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Books > History > History of specific subjects > Maritime history
The common seaman and the pirate in the age of sail are romantic
historical figures who occupy a special place in the popular
culture of the modern age. And yet in many ways, these daring men
remain little known to us. Like most other poor working people of
the past, they left few first-hand accounts of their lives. But
their lives are not beyond recovery. In this book, Marcus Rediker
uses a huge array of historical sources (court records, diaries,
travel accounts, and many others) to reconstruct the social
cultural world of the Anglo-American seamen and pirates who sailed
the seas in the first half of the eighteenth century. Rediker tours
the sailor's North Atlantic, following seamen and their ships along
the pulsing routes of trade and into rowdy port towns. He recreates
life along the waterfront, where seafaring men from around the
world crowded into the sailortown and its brothels, alehouses,
street brawls, and city jail. His study explores the natural terror
that inevitably shaped the existence of those who plied the
forbidding oceans of the globe in small, brittle wooden vessels. It
also treats the man-made terror--the harsh discipline, brutal
floggings, and grisly hangings--that was a central fact of life at
sea. Rediker surveys the commonplaces of the maritime world: the
monotonous rounds of daily labor, the negotiations of wage
contracts, and the bawdy singing, dancing, and tale telling that
were a part of every voyage. He also analyzes the dramatic moments
of the sailor's existence, as Jack Tar battled wind and water
during a slashing storm, as he stood by his "brother tars" in a
mutiny or a stike, and as he risked his neck by joining a band of
outlaws beneath the Jolly Roger, the notorious pirate flag. Between
the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea focuses upon the seaman's
experience in order to illuminate larger historical issues such as
the rise of capitalism, the genesis the free wage labor, and the
growth of an international working class. These epic themes were
intimately bound up with everyday hopes and fears of the common
seamen.
One of the greatest treasures in the archives of the Welsh
Industrial and Maritime Museum is the Hansen Collection, consisting
of over 4500 negatives of shipping taken at Cardiff Docks between
1920 and 1975. Lars Peter Hansen, a native of Copenhagen, settled
in Cardiff in 1891 and he and his third son Leslie established a
photographic business in the docks; taking pictures of ships for
sale to seamen and shipowners was an important part of their
business. Following the retirement of Leslie Hansen in 1975, the
museum purchased the negative collection. Its historical value
cannot be overstated and this album is intended as a tribute to the
Hansens, who through their work have bequeathed to Wales a
pictorial record of shipping activity at the nation's premier port.
This is the story of the unusually long and interesting career of a
small Scottish schooner spent primarily in the southern hemisphere.
From the construction of the vessel to the careers of those who
sailed in her, the story is full of rogues, heroes, the famous and
infamous, as well as ordinary people calmly going about their daily
business in tempestuous and difficult times. Visionary colonists,
whalers, sealers, Maoris, botanists, butchers, missionaries,
cannibals, convicts, aristocrats, explorers and more are linked in
this narrative and thereby exemplify the courage, skill and vision
of people who experience hardship, danger and adversity in their
quest for riches in colonial lands.
Here is a survivor's vivid account of the greatest maritime
disaster in history. The information contained in Gracie's account
is available from no other source. He provides details of those
final moments, including names of passengers pulled from the ocean
and of those men who, in a panic, jumped into lifeboats as they
were being lowered, causing injury and further danger to life.
Walter Lord, author of "A Night to Remember," comments that
Gracie's book--written shortly before he died from the exposure he
suffered on that night--is "invaluable for chasing down who went in
what boat," and calls Gracie "an indefatigable detective."
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Accounts of China and India
(Paperback)
Abu Zayd Al-Sirafi; Foreword by Zvi Ben-Dor Benite; Translated by Tim Mackintosh-Smith
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R393
R323
Discovery Miles 3 230
Save R70 (18%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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The ninth and tenth centuries witnessed the establishment of a
substantial network of maritime trade across the Indian Ocean,
providing the real-life background to the Sinbad tales. An
exceptional exemplar of Arabic travel writing, Accounts of China
and India is a compilation of reports and anecdotes about the lands
and peoples of this diverse territory, from the Somali headlands of
Africa to the far eastern shores of China and Korea. Traveling
eastward, we discover a vivid human landscape-from Chinese society
to Hindu religious practices-as well as a colorful range of natural
wilderness-from flying fish to Tibetan musk-deer and Sri Lankan
gems. The juxtaposed accounts create a kaleidoscope of a world not
unlike our own, a world on the road to globalization. In its ports,
we find a priceless cargo of information. Here are the first
foreign descriptions of tea and porcelain, a panorama of unusual
social practices, cannibal islands, and Indian holy men-a
marvelous, mundane world, contained in the compass of a novella. An
English-only edition.
Poseidon's Curse interprets the American Revolution from the
vantage point of the Atlantic Ocean. Christopher P. Magra traces
how British naval impressment played a leading role in the rise of
Great Britain's seaborne empire, yet ultimately contributed
significantly to its decline. Long reliant on appropriating free
laborers to man the warships that defended British colonies and
maritime commerce, the British severely jeopardized mariners'
earning potential and occupational mobility, which led to deep
resentment toward the British Empire. Magra explains how anger
about impressment translated into revolutionary ideology, with
impressment eventually occupying a major role in the Declaration of
Independence as one of the foremost grievances Americans had with
the British government.
