Maritime History & Piracy

January 1972: the tiny outpost of British Honduras is threatened with imminent invasion by battle-hardened, US-trained Guatemalan paratroopers. Britain's response must be immediate and decisive. But there is only one deterrent the government can offer: HMS Ark Royal....

Madagascar's lost pirate utopia represents some of the first stirrings of Enlightenment political thought. In this jewel of a book, he offers a way to 'decolonise the Enlightenment', demonstrating how this mixed community experimented with an alternative vision of human freedom....

The mutiny on HMS Bounty, in the South Pacific on 28 April 1789, is one of history's truly great stories - a tale of human drama, intrigue and adventure of the highest order - and in the hands of Peter FitzSimons it comes to life as never before. Commissioned by the Royal Navy to collect breadfruit plants from Tahiti and take them to the West Indies, the Bounty's crew found themselves in a tropical paradise. Five months later, they did not want to leave.

A century before Britain became involved in this terrible business, whole villages and towns in England, Ireland, Italy, Spain, and other European countries were being depopulated by slavers, who transported the men, women, and children to Africa, where they were sold....

On a frigid April night in 1912, the world’s largest—and soon most famous—ocean liner struck an iceberg and slipped beneath the waves. She had scarcely disappeared before her new journey began, a seemingly limitless odyssey through the world’s fixation with her every tragic detail...

The extraordinary story of how the world’s most famous shipwreck was found, told by the man leading the search....

The Stolen Village is a fascinating tale of international piracy and culture clash nearly 400 years ago and is the first book to cover this relatively unknown and under-researched incident in Irish history....

Set against the backdrop of the Age of Exploration, Black Flags, Blue Waters reveals the dramatic and surprising history of American piracy's "Golden Age" - spanning the late 1600s through the early 1700s - when lawless pirates plied the coastal waters of North America and beyond....

What was daily life in Nelson's navy really like, for everyone from the captain down to the rawest recruit? What did they eat? What songs did they sing? What was the schedule of watches? How were the officers and crew paid, and what was the division of prize-money? Find out....

The Royal Navy to which Admiral Lord Nelson sacrificed his life depended on thousands of sailors and marines to man the great wind-powered wooden warships.... 

The harrowing survival story of an early polar expedition that went terribly wrong, with the ship frozen in ice and the crew trapped inside for the entire sunless Antarctic winter....

The legendary explorer of the Titanic shares inside stories of danger, suspense, and discovery - plus previously untold stories about his own dyslexia and how it has shaped his life....

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....

Lighthouses are striking totems of our relationship to the sea. For many, they encapsulate a romantic vision of solitary homes amongst the waves, but their original purpose is much more utilitarian than that.... 

For centuries, oceans were the chessboard on which empires battled for supremacy. But in the nuclear age, air power and missile systems dominated our worries about security, and for the United States, the economy was largely driven by domestic production....

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Endeavour, written by Peter Moore, read by Ric Jerrom. An inventive biography of one of the most famous ships of all time....

A thrilling new adventure of danger and deep-sea diving, historic mystery and suspense, by the author of the New York Times best seller Shadow Divers....

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Ghost Map and Extra Life, the story of a pirate who changed the world....

In this grand and thrilling narrative, the acclaimed biographer of Magellan, Columbus, and Marco Polo brings alive the singular life and adventures of Sir Francis Drake, the pirate/explorer/admiral whose mastery of the seas during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I changed....

The true, harrowing story of the ill-fated 1913 Canadian Arctic Expedition and the two men who came to define it....

This epic three-part serial tells the true story of Fletcher Christian’s dramatic mutiny against his tyrannical Captain....

The Shipwreck Hunter chronicles David L. Mearns' most intriguing finds. It describes the extraordinary techniques used, the detailed research, and the courage required to find a wreck thousands of feet beneath the sea, plus the moving human stories that lie behind these tragedies....

If Britain's maritime history were embodied in a single ship, she would have a prehistoric prow, a mast plucked from a Victorian steamship, the hull of a modest fishing vessel, the propeller of an ocean liner and an anchor made of stone....

In this outstanding book, naval historian Peter Padfield explores the ways in which maritime strength has influenced political power from the mid-19th century to the modern age....

The history of the Golden Age of Piracy, the one that has shaped the modern conception of a pirate, is complex and long, with lots of information to cover....