On the ocean, some voyages proceed smoothly, and some go weirdly south. It's the weirder ones, selected from the many passages made by the author over sixteen years as an offshore delivery captain, that are collected here. None are full-scale disasters, but even minor calamities are exciting enough on a small boat, whose mechanical systems are constantly doing their best to disintegrate, on which crew relations can spiral into dysfunction, and where you're vulnerably exposed to unpredicted rough weather. A reader might wonder, weren't there signs beforehand that a voyage was likely to go south... View More...
Journalist Susan Casey joins a strange band of surfer-scientists on a remote island off the California coast for some close encounters with the jaws of the world's most mysterious and fearsome predators in the New York Times bestseller, The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks. Susan Casey was in her living room when she first saw the great white sharks of the Farallon Islands, their dark fins swirling around a small motorboat in a documentary. These sharks were the alphas among alphas, some longer than twenty feet, and there were too many to... View More...
"Riveting." --The New York Times Book Review Hundreds of miles from civilization, two ships wreck on opposite ends of the same deserted island in this true story of human nature at its best--and at its worst. It is 1864, and Captain Thomas Musgrave's schooner, the Grafton, has just wrecked on Auckland Island, a forbidding piece of land 285 miles south of New Zealand. Battered by year-round freezing rain and constant winds, it is one of the most inhospitable places on earth. To be shipwrecked there means almost certain death. Incredibly, at the same time on the opposite end of the island, ano... View More...
"Drifting down on swimmers is standard rescue procedure, but the seas are so violent that Buschor keeps getting flung out of reach. There are times when he's thirty feet higher than the men trying to rescue him. . . . I]f the boat's not going to Buschor, Buschor's going to have to go to it. SWIM they scream over the rail. SWIM Buschor rips off his gloves and hood and starts swimming for his life."It was the storm of the century, boasting waves over one hundred feet high a tempest created by so rare a combination of factors that meteorologists deemed it "the perfect storm." When it struck in... View More...
October 1991. It was the perfect storm--a tempest that may happen only once in a century--a nor'easter created by so rare a combination of factors that it could not possibly have been worse. Creating waves ten stories high and winds of 120 miles an hour, the storm whipped the sea to inconceivable levels few people on Earth have ever witnessed. Few, except the six-man crew of the Andrea Gail, a commercial fishing boat tragically headed towards its hellish center. View More...
From the bestselling author of The Devil in the White City, here is the true story of the deadliest hurricane in history. National Bestseller September 8, 1900, began innocently in the seaside town of Galveston, Texas. Even Isaac Cline, resident meteorologist for the U.S. Weather Bureau failed to grasp the true meaning of the strange deep-sea swells and peculiar winds that greeted the city that morning. Mere hours later, Galveston found itself submerged in a monster hurricane that completely destroyed the town and killed over six thousand people in what remains the greatest natural disaster in... View More...
The classic minute-by-minute account of the sinking of the Titanic, in a 50th anniversary edition with a new introduction by Nathaniel Philbrick First published in 1955, A Night to Remember remains a completely riveting account of the Titanic's fatal collision and the behavior of the passengers and crew, both noble and ignominious. Some sacrificed their lives, while others fought like animals for their own survival. Wives beseeched husbands to join them in lifeboats; gentlemen went taut-lipped to their deaths in full evening dress; and hundreds of steerage passengers, trapped below decks, sou... View More...
From the New York Times bestselling author of Valiant Ambition and In the Hurricane's Eye, the riveting and critically acclaimed bestseller and a major motion picture starring Chris Hemsworth, directed by Ron Howard With its huge, scarred head halfway out of the water and its tail beating the ocean into a white-water wake more than forty feet across, the whale approached the ship at twice its original speed--at least six knots. With a tremendous cracking and splintering of oak, it struck the ship just beneath the anchor secured at the cat-head on the port bow. . .In the Heart of the Sea bring... View More...
A NATIONAL BESTSELLERA NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOKAN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEARONE OF JANET MASLIN'S MUST-READ BOOKS OF THE SUMMERA NEW YORK TIMES EDITOR'S CHOICEONE OF OUTSIDE MAGAZINE'S BEST BOOKS OF THE SUMMERONE OF AMAZON'S BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR SO FAR"A powerful and affecting story, beautifully handled by Slade, a journalist who clearly knows ships and the sea."--Douglas Preston, New York Times Book Review"A Perfect Storm for a new generation."--Ben Mezrich, bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook On October 1, 2015, Hurricane Joaquin barrele... View More...
A masterful biographer now offers a thrilling, definitive portrait of one of history's most legendary icons of adventure. In 1860, sixteen-year-old Joshua Slocum escaped a hardscrabble childhood in Nova Scotia by signing on as an ordinary seaman to a merchant ship bound for Dublin. Despite having only a third-grade education, Slocum rose through the nautical ranks at a mercurial pace; just a decade later he was commander of his own ship. His subsequent journeys took him nearly everywhere: Liverpool, China, Japan, Cape Horn, the Dutch East Indies, Manila, Hong Kong, Saigon, Singapore, San Franc... View More...