Based on hitherto unused sources in English and Spanish in British
and American archives, in this book naval historian Barry Gough and
legal authority Charles Borras investigate a secret Anglo-American
coercive war against Spain, 1815-1835. Described as a war against
piracy at the time, the authors explore how British and American
interests - diplomatic and military - aligned to contain Spanish
power to the critically influential islands of Cuba and Puerto
Rico, facilitating the forging of an enduring but unproclaimed
Anglo-American alliance which endures to this day. Due attention is
given to United States Navy actions under Commodore David Porter,
to this day a subject of controversy. More significantly though,
through the juxtaposition of British, American and Spanish sources,
this book uncovers the roots of piracy - and suppression- that laid
the foundation for the tortured decline of the Spanish empire in
the Americas and the subsequent rise of British and American
empires, instrumental in stamping out Caribbean piracy for good.
Overturns the generally held view that the press gang was the main
means of recruiting seamen by the British navy in the late
eighteenth century. SHORTLISTED for the Society for Nautical
Research's prestigious Anderson Medal. The press gang is generally
regarded as the means by which the British navy solved the problem
of recruiting enough seamen in the late eighteenth century. This
book, however, based on extensive original research conducted
primarily in a large number of ships' muster books, demonstrates
that this view is false. It argues that, in fact, the overwhelming
majority of seamen in the navy were there of their own free will.
Taking a long view across the late eighteenth century but
concentrating on the period of the French Revolutionary and
Napoleonic Wars of 1793-1815, the book provides great detailon the
sort of men that were recruited and the means by which they were
recruited, and includes a number of individuals' stories. It shows
how manpower was a major concern for the Admiralty; how the
Admiralty put in place a rangeof recruitment methods including the
quota system; how it worried about depleting merchant shipping of
sufficient sailors; and how, although most seamen were volunteers,
the press gang was resorted to, especially during the initial
mobilisation at the beginning of wars and to find certain kinds of
particularly skilled seamen. The book also makes comparisons with
recruitment methods employed by the navies of other countries and
by the British army. J. ROSS DANCY is Director of Graduate Studies
in History and Assistant Professor of History at Sam Houston State
University
This edited volume moves beyond the traditional examination of the
treaty ports of China and Japan as places of cultural interaction.
It moves 'beyond the Bund', presenting instead the history of
material culture, the everyday life of the residents of the treaty
ports beyond the symbology of Shanghai's waterfront. Bringing for
the first time together scholars of China and Japan, museum
curators, legal, economic and architectural historians, it studies
the treaty ports not only as sites of cultural exchange, but also
as sites of social contestation, accommodation and mobility,
covering topics as varied as day to day life itself, such as
family, property and law, health and welfare, travel, visual
culture and memory. The call of this volume is to peel the multiple
layers of the encounter between East and West in the treaty ports
of China and Japan.
Rather than a natural frontier between natural enemies, this book
approaches the English Channel as a shared space, which mediated
the multiple relations between France and England in the long
eighteenth century, in both a metaphorical and a material sense.
Instead of arguing that Britain's insularity kept it spatially and
intellectually segregated from the Continent, Renaud Morieux
focuses on the Channel as a zone of contact. The 'narrow sea' was a
shifting frontier between states and a space of exchange between
populations. This richly textured history shows how the maritime
border was imagined by cartographers and legal theorists, delimited
by state administrators and transgressed by migrants. It approaches
French and English fishermen, smugglers and merchants as
transnational actors, whose everyday practices were entangled. The
variation of scales of analysis enriches theoretical and empirical
understandings of Anglo-French relations, and reassesses the
question of Britain's deep historical connections with Europe.
Whale oil lit the cities and greased the machines of the Industrial
Revolution. In light of its importance, competition between whalers
was high. Far from courts and law enforcement, competing crews of
American whalers not known for their gentility and armed with
harpoons tended to resolve disputes at sea over ownership of
whales. Left to settle arguments on their own, whalemen created
norms and customs to decide ownership of whales pursued by multiple
crews. The Law of the Whale Hunt provides an innovative examination
of how property law was created in the absence of formal legal
institutions regulating the American whaling industry in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using depositions, court
testimony, logbooks, and other previously unused primary sources,
Robert Deal tells an exciting story of American whalers hunting in
waters from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific and the Sea of
Okhotsk.
A sweeping, lavishly illustrated one-volume history of the rise of
American naval power during World War II "When he is at his best,
as he often is in these pages, Kennedy can be dazzling."-Ian W.
