Featured Books

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Fighting Temeraire by Sam Willis

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Live Yankees: The Sewalls and Their Ships by W. H. Bunting

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His Majesty's Ship by Alaric Bond

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Galveston's the Elissa: The Tall Ship of Texas by Kurt Voss

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My River Chronicles - Rediscovering the America on the Hudson by Jessica DuLong

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The Frigate Surprise: The Complete Story of the Ship Made Famous in the Novels of Patrick O'Brian by by Geoff Hunt and Brian Lavery

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James Nelson's
George Washington's Secret Navy

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Defying Empire:Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York by Thomas Truxes

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Deadly Shoals, a Wiki Coffin Mystery by Joan Druett

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Star Crossed
by Linda Collison

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The Privateer's Revenge: A Kydd Sea Adventure (Kydd Sea Adventures)

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Peter Wicked: A Matty Graves Novel (The Matty Graves Novels)

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The Jackass Frigate by
Alaric Bond

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Steady As She Goes
by John Molloy

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Voyages, the Age of Sail: Documents in American Maritime History, Volume I, 1492-1865

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Expedition Whydah: The Story of the World's First Excavation of a Pirate Treasure Ship and the Man Who Found Her

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Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom--and Revenge

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The Illustrated Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

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The Mystery of the Mary Celeste

On December 4, 1872, in the Atlantic Ocean, roughly 600 miles west of Portugal, the helmsman of the Dei Gratia, spotted a brigantine sailing erratically. She was the brigantine Mary Celeste and while the ship was sound, had provisions for six months and was sailing in fine weather, no one was aboard.

The mystery of what happened to her crew and passengers has fascinated the public  for over a hundred years. The Mary Celeste has been the subject of theories that  range from fumes from her cargo of alcohol to underwater earthquakes and waterspouts, as well as wild paranormal speculation involving aliens, sea monsters and the Bermuda Triangle.   The Mary Celeste has become the archetypal ghost ship featured in novels and short stories, television, movies, comic books and video games.   From Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1884 short story “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement” to the numerous science fiction movies and television shows which feature intact ships with missing crews, the mystery of the Mary Celeste has endured.  The ship is long gone, yet she still seems to haunt our imaginations.

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HMS Surprise and Star of India

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