This volume publishes for the first time, the journal kept by John Looker (?1670-1715) recording his service as ship's surgeon on the Blackham Galley, a London-built merchantman on its second trading voyage to the Levant, between December 1696 and March 1698. Preserved in the Caird Library of the National Maritime Museum, Looker's 'Journall' describes his experiences on the voyage from the point at which he joined the ship at Gravesend, to March 1698, when the journal breaks off abruptly in mid-sentence when the ship was off the Kentish 'Narrows'. John Looker was a Londoner, brought up in one of the parishes to the east of the City which furnished large numbers of mariners to the English sea-borne trades. He served an apprenticeship to a London barber-surgeon, and became a Freeman of the Company of Barber-Surgeons. His fifteen months of service on board the Blackham Galley appears to have been his only employment at sea, but his ready knowledge of maritime ways and language, which are apparent from the first pages of his 'Journall', make it more than likely that he came from a seafaring family. Subsequent to his voyage, he married, raised a family, practiced in London as a surgeon, and acquired land in East Anglia. He died at Bath in 1715. Looker's 'Journall' divides naturally into three parts. The Blackham Galley's outward and homeward voyages were largely without incident. The time spent by the Blackham Galley in Turkish waters, covers its voyage from Smyrna to Constantinople, where the ship stayed for a month, and then returned to Smyrna. Captain Newnam's ill-advised and disastrous attempt at privateering in Ottoman waters on the return journey to Smyrna, led to the detention of his vessel at Smyrna under a double interdict from the English ambassador at the Porte and from the Ottoman authorities. Looker's account of the Blackham Galley's enforced stay in Smyrna furnishes a vigorous and detailed account of social life in the international merchant community, as well as portside life seen 'from below', with its taverns and prostitutes, and the activities and frequent 'debauches' of an increasingly bored and fractious crew. Looker's record also provides interesting detail of his professional approach to treatment of the illnesses, accidents and occasional deaths of members of the company of his own and other ships anchored off Smyrna.

Out of the Depths explores all aspects of shipwrecks across 4,000 years, examining their historical context and significance, and showing how shipwrecks can be time capsules, shedding new light on long-departed societies and civilizations. Alan G. Jamieson not only informs readers of the technological developments over the last sixty years that have made the true appreciation of shipwrecks possible, but covers shipwrecks in culture, maritime archaeology, treasure hunters and their environmental impacts. Although shipwrecks have become less common in recent decades, their implications have become more wide-ranging: since the 1960s, foundering supertankers have caused massive environmental disasters, and in 2021 the blocking of the Suez Canal by the giant container ship Ever Given had a serious impact on global trade.

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.

In 1789, as the Bounty made its return voyage through the western Pacific Ocean, disgruntled crewmen seized control from their captain, William Bligh. The mutineers set Bligh and the eighteen men who remained loyal to him adrift in one of the ship's boats, with minimal food and only four cutlasses for weapons.In the two centuries since, the mutiny and its aftermath have become the stuff of legend. Millions of words have been written about it; it has been the subject of novels, plays, feature films and documentaries. The story's two protagonists - Bligh and his mutinous deputy, Fletcher Christian - are cast as villain and hero, but which is which depends on which account you read.In Mutiny, Mayhem, Mythology, Alan Frost looks past these inherited narratives to shed new light on the infamous expedition and its significance. Returning to the very first accounts of the mutiny, he shows how gaps, misconceptions and hidden agendas crept into the historical record and have shaped it ever since.

This book tells the story of HMS New Zealand, a battlecruiser paid for by the people of New Zealand in 1909, and when Japan was perceived as a threat in Australasia and the Pacific. Born of the collision between New Zealand's patriotic dreams and European politics, the tale of HMS New Zealand is further wrapped in the turbulent power-plays at the Admiralty in the years leading up to the World War I, not least because her design was already obsolescent when she was built. Nevertheless, she went on to have a distinguished World War I career when she was present in all three major naval battles--Heligoland, Dogger Bank, and Jutland--in the North Sea. The book outlines the politics, the engineering issues, and provides a fast-paced account of the ship's career through official documents, eyewitness accounts of her crew and other period documentation, including reports of her dockings and modifications. All this is inter-woven with the human and social context to create a 'biography' of the ship as an expression of human endeavor, engineering, and action, and it is presented in significantly more detail than the summaries available in prior accounts.

During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries religious zeal nourished by the mendicants' sense of purpose motivated Dominican and Franciscan friars to venture far beyond Europe's cultural frontiers to spread their Christian faith into the farthest reaches of Asia. Their incredible journeys were reminiscent of heroic missionary ventures in earlier eras and far more exotic than evangelization during the tenth through twelfth centuries, when the western church Christianized Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. This new mission effort was stimulated by a variety of factors and facilitated by the establishment of the Mongol Empire, and, as the fourteenth century dawned, missionaries entertained fervent but vain hopes of success within khanates in China, Central Asia, Persia and Kipchak. The reports these missionaries sent back to Europe have fascinated successive generations of historians who analyzed their travels and struggled to understand their motives and aspirations. The essays selected for this volume, drawn from a range of twentieth-century historians and contextualized in the introduction, provide a comprehensive overview of missionary efforts in Asia, and of the developments in the secular world that both made them possible and encouraged the missionaries' hopes for success. Three of the studies have been translated from French specially for publication in this volume.

