In all the complex cultural history of the islands of Britain and Ireland the idea of the coast as a significant representative space is critical. For many important artists coastal space has figured as a site from which to braid ideas of empire, nation, region, and archipelago. They have been drawn to the coast as a zone of geographical uncertainty in which the self-definitions of the nation founder; they have been drawn to it as a peripheral space of vestigial wildness, of island retreats and experimental living; as a network of diverse localities richly endowed with distinctive forms of cultural heritage; and as a dynamically interconnected ecosystem, which is at the same time the historic site of significant developments in fieldwork and natural science. This collection situates these cultures of the Atlantic edge in a series of essays that create new contexts for coastal study in literary history and criticism. The contributors frame their research in response to emerging conversations in archipelagic criticism, the blue humanities, and island studies, the essays challenging the reader to reconsider ideas of margin, periphery and exchange. These twelve case studies establish the coast as a crucial location in the imaginative history of Britain, Ireland and the north Atlantic edge. Coastal Works will appeal to readers of literature and history with an interest in the sea, the environment, and the archipelago from the 18th century to the present. Accessible, innovative and provocative, Coastal Works establishes the important role that the coast plays in our cultural imaginary and suggests a range of methodologies to represent relationships between land, sea, and cultural work.

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.

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.

The naval warfare of the last few decades appears dominated by operations of fast missile craft and a wide diversity of other minor vessels in so-called 'littoral warfare'. On the contrary, skills and knowledge about anti-submarine warfare on the high seas - a discipline that dominated much of the World War II, and once used to be the reason for existence of large fleets of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and of the Warsaw Pact - appear nearly extinct. Indeed, it seems that no armed conflicts involving this form of naval warfare have been fought for a significant time. As so often, the reality is entirely different. Submarine and anti-submarine warfare remain one of most sophisticated forms of armed conflicts to this day. Unsurprisingly, considering the amount of high-technology equipment necessary for their conduct, they are shrouded behind a thick veil of secrecy. This is why the operations of the sole Argentinean aircraft carrier - ARA 25 de Mayo - during the much-publicised war in the South Atlantic of 1982 remain largely unknown until this very day. It is well-known that the United Kingdom deployed the largest task force its Royal Navy had assembled since the Korean War over 12,000 kilometres away from home. It is well-known that the operations of this task force proved decisive for the outcome of the war: it not only brought the air power that established itself in control of the air space over the battlefield, but also hauled all the troops and supplies necessary to recover the islands that were the core of the dispute. However, the impression created very early during this conflict - and largely maintained until today - is that ARA 25 de Mayo and other elements of the accompanying Task Force 79 of the Argentinean Navy were forced into a hurried withdrawal by the sheer presence of multiple nuclear attack submarines of the Royal Navy. Based on years of research, including extensive investigation into naval operations of both sides of the conflict, 'A Carrier at Risk' is a vibrant and lucid account of a week-long cat-and-mouse game between anti-submarine warfare specialists on board ARA 25 de Mayo, and multiple nuclear attack submarines of the Royal Navy: an entirely unknown, yet crucial aspect of the South Atlantic War. Illustrated by over 100 photographs, maps, and colour profiles, this volume closes one of the major gaps - though also a crucially important affair - in the coverage of this conflict.

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

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.

