Sea Stories - New Books


The Grey Wolves of Eriboll by David Hird – The Secret Mass Surrender of Nazi U-boats

March 21, 2010

Mass surrender of Nazi U-boats documented in new book
For 65 years residents of a remote Scottish village have paid heed to the wartime warning that “loose lips sink ships”.
The surrender of German submarines in Loch Eriboll in Sutherland was one of the strangest episodes at the end of World War II. Locals were sworn to [...]

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Skipjack: The Story of America’s Last Sailing Oystermen by Christopher White – A Review

February 1, 2010

A review by Steven Toby, written for the Maritime History Listserv, included here with his kind permission.  Sounds like a fascinating book.
Skipjack: The Story of America’s Last Sailing Oystermen by Christopher White is an excellent book on the last commercial fishing craft operating under sail in the US. The author has a journalistic rather than a scholarly [...]

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Unlocking the bloody history of the ship made famous by Turner, the Fighting Temeraire

January 23, 2010

Sam Willis has written what appears to be a fascinating book – Fighting Temeraire.
J.M.W. Turner’s painting, The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to her Last Berth to be Broken Up,  hangs in the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square and was recently voted to be Britain’s favorite painting, by a landslide, in a BBC4 poll.   Sam Willis, a naval historian [...]

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

November 13, 2009

Most of the over 4,000 books in  Arcadia Publishing’s “Images of America” series focus on local histories with extensive photographs of what a town, city or region looked like way back when.  (Not long after my family moved into our 1880s brownstone, Arcadia came out with a book titled “Jersey City”, and I probably spent [...]

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My River Chronicles – Rediscovering the America on the Hudson by Jessica DuLong : A Review

November 3, 2009

My River Chronicles – Rediscovering the America on the Hudson, is a fascinating voyage in the life of a young woman, who finds herself oddly quite at home in a most unlikely new job. It is also a journey through the history of America itself as it moves from an industrial past into an uncertain future.
While [...]

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J D Davies wins 2009 Samuel Pepys Award

October 23, 2009

This year’s Samuel Pepys Award  has been awarded to novelist and historian J D Davies for his book, Pepys’s Navy:Ships, Men and Warfare 1649-89, which examines the English navy in the second half of the 17th century.   Chair of the judges Ann Sweeney said she expected the book to become “an enduring work of reference.  [...]

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Live Yankees, the Sewalls and their Ships, by W.H. Bunting – A Review

October 18, 2009

Live Yankees, the Sewalls and their Ships is a fascinating and sweeping history of one family from Bath, Maine, which built and operated over one hundred merchant ships, mostly square riggers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It offers a complex and intriguing portrait of the shipbuilders, ship owners, captains and crews who helped [...]

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The Temple, a new Sir Sidney Smith novel by Tom Grundner – A Review

October 12, 2009

There have been hundreds of novels written about dashing Royal Navy ships’ captains who bear a striking resemblance to Lord Cochrane. The resemblance and family history are most obvious in Jack Aubrey and Horatio Hornblower, but a dozen or so other worthy fictional officers share the same heritage. It is therefore pleasing to see that [...]

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“Lords of the Sea”, a new Book by John R. Hale – the Birth of “Trireme Democracy”

August 9, 2009

The New York Times has a review by Dwight Garner this week of what sounds like a fascinating book – LORDS OF THE SEA – The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy by John R. Hale.
Rowing to Democracy
Mr. Hale’s thesis in “Lords of the Sea” is that the construction [...]

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Captains Contentious – The Dysfunctional Sons of the Brine by Louis Arthur Norton – A Review

June 23, 2009

Louis Arthur Norton’s book Captains Contentious – The Dysfunctional Sons of the Brine is an entertaining reminder that history is finally about individuals, dedicated to the causes in which they believe, as well as serving their own needs and obsessions.
Norton looks at five ship’s captains who fought for the infant American Navy in the Revolutionary [...]

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Congratulations to James Nelson, author of
George Washington’s Navy

June 11, 2009

Congratulations to James Nelson, author of George Washington’s Navy: How the American Revolution Went to Sea, which has been selected as the 2009 recipient of the Samuel Eliot Morison Award for excellence in naval literature.
Read more in Maritime Today
 We had previously posted about the book on its release -   George Washington’s Secret Navy – a [...]

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Alaric Bond’s “His Majesty’s Ship” – A Review

June 9, 2009

Whereas most  nautical adventure fiction follows the same general format – tracking the exploits of a young ship’s officer, Alaric Bond takes a refreshingly different tack.  His latest novel, His Majesty’s Ship does not focus on a single hero but follows multiple officers and crew of the 64 gun HMS Vigilant.  His range of characters and his use of [...]

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Naval Academy Graphic Novel to Aid Recruiting

May 10, 2009

Not too long ago my teenaged son asked me to read the graphic novel Watchmen.   I enjoyed it far more than I expected to.  (The movie wasn’t bad either.)  I was intrigued then when Alaric Bond passed this article along to me.  It seems the US Naval Academy is using a graphic novel to recruit [...]

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The Frigate Surprise: The Complete Story of the Ship Made Famous in the Novels of Patrick O’Brian – A Review

May 8, 2009

In his Aubrey/Maturin series, Patrick O’Brian wrote of HMS Surprise, a small British frigate, originally captured from the French. Over several books, the Surprise became almost as beloved a character, in her own way, as Jack Aubrey and Doctor Maturin themselves.
Independent of her qualities in fiction, HMS Surprise was indeed a real ship upon which [...]

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Sultana: Surviving the Civil War, Prison, and the Worst Maritime Disaster in American History by Alan Huffman – a Review

May 4, 2009

In his book, Sultana: Surviving the Civil War, Prison, and the Worst Maritime Disaster in American History, Alan Huffman follows a handful of Union soldiers from their enlistment in the Army during the American Civil War, through the confusion and terror of battle, and then on to the often far greater horror of Confederate prison [...]

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Video of the Moment

HMS Surprise and Star of India

Also featuring the Californian
and the Lynx

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