The Truth About the Mutiny on HMAV BOUNTY - and the Fate of Fletcher Christian_ brings this famed South Pacific saga into the 21st century. By combining unprecedented research into Fletcher Christian and his fate with deep knowledge of Bounty's Polynesian women, Glynn Christian presents a fresh and comprehensive telling of a powerful maritime adventure that still captivates after 230 years. Of over 3000 books and major articles on the mutiny, or the five feature films starring such as Clark Gable, Charles Laughton, Marlon Brando and Mel Gibson, none has told the true story as until 1982, no author knew the real Fletcher Christian, or could understand his relationship with William Bligh, his mentor-turned-nemesis. Glynn Christian's extraordinary research into Bligh, Christian and Bounty included every deposit of documents worldwide and a sailing expedition to Pitcairn Island. This book details the cramped dark conditions on the ship and how Bligh bravely commanded it at Cape Horn, saving it and the crew. Yet he was unable to keep discipline because he didn't punish enough, instead relying on his brutal tongue. Forced to remain in Tahiti for 23 weeks, Bligh struggled to retain order when Bounty sailed. Glynn Christian reveals how this affected Fletcher Christian mentally, explaining his out-of-character mutiny. Then Christian showed revolutionary social conscience, using democracy and uniforms on Bounty to maintain leadership, including through the little-known settlement of Fort George on Tubuai. After this, he and Bounty disappeared for 18 years. Bounty's story becomes that of Pitcairn Island, of revolutionary black women who protected their children with the blood of their fathers and continued Fletcher's ideals to become the first women in the world permanently to have the vote and guarantee education for girls. But where was Fletcher Christian?

Now available in paperback, False Flags tells the epic untold story of German raider voyages to the South Seas during the early years of World War II. In 1940 the raiders Orion, Komet, Pinguin, and Kormoran left Germany and waged a "pirate war" in the South Seas as part of Germany's strategy to attack the British Empire's maritime trade on a global scale. Their extraordinary voyages spanned the globe and are maritime sagas in the finest tradition of seafaring. The four raiders voyaged across the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans as well as the Arctic and Antarctic. They sank or captured 62 ships in a forgotten naval war that is now being told in its entirety for the first time. The Orion and Komet terrorised the South Pacific and New Zealand waters before Pearl Harbor when the war was supposed to be far away. The Pinguin sank numerous Allied merchant ships in the Indian Ocean before mining the approaches to Australian ports and capturing the Norwegian whaling fleet in Antarctica. The Kormoran raided the Atlantic but will always be remembered for sinking the Australian cruiser Sydney off Western Australia, killing all 645 sailors on board in tragic circumstances. False Flags is also the story of the Allied sailors who encountered these raiders and fought suicidal battles against a superior foe as well as the men, women and children who endured captivity on board the raiders as prisoners of the Third Reich. False Flags is an engrossing tale that will appeal to not only military experts, but also to anyone interested in Maritime History.

Here the late Raphael Patai (1910-1996) recreates the fascinating world of Jewish seafaring from Noah's voyage through the Diaspora of late antiquity. In a work of pioneering scholarship, Patai weaves together Biblical stories, Talmudic lore, and Midrash literature to bring alive the world of these ancient mariners. As he did in his highly acclaimed book "The Jewish Alchemists," Patai explores a subject that has never before been investigated by scholars. Based on nearly sixty years of research, beginning with study he undertook for his doctoral dissertation, "The Children of Noah" is literally Patai's first book and his last. It is a work of unsurpassed scholarship, but it is accessible to general readers as well as scholars.

An abundance of evidence demonstrates the importance of the sea in the lives of Jews throughout early recorded history. Jews built ships, sailed them, fought wars in them, battled storms in them, and lost their lives to the sea. Patai begins with the story of the deluge that is found in Genesis and profiles Noah, the father of all shipbuilders and seafarers. The sea, according to Patai's interpretation, can be seen as an image of the manifestation of God's power, and he reflects on its role in legends and tales of early times. The practical importance of the sea also led to the development of practical institutions, and Patai shows how Jewish seafaring had its own culture and how it influenced the cultures of Mediterranean life as well. Of course, Jewish sailors were subject to the same rabbinical laws as Jews who never set sail, and Patai describes how they went to extreme lengths to remain in adherence, even getting special emendations of laws to allow them to tie knots and adjust rigging on the Sabbath.

"The Children of Noah" is a capstone to an extraordinary career. Patai was both a careful scholar and a gifted storyteller, and this work is at once a vivid history of a neglected aspect of Jewish culture and a treasure trove of sources for further study. It is a stimulating and delightful book.