'A vivid account of a forgotten chapter of British naval history.' Dan Snow, Historian, TV Presenter and Broadcaster The true story of one of the most notorious mutinies in naval history, which provided inspiration for Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin and C.S. Forester's Hornblower novels. In 1797 the 32-gun Royal Navy frigate HMS Hermione was serving in the Caribbean, at the forefront of Britain's bitter sea war against Spain and Revolutionary France. Its commander, the sadistic and mercurial Captain Hugh Pigot ruled through terror, flogging his men mercilessly and pushing them beyond the limits of human endurance. On the night of 21 September 1797, past breaking point and drunk on stolen rum, the crew rebelled, slaughtering Pigot and nine of his officers in the bloodiest mutiny in the history of the Royal Navy. Handing the ship over to the Spanish, the crew fled, sparking a manhunt that would last a decade. Seeking to wipe clean this stain on its name, the Royal Navy pursued the traitorous mutineers relentlessly, hunting them across the globe, and, in 1801, seized the chance to recover its lost ship in one of the most daring raids of the Age of Fighting Sail. Anchored in a heavily fortified Venezuelan harbour, the Hermione - now known as the Santa Cecilia - was retaken in a bold night-time action, stolen out from under the Spanish guns. Back in British hands, the Hermione was renamed once more - its new identity a stark warning to would-be mutineers: Retribution. Drawing on letters, reports, ships' logs, and memoirs of the period, as well as previously unpublished Spanish sources, Angus Konstam intertwines extensive research with a fast-paced but balanced account to create a fascinating retelling of one of the most notorious events in the history of the Royal Navy, and its extraordinary, wide-ranging aftermath.

Capturing the times when lives and victory were in peril, this book records the exploits of the men who fought in WWII in the air and on the sea, including pilots and air crewmen of carrier squadrons, officers and men of the ship's company, and admirals and their staffs.

While the Ottoman Empire is most often recognized today as a land power, for four centuries the seas of the Eastern Mediterranean were dominated by the Ottoman Navy. Yet to date, little is known about the seafarers who made up the sultans' fleet, the men whose naval mastery ensured that an empire from North Africa to Black Sea expanded and was protected, allowing global trading networks to flourish in the face of piracy and the Sublime Porte's wars with the Italian city states and continental European powers. In this book, Christine Isom-Verhaaren provides a history of the major events and engagements of the navy, from its origins as the fleets of Anatolian Turkish beyliks to major turning points such as the Battle of Lepanto. But the book also puts together a picture of the structure of the Ottoman navy as an institution, revealing the personal stories of the North African corsairs and Greek sailors recruited as admirals. Rich in detail drawn from a variety of sources, the book provides a comprehensive account of the Ottoman Navy, the forgotten contingent in the empire's period of supremacy from the 14th century to the 18th century.

Passed down in the oral tradition and sung traditionally as working songs, sea shanties tell the human stories of life at sea: hard graft, battling the elements, the loss of ships or pining for a lady on shore. Its pages decorated with hand-drawn or wood-cut illustrations from celebrated artist Jonny Hannah, Sailor Song addresses the current modern revival of sea shanties, and seeks to celebrate and to explore the historical, musical and social history of the traditional sea song through 40 beautiful, mournful, haunting and uplifting shanties. Acclaimed shanty devotee Gerry Smyth presents the background to each one alongside musical notation. The lyrics are elaborated with explanations of terminology, context including historical facts and accounts of life at sea, and the characters, both fictional and non-fictional, that appear in the songs from the great age of sail to the last days of square-rig. Where appropriate, a direct digital link is made to a shanty recording in the British Library Sound Archive.

From their earliest encounters with seaborne strangers from the east in the sixteenth century to the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, scattered bands of Native hunter-gatherers across northeastern North America came together to undertake an immense political project. Their campaign of sea and shore, emboldened by a revolutionary technology, brought wealth, honor, and power to their confederacy while alienating colonial neighbors and thwarting English and French imperialism. Afloat, Indian hunter-warriors commanded fleets of sailing ships and coordinated punitive and plundering assaults on the heart of England's Atlantic economy. Ashore, Indian diplomats engaged in shrewd transatlantic negotiations with imperial officials of French Acadia and New England. Wabanaki communities had long looked to the sea for opportunities. By the Atlantic's Age of Sail, the People of the Dawn were mobilizing it to achieve a Native dominion governed by its sovereign masters and enriched by its profitable and compliant tributaries.

