L.T.C. Rolt's fame was born from his unique ability to produce works of literature from subject matter seemingly ill suited to such treatment - engineering, canals, railways, steam engines, agricultural machinery, vintage cars - such as in his classic biographies of Brunel, Telford, Trevithick and the Stephensons, and in his superbly written volumes of autobiography. In this, the first part of his autobiography, Rolt tells of his childhood in Chester, on the Welsh border near Hay-on-Wye and in Gloucestershire; of an engineering apprenticeship and career which took him from a farm in the Vale of Evesham to a locomotive works in Stoke-on-Trent and from Dursley to the Wiltshire Downs until he finally settled in a Hampshire village, running a garage which specialised in veteran and vintage cars. Imbued with the author's love of England and his intense feeling for the beauties of the English countryside, the book reveals a landscape populated not only be men, but by machines: steam-ploughing engines, steam wagons, steam locomotives, canal boats and a variety of unusual motor cars. This vividly told tale of rural England sets the stage of a life that was to be consumed by preserving the best the country had to offer in landscape and the technology of a now bygone age.

Combining a ship finance textbook with a jet setting geopolitical romp, Viking Raid picks up where The Shipping Man left off on a journey into the famously private world of international shipping tycoons and their financiers. At the conclusion of The Shipping Man, Robert Fairchild is sipping rose on the Cote d Azur with Coco Jacobsen and toasting to the success of their $300 million junk bond offering; six months later the CEO is in the 120-degree engine room of a supertanker discharging two million barrels of Saudi crude oil afraid for his job and afraid for his life. Fortunes change quickly in the volatile world of international oil shipping and Fairchild knows that unless he can find another $500 million soon his powerful Norwegian tanker tycoon boss will have little use for him. When Robert convinces Coco to attempt an Initial Public Offering of Viking Tankers on Wall Street, the desperate American thinks his problems may have been solved but the former hedge fund manager couldn t be more wrong. Instead, Fairchild finds himself stuck between an American shale gas wildcatter and The Peoples Republic of China in their competition for clean energy. Combining swashbuckling shipping adventure with corporate finance derring-do, Viking Raid puts Fairchild back at the table in the highest stakes casino in the world with more than just his deal at risk.

This book is an updated and expanded edition of a text that has been used in navigation courses for 30 years. It covers practical small-craft navigation (sail, power, or paddle), starting from the basics and ending with all that is needed to navigate safely and efficiently on inland and coastal waters in all weather conditions. It is for beginners, starting from scratch, or for more seasoned mariners who wish to expand their skills. Topics include: Charts, Chart Reading, and Chart Plotting Instruments and Logbook Procedures Compass Use Piloting and Dead Reckoning Lights and Buoyage Tides and Currents Rules of the Road GPS and other Electronic Aids The GPS tells us where we are and how fast we are moving in what direction, but it can never tell us the safest, most efficient route to our destination. That fundamental task requires the basic navigation skills taught in this book, which we can use as well to check the GPS underway, and then be prepared to navigate without the GPS if we need to. The hallmark of good seamanship is to look ahead and be prepared. The text covers not only the long tested traditional methods of navigation but also the efficient use of the latest technology in electronic navigation and charting.

As a dedicated passenger during both the vessel's lives, John Maxtone-Graham is in a perfect position to give us this rich, profusely illustrated history of France/Norway. The French Line's dazzling ocean liner S.S. France was alone in her class until the arrival of the QE2 in 1967. She was fast, chic, lavishly manned, and offered sumptuous catering. For a dozen years she was a star on the North Atlantic. However, in the summer of 1974, with jet airliners dominating transatlantic travel, France was withdrawn and allowed to molder for five years. Then a miraculous reprieve: the head of Norwegian Cruise Line decided to buy France; the vessel was revamped for warm weather and rechristened Norway. One of the last North Atlantic liners became the Caribbean's first megaship. The singularity of this incredible hull that sailed in two contrasting modes demands remembrance she was the pioneering big ship, popularizing a scale of cruising then unknown."

"A great read about some great ladies, Pat Majher's "Ladies of the Lights" pays long overdue homage to an overlooked part of Great Lakes maritime history in which a select group of stalwart women beat the odds to succeed in a field historically reserved for men."
---Terry Pepper, Executive Director of Great Lakes Lighthouse Keepers Association

Michigan once led the country in the number of lighthouses, and they're still a central part of the mystique and colorful countryside of the state. What even the region's lighthouse enthusiasts might not know is the rich history of female lighthouse keepers in the area.

