The Tempest to Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, in the journals of explorers and scientists such as James Cook and Charles Darwin, and in Hollywood cinema. It traces the ways in which literary and cinematic islands have functioned as malleable spatial figures that offer vivid perceptual experiences as well as a geopoetic oscillation between the material energies of words and images and the energies of the physical world. The chapters focus on America's island gateways (Roanoke and Ellis Island), visions of tropical islands (Tahiti and imagined South Sea islands), the islands of the US-Canadian border region in the Pacific Northwest, and the imaginative appeal of mutable islands. It argues that modern voyages of discovery posed considerable perceptual and cognitive challenges to the experience of space, and that these challenges were negotiated in complex and contradictory ways via poetic engagement with islands. Discussions of island narratives in postcolonial theory have broadened understanding of how islands have been imagined as geometrical abstractions, bounded spaces easily subjected to the colonial gaze. There is, however, a second story of islands in the Western imagination which runs parallel to this colonial story. In this alternative account, the modern experience of islands in the age of discovery went hand in hand with a disintegration of received models of understanding global space. Drawing on and rethinking (post-)phenomenological, geocritical, and geopoetic theories, The Aesthetics of Island Space argues that the modern experience of islands as mobile and shifting territories implied a dispersal, fragmentation, and diversification of spatial experience, and it explores how this disruption is registered and negotiated by both non-fictional and fictional responses.

Athenian power and prosperity in the fourth century B.C. was based largely on commerce. The complex litigation arising from commercial activities was heard in special maritime courts, dikai emporikai, the subject of this monograph. Using both ancient and secondary sources, Edward E. Cohen has pieced together the evolution of these courts and has explored their procedure and jurisdiction. He successfully treats the much-discussed problem of why they were termed "monthly," and makes it clear that "supranationality" was a feature of all Hellenic maritime law. He shows conclusively that their jurisdiction was limited ratione rerum, not ratione personarum, because a legally defined "commercial class" did not exist in Athens at this time. Classicists and lawyers alike will find this a fascinating study. It not only contributes to our understanding of the Athens of Plato, Aristotle, and Demosthenes, but also points out that certain principles of Athenian maritime law are still imbedded in the modern international law of maritime commerce. Originally published in 1973. 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.

Attempts to assemble the historic pattern of contributing factors which shaped the course of American naval development from 1776 to 1918. Originally published in 1966. 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.

This historical analysis of the problems faced by the British navy during the War of 1739-1748 also sheds light on the character, limitations, and potentialities of eighteenth-century British administration. Originally published in 1965. 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.

When Commodore Perry opened Japan to the West, the U.S. Navy sent a surveying expedition to the North Pacific. The officers of that expedition, 1853-1856, recounted their experiences, and especially their dealings with the Japanese, in vivid and outspoken letters which are here reproduced for the first time. Entertaining reading, as well as important naval and diplomatic history. Originally published in 1947. 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.

Sea nomads have been part of the economic and political landscape of Southeast Asia for millennia. They have played many roles over the longue-durEe: in certain periods proving central to the ability of land-based polities to generate wealth, by sourcing valuable maritime commodities, facilitating trade, forming a naval force to secure and protect vital sea lanes and providing crucial connectivity. They have existed in complex, codified relations with different sedentary populations, as pirates, guardians of the sea-lanes, merchants and explorers. Paradoxically, as modern states emerged, the sea-nomads became progressively marginalized and impoverished. For many years, the sea nomads were assumed to be without history, and even without archaeology. This has proven far from the case, and recent archaeological findings allow us to more closely describe sea nomadism from the Pleistocene through the early Holocene up to the present. Integrating these findings with the latest in historical research, linguistics, ethnography and historical genetics allows us to better understand sea-nomad ways of life over a scale of millennia and to appreciate the diversity and flexibility of this sea-nomad world. This in turn enriches our understanding of nomadism and mobility as ways of life more generally, and of the sea not only as a landscape of resources, but as a home and spiritual landscape.

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.

While we know a great deal about naval strategies in the classical Greek and later Roman periods, our understanding of the period in between-the Hellenistic Age-has never been as complete. However, thanks to new physical evidence discovered in the past half-century and the construction of Olympias, a full-scale working model of an Athenian trieres (trireme) by the Hellenic Navy during the 1980s, we now have new insights into the evolution of naval warfare following the death of Alexander the Great. In what has been described as an ancient naval arms race, the successors of Alexander produced the largest warships of antiquity, some as long as 400 feet carrying as many as 4000 rowers and 3000 marines. Vast, impressive, and elaborate, these warships "of larger form"-as described by Livy-were built not just to simply convey power but to secure specific strategic objectives. When these particular factors disappeared, this "Macedonian" model of naval power also faded away-that is, until Cleopatra and Mark Antony made one brief, extravagant attempt to reestablish it, an endeavor Octavian put an end to once and for all at the battle of Actium. Representing the fruits of more than thirty years of research, The Age of Titans provides the most vibrant account to date of Hellenistic naval warfare.

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.

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.