In 1820, a suspicious vessel was spotted lingering off the coast of northern Florida, the Spanish slave ship Antelope. Since the United States had outlawed its own participation in the international slave trade more than a decade before, the ship's almost 300 African captives were considered illegal cargo under American laws. But with slavery still a critical part of the American economy, it would eventually fall to the Supreme Court to determine whether or not they were slaves at all, and if so, what should be done with them. Bryant describes the captives' harrowing voyage through waters rife with pirates and governed by an array of international treaties. By the time the Antelope arrived in Savannah, Georgia, the puzzle of how to determine the captives' fates was inextricably knotted. Set against the backdrop of a city in the grip of both the financial panic of 1819 and the lingering effects of an outbreak of yellow fever, Dark Places of the Earth vividly recounts the eight-year legal conflict that followed, during which time the Antelope's human cargo were mercilessly put to work on the plantations of Georgia, even as their freedom remained in limbo. When at long last the Supreme Court heard the case, Francis Scott Key, the legendary Georgetown lawyer and author of "The Star Spangled Banner," represented the Antelope captives in an epic courtroom battle that identified the moral and legal implications of slavery for a generation. Four of the six justices who heard the case, including Chief Justice John Marshall, owned slaves. Despite this, Key insisted that "by the law of nature all men are free," and that the captives should by natural law be given their freedom. This argument was rejected. The court failed Key, the captives, and decades of American history, siding with the rights of property over liberty and setting the course of American jurisprudence on these issues for the next thirty-five years. The institution of slavery was given new legal cover, and another brick was laid on the road to the Civil War. The stakes of the Antelope case hinged on nothing less than the central American conflict of the nineteenth century. Both disquieting and enlightening, Dark Places of the Earth restores the Antelope to its rightful place as one of the most tragic, influential, and unjustly forgotten episodes in American legal history.

The perfect accompaniment to the collection of fourteen warship figureheads displayed in the atrium of The Box at Plymouth, this book introduces each of the figureheads, giving details of its design, the ship for which it was carved and the actions it witnessed when serving in the Royal Navy. To put these descriptions into perspective, early chapters tell the story of the development of warship figureheads over the centuries, the evolution of the figurehead collection at Devonport and the work of the figurehead carvers of Plymouth. As most of the figureheads on display come from the Devonport collection, the Directory at the end of the book provides a summary of all the figureheads that have appeared at some time in the collection and their fate.

This edited volume programmatically reconsiders the creative contribution of the littoral and insular regions of Maritime Asia to shaping new paradigms in the Buddhist and Hindu art and architecture of the mediaeval Asian world. Far from being a mere southern conduit for the maritime circulation of Indic religions, in the period from ca. the 7th to the 14th century those regions transformed across mainland and island polities the rituals, icons, and architecture that embodied these religious insights with a dynamism that often eclipsed the established cultural centres in Northern India, Central Asia, and mainland China. This collective body of work brings together new research aiming to recalibrate the importance of these innovations in art and architecture, thereby highlighting the cultural creativity of the monsoon-influenced Southern rim of the Asian landmass.

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.

Set atop the rocky plateau of Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel, the Old Light stands proudly - a monument to the skill of its builder, Joseph Nelson. It is of a pleasing construction, both solid and graceful, and when built in 1820 it had two lights - an upper and a lower, and was the highest lighthouse in the country. In this fascinating history of the old lighthouse and the fog signal station, the author has combined her wide knowledge of the island's history with information gleaned from extensive research into Trinity House's archives. Some tantalising insights into the life of the keepers and their families have emerged - the keeper who was too tall for the lantern room; the keeper's wife who tragically died of water contamination, and the gunners who poached their dinners and hid their numerous children when the Elder Brethren came to inspect the cottages! Interwoven throughout the story are details of the numerous wrecks from the 15th century until 1897. Accounts from newspapers are often included, and the wrecks are linked to the lighthouse keepers of the time and the heroic rescues performed by the lighthouse staff. There are also some wonderful snippets of island history - one owner regarded Lundy as independent of mainland authorities and issued his own 'puffin' coins and stamps - the latter are still in use to cover postage to the mainland although the coins are now collectors' items. The height of the Old Light soon proved to be its downfall and eventually the reason why it was extinguished. Due to Lundy's plateau-top fogs which completely obscured the lantern, although there was clear visibility at ground level, a programme of alterations and intensifications took place under the advice of Professor Faraday. In 1862, a fog signal station was built on the west coast, providing shipping with another warning. This was not wholly successful either and it was not until 1897 that the Old Light was replaced by new lights on lower levels at the north and south ends of the island. Since the light was extinguished, the Old Light and the fog signal station reverted to the owners. The Landmark Trust restored the lighthouse and holiday-makers can now stay in the keepers' quarters, climb the 147 steps to the lantern room, and enjoy the breathtaking views across the whole island to the coasts of Wales and Cornwall. Owned by the National Trust, Lundy Island is an outstanding area of great natural beauty which attracts many visitors, who frequently return year after year to enjoy this special place.