Best of
Maritime

2009

Ocean Life in the Old Sailing Ship Days


John D. Whidden - 2009
    Whidden started out at sea in 1834, at the age of twelve, and did not retire until 1870. This is his account of over a quarter-century spent on the high seas. Orphaned at five, nothing held Whidden back from embarking on sea life seven years later. Serving as an apprentice, he quickly proved his worth, and earned himself a mate’s position by his early twenties. Graduating to third, second and first office, he ended his career in command of, and having part-ownership of his own vessel. This memoir, Ocean Life in the Old Sailing Ship Days, records a series of real events, from his childhood impressions of rough and ready seamen, to his thrilling and brutal experiences of war. His travels saw him spanning the world, with stops at major ports such as Honolulu, Buenos Aires, Calcutta, and Liverpool. His life spans the changes in the shipping industry over the 19th and into the 20th century. During the Civil War, Whidden was heavily involved in profitable island trading in the Bahamas to elude Confederate sailors. However, shortly after the close of the war, in 1870, Whidden left sailing as he found it being overtaken by foreign interests. John D. Whidden (1832-1911) wrote Ocean Life in the Old Sailing Days in 1908, partly as a memoir, but also to offer a snippet of the “old sailing ship days” before major changes occurred to its business environment, fundamentally changing its nature. It is a classic account of a different way of life, which will appeal to both sailing enthusiasts and historians alike.

Flotsam and Jetsam: The Collected Adventures, Opinions, and Wisdom from a Life Spent Messing About in Boats


Robb White - 2009
    He was an old salt, dispensing copious wisdom and entertainment in a voice that is part Florida cracker, part biology professor. Readers got a taste of his stories in How to Build a Tin Canoe, but that volume barely scratched the surface of his total output. Flotsam and Jetsam includes all those stories, plus about five times more.His stories revolve around boats and boatbuilding, with countless sidetracks into such esoterica as clam chowder, sawmills, cast-netting, and alligators. His style is similar to his sister Bailey White’s—mining a deep vein of Southern eccentricity and charm, while also imparting a great deal of practical and technical wisdom.As Peter Spectre wrote about him: “At first blush his style seemed to be pure memory dump, but if you stuck with it over the long haul, you would discover that each piece was part of a long, loose tale about what life used to be and still could be without SUVs, personal watercraft, Blackberries, plywood, fast food, and any amount of other useless stuff bought off the shelf. The cumulative, compelling effect was to cause one to examine critically one’s life in light of what he wrote about his. A story by Robb White was beautifully constructed.”A must-read for any boat-nut, and for anyone who values the old ways of doing it yourself.

The Fighting Temeraire: The Battle of Trafalgar and the Ship that Inspired J. M. W. Turner's Most Beloved Painting


Sam Willis - 2009
    Temeraire, one of Britain`s most illustrious fighting ships, is known to millions through J.M.W. Turner`s masterpiece, The Fighting Temeraire (1839), which portrays the battle-scarred veteran of Britain`s wars with Napoleonic France. In this evocative new volume, Sam Willis tells the extraordinary story of the vessel behind the painting and the making of the painting itself.Turner's Temeraire was the second ship in the Royal Navy to carry the name. The first, a French warship captured and commandeered by the British in 1759, served with distinction during the Seven Years' War before being sold off in 1784. The second Temeraire, named in honor of her predecessor, was a prestigious three-decked, 98-gun warship that broke through the French and Spanish line directly astern of Nelson`s flagship Victory at Trafalgar in 1805, saving the Vice-Admiral at a crucial moment in the battle. This tale of two ships spans the heyday of the age of sail: the climaxes of both the Seven Years War (1756-63) and the Napoleonic Wars (1798-1815).Filled with richly evocative detail, and narrated with the pace and gusto of a master storyteller, The Fighting Temeraire is an enthralling and deeply satisfying work of narrative history.

The Four Days' Battle of 1666: The Greatest Sea Fight of the Age of Sail


Frank L. Fox - 2009
    Fox presents a thoroughly engrossing story, and one worthy of the greatest battle of the age of sail, the Four Days' Battle of 1666.