Colonial and post-colonial port cities in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean regions brought together laboring populations of many different backgrounds and statuses - legally free or semi-free wage-laborers, soldiers, sailors, and the self-employed, indentured servants, convicts, and slaves. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century the labor of these 'motley crews' made port cities crucial hubs of the emerging capitalist world market and centers of imperial infrastructure. The nine chapters in this volume investigate the interaction between different groups of laborers around the docks and the neighborhoods that stretched behind them. How did the mixture of many different groups of laborers shape patterns of work and life, authority and control, exclusion and inclusion, group-competition and joint resistance? What roles did gender, race and status play in maintaining divisions or enabling solidarities? Together, the nine case studies present a vibrant picture of social relations and working-class cultures in port cities.

More than 6,000 ships have met their doom in the waters along the North Carolina coast, weaving a rich history of tragedy, drama and heroics along these picturesque beaches. Men have lost their lives, fortunes lost and heroes made where the combination of mixing currents, treacherous coastline and shifting underwater sandbars spells disaster for even the most seasoned sailor. These are the stories of daring rescues, tragic failures, enduring mysteries, buried treasure and fascinating legend.

Submerged stories in the Graveyard of the Pacific Thousands of ships have wrecked off the coast of Washington and Oregon. Shipwrecks of the Pacific Northwest will uncover the tragic tales, close calls and heroic feats of vessels that met their end off of the 150 miles of coastline between northern Oregon and southern Washington, including the mouth of the Columbia River where an untold number of shipwrecks are concentrated. This book will recount the most compelling of these historic shipwrecks. Some are infamous, while others are lesser known. The accurate history of the wrecks and stories of the people involved will be enhanced by new research and by the addition of recently available primary source material. These dramatic tales are uniquely tied to the present by their tangible remains.

The fast, nimble pilot schooners of the Chesapeake Bay -- employed not only for piloting but also for cargo carrying -- began to build their legend in the eighteenth century, becoming blockade runners during the American Revolution, privateering vessels during the War of 1812, and armed dispatch and policing vessels for European navies. They were also a favored type for the activities of pirates, smugglers, and slavers. Variations of the final "clipper" model of the Baltimore schooner continued the vessels' reputation through the nineteenth century as both great yachts and humble "pungy" schooners carrying produce. Geoffrey Footner documents the family tree of this distinctive American schooner in both text and illustration, including hull lines from sources around the world.

A vivid reappraisal of the legendary Captain Cook, from bestselling biographer Frank McLynn The age of discovery was at its peak in the eighteenth century, with heroic adventurers charting the furthest reaches of the globe. Foremost among these explorers was navigator and cartographer Captain James Cook of the British Royal Navy. Recent writers have viewed Cook largely through the lens of colonial exploitation, regarding him as a villain and overlooking an important aspect of his identity: his nautical skills. In this authentic, engrossing biography, Frank McLynn reveals Cook's place in history as a brave and brilliant seaman. He shows how the Captain's life was one of struggle--with himself, with institutions, with the environment, with the desire to be remembered--and also one of great success. In Captain Cook, McLynn re-creates the voyages that took the famous navigator from his native England to the outer reaches of the Pacific Ocean. Ultimately, Cook, who began his career as a deckhand, transcended his humble beginnings and triumphed through good fortune, courage, and talent. Although Cook died in a senseless, avoidable conflict with the people of Hawaii, McLynn illustrates that to the men with whom he served, Cook was master of the seas and nothing less than a titan.

Suspended between sea and sky, battered by the waves and the wind, lighthouses mark the battlelines between the elements. They guard the boundaries between the solid human world and the primordial chaos of the waters; between stability and instability; between the known and the unknown. As such, they have a strange, universal appeal that few other manmade structures possess. Engineered to draw the gaze of sailors, lighthouses have likewise long attracted the attention of soldiers and saints, artists and poets, novelists and filmmakers, colonizers and migrants, and, today more than ever, heritage tourists and developers. Their evocative locations, their isolation and resilience have turned these structures into complex metaphors, magnets for stories. This book explores the rich story of the lighthouse in the human imagination.

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.

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.