Fifty women served the sailing communities on Lakes Huron, Michigan, and Superior, as well as on the Detroit River, for more than 100 years. From Catherine Shook, who raised eight children while maintaining the Pointe Aux Barques light at the entrance to Saginaw Bay; to Eliza Truckey, who assumed responsibility for the lighthouse in Marquette while her husband fought for four years in the Civil War; to Elizabeth Whitney, whose combined service on Beaver Island and in Harbor Springs totaled forty-one years---the stories of Michigan's "ladies of the light" are inspiring.

This is no technical tome documenting the minutiae of Michigan's lighthouse specifications. Rather, it's a detailed, human portrait of the women who kept those lighthouses running, defying the gender expectations of their time.

Patricia Majher is Editor of "Michigan History" magazine, published by the Historical Society of Michigan. Prior, she was Assistant Director of the Michigan Women's Historical Center and Hall of Fame in Lansing, Michigan. In addition, she has been writing both advertising and editorial copy for almost thirty years and has been a frequent contributor to Michigan newspapers and magazines.

On January 22, 1906, the passenger ship "Valencia" lost her way in heavy fog and rain and rammed into the deadly rocks at Pachena Point on the west coast of Vancouver Island. As the wreck was shattered by the pounding waves, the survivors clung desperately to the rigging. Few made it the short distance to shore through the frigid and turbulent waves--117 of the 164 souls aboard perished. A year earlier, the "King David" had been wrecked on Bajo Reef near Nootka Sound. The fate of her sailors was much more mysterious. Today, the magnificent Pacific coastline of Vancouver Island draws hikers, surfers and storm-watchers to marvel at its natural splendour. But the ghosts of the "Valencia," "King David," "Janet Cowan," "Pacific," "Soquel" and dozens of other lost ships still haunt the rugged shores of the Graveyard of the Pacific. Anthony Dalton tells the incredible stories of many of these ships and their courageous crews, who often discovered that their nightmares had only begun once they made it ashore. These true tales of disaster and daring rescues are a fascinating adventure into British Columbia maritime history.

This meticulously researched and illustrated book focuses on the evolution of aircraft carriers and naval aircraft. It features chronological histories and comprehensive directories of the world's most important aviation ships and aircraft, including the first ships to launch primitive aircraft; biplanes that were catapulted from converted destroyers; modern warships capable of carrying jets and helicopters; and state-of-the-art jets that are unique for their vertical take-off ability. With more than 1100 magnificent photographs, this book provides historians and enthusiasts with key information about the world's greatest aircraft carriers and naval aircraft.

The coastline of Cornwall has a reputation for being one of the most treacherous in Britain and is protected by a fleet of fast and sophisticated rescue craft, funded by voluntary contributions and operated by the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. This book tells the history of the lifeboats that have served at Fowey and Polkerris.

From the Celtic sea-farers to the Cutty Sark and the Royal Yacht Britannia - Osborne and Armstrong champion great ships. Combining the ships' histories with their involvement and significance in Scottish life and imagination, this is a unique study of Scotland's oft forgotten maritime legacy. Not just a book for ship enthusiasts, this lavishly illustrated, highly accessible and readable account of Scotland's great ships will capture your imagination and leave you dreaming of life on the high seas.

Written by a man who has lived and sailed a great part of his life in the waters around Chichester Harbour, this book aims to capture the beauties and excitement of the place. It tells the history of the region in a series of chapters, ranging from the arrival of the Romans to the evacuation from Dunkirk, that recreate a series of local incidents.

This work is a wide-ranging pictorial survey of the ports old and new on both sides of the sea and the varied traffic between them - including that to and from the Isle of Man - covers ferries, mail ships, local services, cargo and cattle ships, tourism, cruising, and much more.

From Orkney and Shetland to the north east coast, and from Fife to Berwick, fishing boats have been an important part of the maritime heritage of Scotland. The original designs of fishing vessels were based on Viking ships, but by the early twentieth century, scaffies, fifies and zulus were being replaced by more modern craft, all of which are included in this charming collection of fishing boats of Scotland. The future of the fishing industry in Scotland cannot currently be termed as promising; successive EEC rulings gave resulted in a large diminution of fleet, and this, combined with a regime of ever-changing restrictions and rules, have made it impossible to work with current legislation and still be economically viable. However, the author hopes that there will be those who, either due to faith and enterprise or simply for lack of other opportunity, will continue to invest and continue as generations of their forefathers have done before. This book illustrates the vessels that played a past in the fishing industry in Scotland, with 200 old photographs accompanied by informative captions.