Toll, New York Times "The book makes for enjoyable reading, owing
to the author's easygoing style. . . . Kennedy is an academic who
does not write like one; he writes a story, not a treatise."-Robert
D. Kaplan, Washington Post "Engrossing."-Brendan Simms, Wall Street
Journal In this engaging narrative, brought to life by marine
artist Ian Marshall's beautiful full-color paintings, historian
Paul Kennedy grapples with the rise and fall of the Great Powers
during World War II. Tracking the movements of the six major navies
of the Second World War-the allied navies of Britain, France, and
the United States and the Axis navies of Germany, Italy, and
Japan-Kennedy tells a story of naval battles, maritime campaigns,
convoys, amphibious landings, and strikes from the sea. From the
elimination of the Italian, German, and Japanese fleets and almost
all of the French fleet, to the end of the era of the big-gunned
surface vessel, the advent of the atomic bomb, and the rise of an
American economic and military power larger than anything the world
had ever seen, Kennedy shows how the strategic landscape for naval
affairs was completely altered between 1936 and 1946.
Originally published in 1930, this book presents an English
translation of the 1639 journal of Dutch naval commander Maarten
Harpertszoon Tromp (1598-1653), who led the Dutch fleet in a
decisive victory over the Spanish at the Battle of the Downs during
that year. Translation of the journal was carried out by Charles
Ralph Boxer (1904-2000), a renowned specialist in Dutch and
Portugese naval history and the early colonial expansion of
European nations. Created in response to 'an increasing interest
shown by English historians in naval matters', the text provides
both an insight into Dutch naval strategy and a revealing portrait
of Tromp's character. A highly detailed introduction, illustrative
figures and a bibliography are included. This book will be of value
to anyone with an interest in European and Maritime history.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, a combination of coastal
defence for the homeland and fleet defence for the East Indies
became the established naval strategy for the Royal Dutch Navy and
set the template for the world wars. Battleships were too expensive
to build and maintain, so after World War I, there was significant
investment in submarine development and construction. A handful of
modern light cruisers and a new class of destroyers were also
constructed during the interwar years to serve as a small
Fleet-in-Being in the East Indies, as well as to support the
actions of the navy's submarines. The light cruiser HNLMS De Ruyter
and the Java-class light cruisers were the most powerful units of
the new fleet whilst the backbone of the destroyer fleet was the
Admiralen-class and the Tromp-class of destroyer leaders. Beginning
in December 1941, the Dutch Navy played a very active role in the
defence of the East Indies against the Japanese during World War
II. The Battle of the Java Sea at the end of February 1942 crushed
Dutch naval power in the East Indies, sinking the cruisers Java and
De Ruyter and killing Admiral Karel Doorman. However, several Dutch
surface warships and submarines continued the fight against the
Axis powers alongside the Allies until the end of World War II,
including a pair of British-built destroyers, Van Galen and Tjerk
Hiddes. This beautifully illustrated book from a leading scholar on
Dutch military history provides a comprehensive guide to the Royal
Netherlands Navy of the World War II period, complete with detailed
cutaways and battleplates of the fleet in action.
Sir Edmund Hillary described Douglas Mawson's epic and punishing
journey across 600 miles of unknown Antarctic wasteland as 'the
greatest story of lone survival in polar exploration'.This Accursed
Land tells that story; how Mawson declined to join Captain Robert
Scott's ill-fated British expedition and instead lead a three-man
husky team to explore the far eastern coastline of the Antarctic
continent. But the loss of one member and most of the supplies soon
turned the hazardous trek into a nightmare. Mawson was trapped 320
miles from base with barely nine days' food and nothing for the
dogs. Eating poisoned meat, watching his body fall apart, crawling
over chasms and crevices of deadly ice, his ultimate and lone
struggle for survival, starving, poisoned, exhausted and
indescribably cold, is an unforgettable story of human endurance.
Grippingly told by Lennard Bickel, this is the most extraordinary
journey from the brutal golden age of Antarctic exploration.
Perfect for fans of Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air or Michael Palin's
Erebus.
Figureheads developed from an ancient tradition of decorating
vessels with painted eyes, carved figures and animal heads. Vikings
in Northern Europe adorned the bows of their ships with dragon
heads, which were thought to help ships see their way through the
sea. But what other purposes did sailors believe figureheads
served? What stories do these beautiful objects tell? And what do
the different characters symbolise? Exploring the history and
traditions associated with figureheads, this illustrated guide
contains 60 examples from the National Maritime Museum, home to the
world's largest collection of figureheads. With a selection of
short in-focus studies, the book looks at mythology, memorial,
gender, empire, politics and literature surrounding these unique
carvings. The National Maritime Museum is part of Royal Museums
Greenwich.
This important collection, published in two volumes in 1770-1 and
reissued here in one, contains accounts of notable Iberian and
Dutch voyages in the southern hemisphere, translated and edited by
Alexander Dalrymple (1737-1808). Hydrographer to the Admiralty from
1795, Dalrymple produced this work as part of his research into the
belief at the time that there existed an undiscovered continent in
the South Pacific. These volumes were intended to demonstrate the
knowledge of the region to date. The first volume covers
sixteenth-century Spanish and Portuguese voyages, beginning with
Ferdinand Magellan and including those of Juan Fernandez, Alvaro de
Mendana y Neira and Pedro Fernandes de Queiros. The second volume
contains the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch voyages of
Jacob Le Mair and Willem Schouten, Abel Tasman and Jacob Roggeveen.
This volume also contains a chronological table of discoveries in
the southern hemisphere since 1501.
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