'Captivating, a John le Carre-esque yarn' Telegraph 'A thoroughly good read' Michael Portillo, author of Portillo's Hidden History of Britain and presenter of Great British Railway Journeys 'A compelling story of courage, determination and skill' Terry Waite CBE, author of Taken on Trust The true story of a retired British army officer's private Somali-hostage rescue mission During the peak of the Somali piracy crisis, three ships - from Malaysia, Thailand and Taiwan - were hijacked and then abandoned to their fate by their employers, who lacked the money to pay ransoms. All would still be there, were it not for Colonel John Steed, a retired British military attache, who launched his own private mission to free them. At 65, Colonel Steed was hardly an ideal saviour. With no experience in hostage negotiations and no money behind him, he had to raise the ransom cash from scratch, running the operation from his spare room and ferrying million-dollar ransom payments around in the boot of his car. Drawing on first-hand interviews, former chief foreign correspondent of The Sunday Telegraph, Colin Freeman, who has himself spent time held hostage by Somali pirates, takes readers on an inside track into the world of hostage negotiation and one man's heroic rescue mission.

This is the story of saltpeter, the vital but mysterious substance craved by governments from the Tudors to the Victorians as an 'inestimable treasure.' National security depended on control of this organic material - that had both mystical and mineral properties. Derived from soil enriched with dung and urine, it provided the heart or 'mother' of gunpowder, without which no musket or cannon could be fired. Its acquisition involved alchemical knowledge, exotic technology, intrusions into people's lives, and eventual dominance of the world's oceans. The quest for saltpeter caused widespread 'vexation' in Tudor and Stuart England, as crown agents dug in homes and barns and even churches. Governments hungry for it purchased supplies from overseas merchants, transferred skills from foreign experts, and extended patronage to ingenious schemers, while the hated 'saltpetermen' intruded on private ground. Eventually, huge saltpeter imports from India relieved this social pressure, and by the eighteenth century positioned Britain as a global imperial power; the governments of revolutionary America and ancien regime France, on the other hand, were forced to find alternative sources of this treasured substance. In the end, it was only with the development of chemical explosives in the late Victorian period that dependency on saltpeter finally declined. Saltpeter, the Mother of Gunpowder tells this fascinating story for the first time. Lively and entertaining in its own right, it is also a tale with far-reaching implications. As David Cressy's engaging narrative makes clear, the story of saltpeter is vital not only in explaining the inter-connected military, scientific, and political 'revolutions' of the seventeenth century; it also played a key role in the formation of the centralized British nation state - and that state's subsequent dominance of the waves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In his famous book A Night to Remember, historian Walter Lord described the sinking of the Titanic as 'the last night of a small town'. Now, a hundred years after her sinking, John Welshman reconstructs the fascinating individual histories of twelve of the inhabitants of this tragically short-lived floating town. They include members of the crew; passengers in First, Second, and Third Class; women and men; adults and children; rich and poor. Among them are a ship's Captain, a Second Officer, an Assistant Wireless Operator; a Stewardess, an amateur military historian, a governess, a teacher, a domestic servant, a mother, and three children. What were their earlier histories? Who survived, and why, and who perished? And what happened to these people in the years after 1912? Titanic: The Last Night of a Small Town answers all these questions and more, while offering a minute-by-minute depiction of events aboard the doomed liner through the eyes of a broad and representative cross-section of those who sailed in her - both those who survived and those who didn't.

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.

Nusantaria - often referred to as 'Maritime Southeast Asia' - is the world's largest archipelago and has, for centuries, been a vital cultural and trading hub. Nusantara, a Sanskrit, then Malay, word referring to an island realm, is here adapted to become Nusantaria - denoting a slightly wider world but one with a single linguistic, cultural and trading base. Nusantaria encompasses the lands and shores created by the melting of the ice following the last Ice Age. These have long been primarily the domain of the Austronesian-speaking peoples and their seafaring traditions. The surrounding waters have always been uniquely important as a corridor connecting East Asia to India, the Middle East, Europe and Africa. In this book, Philip Bowring provides a history of the world's largest and most important archipelago and its adjacent coasts. He tells the story of the peoples and lands located at this crucial maritime and cultural crossroads, from its birth following the last Ice Age to today.