How history's only five-star admirals triumphed in World War II and made the United States the world's dominant sea power.
Only four men in American history have been promoted to the five-star rank of Admiral of the Fleet: William Leahy, Ernest King, Chester Nimitz, and William Halsey. These four men were the best and the brightest the navy produced, and together they led the U.S. navy to victory in World War II, establishing the United States as the world's greatest fleet.
In THE ADMIRALS, award-winning historian Walter R. Borneman tells their story in full detail for the first time. Drawing upon journals, ship logs, and other primary sources, he brings an incredible historical moment to life, showing us how the four admirals revolutionized naval warfare forever with submarines and aircraft carriers, and how these men-who were both friends and rivals-worked together to ensure that the Axis fleets lay destroyed on the ocean floor at the end of World War II.

In the 1930s, hundreds of barges sailed the crowded waters of the Thames estuary carrying up to 100 tons of every sort of cargo - wheat and barley, coal, gun powder, cement and gravel. These remarkable craft were worked by a crew of two - skipper and mate. Here, the shipmate tells his story.

The 1866 transatlantic yacht race was a match that saw three yachts battle their way across the Atlantic in the dead of winter in pursuit of a $90,000 prize. Six men died in the brutal and close-fought contest, and the event changed the perception of yachting from a slightly effete gentlemen's pursuit into something altogether more rugged and adventurous. The race also symbolized the beginning of America's 'gilded age', with its associated obscene wealth and largesse (the $90,000 prize put up by the three contestants is about $15 million in today's money), as well as the thawing of relations between the US and UK. The narrative focuses on the victorious yacht Henrietta and her owner James Gordon Bennett. Bennett was the son of the multimillionaire proprietor of the New York Herald, and a notorious playboy. His infamous stunts included driving his carriage through the streets of New York naked, tipping a railway porter $30,000, and turning up at his own engagement party blind drunk and mistaking the fire for a urinal, which led to the coining of the phrase 'Gordon Bennett!'. However, Bennett was also a serious yachtsman and had served with distinction during the civil war aboard Henrietta, and he was the only owner to be aboard his own boat during the race. Other characters include Bennett's captain Samuel Samuels (legendary clipper skipper, ex-convict and occasional vaudeville actor), financier Leonard Jerome, aboard Henrietta as race invigilator (he also happened to be grandfather to Winston Churchill) and Stephen Fisk, a journalist so desperate to cover the race that he evaded a summons to appear as a witness in court and instead smuggled himself aboard Henrietta in a crate of champagne. Using the framework of the race to discuss the various historical themes, there's ample drama, and the diverse and eccentric range of characters ensure that this is a book laced with plenty of human interest, scandal and adventure.

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.

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.

Island Tug & Barge, once the largest employer in Victoria, BC, was a Pacific Ocean marine salvage company world famous for deep-sea rescues and long distance towing feats - and infamous for superior crews and a feisty little fleet, including the renowned "Sudbury" and "Sudbury II." Most famous, however, was the unstopable, fiery owner, Harold Elworthy - "H.B." for "Hard-boiled" - a boy who started with nothing and became a maritime giant. Together these ships and men proved themselves as some of the best marine salvors in the world. "High Seas, High Risk" recounts the "Sudbury"s' most notable and dramatic tows and rescues, told mostly through the memories and anecdotes of former crew members.
Island Tug & Barge made headlines around the seafaring world. The "Sudburys" made almost impossible rescues with ease - towing their charges through typhoons, pulling them off pinnacles of rock, fighting their fires and keeping them afloat with batteries of pumps. Beset by storms, lightning, and impossible conditions, the two tugs always made it home safely. Year after year the drama was repeated, until, one day, the headlines stopped. The "Sudbury" and the "Sudbury II" disappeared, Island Tug & Barge was gone.
Writing with the care and detail of a historian, and the passion of a maritime adventurer, Pat Wastell Norris has parlayed her childhood seafaring passion into every story and anecdote - an interest instilled by her father who carried her about his 60-foot tugboat before she could walk. This never-before told history of Island Tug & Barge is a must-read for mariners and yachtsmen of every ilk--the armchair adventurers, professionals and everyone in between.

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.

At the outset of World War II, Scapa Flow was supposed to be the safe home base of the British Navy - nothing could penetrate the defences of this bastion. So how, in the dead of night, was Gunther Prien's U-47 able to slip through the line of protective warships to sink the mighty Royal Oak? This book provides the answer with an account of one of the most daring naval raids in history. Drawing on the latest underwater archaeological research, this study explains how Prien and his crew navigated the North Sea and Kirk Sound to land a devastating blow to the British. It reveals the level of disrepair that Scapa Flow had fallen into, and delves into the conspiracy theories surrounding the event, including an alleged cover-up by the then First Sea Lord, Winston Churchill.

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 .

Shipping has been the international business par excellence in many national economies, one that preceded trends in other, more highly visible sectors of international economic activity. Nevertheless, in both business or economic history, shipping has remained relatively overlooked. That gap is filled by this exploration of the evolution of European shipping through the study of two Greek shipping firms. They provide a prime example of the regional European maritime businesses that evolved to serve Europe's international trade and, eventually, the global economy. By the end of the twentieth century, Greeks owned more ships than any other nationality. The story of the Vagliano brothers traces the transformation of Greek shipping from local shipping and trading to international shipping and ship management, while the case of Aristotle Onassis reveals how international shipping was transformed into a global business.

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.

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.