Written to replace and extend Torr's Ancient Ships, this generously illustrated underwater Bible" traces the art and technology of Mediterranean ships and seamanship from their first crude stages (about 3000 B.C.) to the heyday of the Byzantine fleets. Originally published in 1971. 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.

It was a desperate mission that made front-page headlines and captured the attention of millions of readers around the world. In January 1998, in the dead of an Alaskan winter, a cataclysmic Arctic storm with hurricane-force winds and towering seas forced five fishermen to abandon their vessel in the Gulf of Alaska and left them adrift in thirty-eight-degree water with no lifeboat. Their would-be rescuers were 150 miles away at the Coast Guard station, with the nearby airport shut down by an avalanche.

The Last Run is the epic tale of the wreck of the oldest registered fishing schooner in Alaska, a hellish Arctic tempest, and the three teams of aviators in helicopters who withstood 140-mph gusts and hovered alongside waves that were ten stories high. But what makes this more than a true-life page-turner is its portrait of untamed Alaska and the unflappable spirit of people who forge a different kind of life on America's last frontier, the "end of the roaders" who are drawn to, or flee to, Alaska to seek a final destiny.

A colorful and deadly history of ocean liner disasters from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, Disaster at Sea is a chronicle of the most frightening episodes in the maritime history of the North Atlantic. From 1850 to the present day, the Atlantic has been home to hundreds of ocean liners and cruise ships, each more lavish than the last...all of them symbols of wealth and luxury. Perhaps this is why readers have always been fascinated by the lives of these ships and their deaths. Many of us know the stories of the Titanic and the Lusitania. Both tragedies caused tremendous loss of life, even as they made the ships immortal. But there are many little-known accounts of extraordinary survivals at sea, such as the Inman and International liner City of Chicago that jammed her bow into an Irish peninsula in 1892 but stayed afloat long enough for all to be rescued, or the City of Richmond that survived a dangerous fire in 1891, and a year earlier the City of Paris, whose starboard engine exploded at full speed in the mid-Atlantic and yet miraculously still made port. Often such tales are forgotten even if the ship sank: In 1898 the Holland-America liner Veendam hit a submerged wreck and sank at sea, but all lives were saved so this vessel's dramatic story seemed less important in maritime history than incidents involving human loss. As recently as 2000, the Sea Breeze I sank off the East Coast of the United States while on a positioning voyage, but all her crew members were rescued in a heroic effort by U.S. Coast Guard helicopters. These stories and many others are dramatic, and acclaimed maritime scholar William Flayhart has spent much of the last forty years in search of material from which to create colorful narratives. Author of The American Line: 1871 1902 and coauthor of Majesty at Sea and the first edition of QE2, Flayhart retells classic ocean liner disaster stories while bringing to light never-before-published but compelling episodes in man's ongoing battle with the sea. Originally published in hardcover under the title Perils of the Atlantic."

Over the years, several books featuring shipping on the River Humber have been published, but few have viewed their subject from an inland waterway viewpoint. This book, together with its companion volume "Shipping on the Humber - The South Bank", attempts to fill that gap, though sea-going traffic has not been ignored. Wooden sailing keels and sloops, characteristic of the region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the steel motor barges that came along later, are featured in the illustrations, together with the shipyards where many of them were built and maintained. Maps and photographs of inland waterway craft at work on the docks, havens, rivers and canals of the Humber's north bank have been selected from locations including Driffield, Beverley, Brough, Hessle, Hedon, Newport and, of course, Hull.

SS Terra Nova was most famous for being the vessel to carry the ill-fated 1910 polar expedition led by Robert Falcon Scott, but the story of this memorable ship, built in wood to enable flexibility in the ice, continued until 1943, when she sank off Greenland. This newly designed and updated edition presents the definitive illustrated account of one of the classic polar exploration ships of the 'heroic age'. Put together from accounts recorded by the men who sailed in her, it tells the sixty-year history of a ship built by a famous Scottish shipbuilding yard, in the nineteenth-century days of whaling and sealing before coal gas and electricity replaced animal oils.

Since 1883, four generations of the Beken family have dedicated themselves to marine photography, creating the most artistic images of sailboats ever shot and even receiving a Royal Warrant of Excellence. This extraordinary selection of work from the Beken Marine Photography Archive traces the evolution of their unsurpassable style. For every rare and legendary picture, and every yacht, theres a captivating accompanying story.