Showing titles in Maritime History & Piracy

Brought to you by Penguin. The riveting true story of a legendary Spanish galleon that sunk with over $1 billion in gold and silver—and one man’s obsessive quest to find it—from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Madhouse at the End of the Earth Roger Dooley wasn’t looking for the...

David L. Mearns has discovered some of the world's most fascinating and elusive shipwrecks. The Shipwreck Hunter chronicles his most intriguing finds. It describes the extraordinary techniques used, the detailed research, and mid-ocean stamina and courage required to find a wreck thousands of feet beneath the sea, plus the moving human stories that lie behind each of these oceanic tragedies. Combining the adventuring derring-do of Indiana Jones with the precision of a scientist, The Shipwreck Hunter opens an illuminating porthole into the shadowy depths of the ocean.

Brought to you by Penguin. Wreckers sinks the old narratives of imperialism, revealing the violent, chaotic and improvised reality of empire-building from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. While figures such as Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama and Ferdinand Magellan are celebrated for...

“Thoroughly engrossing . . . a spirited, suspenseful, economically told tale whose significance is manifest and whose pace never flags.” —The Wall Street Journal From The New York Times–bestselling author of The Ghost Map and Extra Life, the story of a pirate who changed the world Henry...

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER & THE TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF 2021 'Astonishing and compelling' Bernard Cornwell ‘This superb book is like a classical symphony, perfectly composed and exquisitely performed’ THE TIMES Books of the Year Follow bioarchaeologist Cat Jarman – and the cutting-edge...

Out of print for many years, this is a brand new edition of the definitive companion to the acclaimed Aubrey-Maturin series of novels, written by the author himself. What was daily life in Nelson's navy really like, for everyone from the captain down to the rawest recruit? What did they eat?...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY CHICAGO TRIBUNE A thrilling adventure of danger and deep-sea diving, historic mystery and suspense, by the author of Shadow Divers Finding and identifying a pirate ship is the hardest thing to do under the sea. But...

Brought to you by Penguin. From the New York Times bestselling author of Cobalt Red, discover the incredible true story and page-turning account of the 18th century slave ship, often known as the Zong yet actually named the Zorg, that sparked the human rights campaign to end the slave trade...

LONGLISTED FOR THE CUNDHILL HISTORY PRIZE 'An acerbic, compelling and always accessible account of how opium corrupted the world' TLS 'The writing is sublime, the research thorough, the eye for story superb' Sunday Telegraph 'A history of the opium poppy, which probes how the drug trade has...

The Dive is a thrilling narrative nonfiction in the tradition of The Perfect Storm and Apollo 13. They were out of their depth, out of breath, and out of time. It was 1973. Two men were trapped in a crippled submarine 1,700 feet below sea. They only had enough air to survive for two days. On the...

A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK One woman. One ship. One astonishing true story. ‘Hear the wind whistle through the ropes, taste the salt spray and feel the roll of the ship…. A true-life epic.’ Peter Fretwell, author of Antarctic Atlas Summer 1856. Nineteen-year-old Mary Ann Patten and her...

Brought to you by Penguin. The Outlaw Ocean is a riveting, adrenalin-fuelled tour of a vast, lawless and rampantly criminal world that few have ever seen: the high seas. There are few remaining frontiers on our planet. But perhaps the wildest, and least understood, are the world’s oceans: too...

Bloomsbury presents The Pirate Menace by Angus Konstam, read by David Monteath. This new account explores the most notorious pirates in history and how their rise and fall can be traced back to a single pirate haven, Nassau. Angus Konstam, one of the world's leading pirate experts, has brought...

On January 25, 1917, HMS Laurentic struck two German mines off the coast of Ireland and sank. The ship was carrying 44 tons of gold bullion to the still-neutral United States via Canada in order to finance the war effort for Britain and its allies. Britain desperately needed that sunken treasure, but any salvage had to be secret, since the British government dared not alert the Germans to the presence of the gold. Lieutenant Commander Guybon Damant was the most qualified officer to head the risky mission.

Andrew Lambert, author of The Challenge - winner of the prestigious Anderson Medal - turns his attention to Athens, Carthage, Venice, the Dutch Republic, and Britain, examining how their identities as "seapowers" informed their actions and enabled them to achieve success disproportionate to their size. Lambert demonstrates how creating maritime identities made these states more dynamic, open, and inclusive than their lumbering continental rivals. Only when they forgot this aspect of their identity did these nations begin to decline.

Often romanticized in print and on the silver screen, real-life pirates were a brutal menace that plagued the high seas. In this book, Angus Konstam separates myth from reality, tracing the history of piracy through the centuries, from the pirates who plagued the Ancient Egyptians to the Viking raids and on to the era of privateers. He discusses the so-called "Golden Age of Piracy" and colorful characters such as Blackbeard and Captain Kidd, before examining the West's initial encounters with Eastern pirates off the Chinese coast and the phenomenon of the modern pirate. 

For many, the colonial story of Australia starts with Captain Cook's discovery of the east coast in 1770, but it was some 164 years before his historic voyage that European mariners began their romance with the immensity of the Australian continent. Between 1606 and 1688, while the British had their hands full with the Gunpowder Plot and the English Civil War, it was highly skilled Dutch seafarers who discovered and mapped the majority of the vast, unknown waters and land masses in the Indian and Southern Oceans.

It was an era when monopoly trading companies were the unofficial agents of European expansion, controlling vast numbers of people and huge tracts of land, and taking on governmental and military functions. The leaders of these trading enterprises exercised virtually unaccountable, dictatorial political power over millions of people.

This is a comprehensive history of Portugal that covers the whole span, from the Stone Age to today. An introduction provides an understanding of geographical and climatic issues, before an examination of Portugal's prehistory and classical Portugal, from the Stone Age to the end of the the Roman era. Portugal's history from AD 420 to the 13th century takes in the Suevi, Visigoths and Moors. Then, a look at medieval Portugal, covers the development of Christian Portugal culminating with the expulsion of the Moors, with a focus on key sites.  

In The Dutch Moment, Wim Klooster shows how the Dutch built and eventually lost an Atlantic empire that stretched from the homeland in the United Provinces to the Hudson River and from Brazil and the Caribbean to the African Gold Coast. The fleets and armies that fought for the Dutch in the decades-long war against Spain included numerous foreigners, largely drawn from countries in northwestern Europe. Likewise, many settlers of Dutch colonies were born in other parts of Europe or the New World.