The Wolf: The German Raider That Terrorized the Southern Seas During World War I in an Epic Voyage of Destruction and Gallantry


Richard Guilliatt - 2009
    The long-forgotten drama of a WWI secret German warship and floating international prison.

British Warships in the Age of Sail 1603-1714: Design, Construction, Careers and Fates


Rif Winfield - 2009
    The character of this navy was forged by a bloody civil war, three fiercely disputed conflicts with the Dutch, and the first of many wars with the French. In the process the ships themselves were transformed from the surviving galleons that had defeated the Spanish Armada, through huge prestige vessels like Prince Royal and Sovereign of the Seas and the lightly built frigates of the Commonwealth era into warships that were recognizably ships of the line. These radical developments in the design and employment of warships can be followed in detail for the first time in this comprehensive new reference book, which outlines the history of every ship built, purchased or captured that saw naval service during this era. Like its companion volumes on the 1714-1792 and 1793-1817 periods, the book is organized by Rate, classification and class, with outline technical and building data, but followed by a concise summary of the careers of each ship in every class. With its unique depth of information, this is a work of the utmost importance to every naval historian and general reader interested in the navy of the sailing era.

Australian Backyard Explorer


Peter Macinnis - 2009
    Released August 2009, awarded the Children's Book Council of Australia Eve Pownall Book of the Year award in August 2010. In 2011, it was named as one of the 250 White Ravens books for 2011, selected from around the world as "annual recommendation list of outstanding international books for children and young adults" by the Internationale Jugendbibliothek München (International Youth Library). See the full list at http://www.ijb.de/files/Page00.htm or http://www.ijb.de/files/whiteravens/w... and follow the links (Source is the author)

Port and Terminal Management


Institute of Chartered Shipbrokers - 2009
    

The Search For The Sydney How Australia's Greatest Maritime Mystery Was Solved


David L. Mearns - 2009
    

Network-Centric Warfare: How Navies Learned to Fight Smarter Through Three World Wars


Norman Friedman - 2009
    It argues that navies invented this style of warfare over the last century, led by the Royal Navy, and that the wars of that century, culminating in the Cold War, show how networked warfare worked - and did not work.These wars also illustrate what net-on-net warfare means; most exponents of the new style of war assume that the United States will enjoy a monopoly on it. This account is important to all the services; it is naval because navies were the first to use network-centric approaches (the book does take national air defense into account, because air defense systems deeply influenced naval development). This approach is probably the only way a reader can get a realistic feeling for what the new style of war offers, and also for what is needed to make it work. Thus the book concentrates on the tactical picture which the network is erected to help form and to disseminate, rather than, as is usual, the communications network itself.This approach makes it possible to evaluate different possible contributions to a network-centric system, because it focuses on what the warriors using the picture really want and need. Without such a focus, the needs of networked warfare reduce simply to the desire for more and more information, delivered at greater and greater speeds. Although it concentrates on naval examples, this book is of vital importance to all the services. It is the first book about network-centric warfare to deal in concrete examples, and the first to use actual history to illuminate current operational concepts.It also offers considerable new light on the major naval battles of the World Wars, hence ought to be of intense interest to historians. For example, it offers a new way of understanding the naval revolution wrought in the pre-1914 Royal Navy by Admiral Sir John Fisher.

Weapons of Warre: The Ordnance of the Mary Rose


Alexzandra Hildred - 2009
    It begins with a full description of the guns, followed by discussion of the many objects that relate to their use: the shot, the gunpowder and the items needed for loading and firing, as well the experiments that have been carried out in the manufacture and use of specific gun types, carriages and other items. This is followed by chapters dealing with other ordnance: incendiaries, hand guns, staff weapons and archery equipment. The volume concludes with a drawing together of all the evidence to present a detailed consideration of the ship as a fighting unit and an indication of some of the major topics that still require research. Please note that the reduced copies are damaged - the slipcase is either split or missing entirely.

Your Noblest Shippe: Anatomy of a Tudor Warship (Archaeology of the Mary Rose)


Peter Marsden - 2009
    Book by