Castaways - Adrift and Abandoned


Book Description

Seafaring before the twentieth century bristled with peril. The safe haven of your vessel might be destroyed by tempest or misadventure, your security scuttled. When you were cast away with only the resources of pluck, stamina, hope – and luck. Where you might end up on the expanse of endless sea facing the prospect of imminent dehydrated, starving death. Or on a safe but potentially forbidding – yet occasionally lush – outcrop of an isolated shore, amongst which perils abounded accounts of courage and companionship. These are narratives of castaways abandoned to fend for themselves, and the ordeals they endured and survived and in remembrance of the seafarers who did not.




Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls


Book Description

Explores the lives of survivors who were shipwrecked, banished, or abandoned during the past several centuries.




438 Days


Book Description

The miraculous account of the man who survived alone and adrift at sea longer than anyone in recorded history. For fourteen months, Alvarenga survived constant shark attacks. He learned to catch fish with his bare hands. He built a fish net from a pair of empty plastic bottles. Taking apart the outboard motor, he fashioned a huge fishhook. Using fish vertebrae as needles, he stitched together his own clothes. Based on dozens of hours of interviews with Alvarenga and interviews with his colleagues, search and rescue officials, the medical team that saved his life and the remote islanders who nursed him back to health, this is an epic tale of survival. Print run 75,000.




The Castaways


Book Description

ADRIFT AT SEA, Tom Tin and his four convict companions are only too glad when they come upon a deserted ship. The boys clamber aboard, not knowing whether they've been saved or set on a course toward doom. But after rescuing two men stranded on a melting iceberg, Tom begins to suspect that these unsavory sailors are dangerous castaways from this very vessel. The more Tom questions the men, the more they dislike him. So, when Tom overhears them plotting to get rid of him, he knows they mean it. But the other boys don't feel threatened - at least not until the sailors attempt to sell them as slaves, a decision that ends with death for some . . . and with Tom sailing the ship home to England. Soon Tom discovers that he has to cast away every ill-intentioned companion from his voyage home before he can truly be free.




Mysteries and Sea Monsters


Book Description

The sea realm has ever been mysterious: strange happenings upon it, an unfathomable abyss of 'The Great Unknown' below. Before the scrutiny of scientific Enlightenment and Age of Reason, in the eighteenth century, ghost ships and oceanic monsters were the stuff of superstition, myth and legend to explain the inexplicable, to enthral the imagination – and enliven the unimaginable. Narratives of phantom ships manned by ghostly (sometimes skeletal) crews, or damned like the Flying Dutchman to roam the seas forever; of sinister, sinuous sea serpents; and the lore of the terrible multi-tentacled kraken. Accounts inspired spirited controversy amongst believers and sceptics, in the awestruck thrill of such frightful enigmas.




The Mysterious Case of the Mary Celeste


Book Description

4 December 1872: The brigantine Dei Gratia chances upon another brigantine out on the Atlantic near the Azores. She is the Mary Celeste . She is under sail. But she is deserted. Silent as a drowned cadaver. For 150 years since then, the mystery of why the Mary Celeste was abandoned, and what happened to the ten souls on board, has spawned thousands of conjectures, conspiracy theories, fictions and fantasies. Some have thought they solved the mystery. Some have just spun yarns. One, at least, has claimed it was all a hoax. The Mysterious Case of the Mary Celeste: 150 Years of Myth and Mystique unveils those stories – the 'fake news', 'alternative facts' and the myths fabricated from fractured truths. These are the real facts in search of a truth that remains unfathomable to this day.




Breaking History: Vanished!


Book Description

A front row seat to the breaking news, photos and hype surrounding history's most mysterious disappearances. Breaking History books offer a front row seat to history as it broke (like “breaking news”) and give the blow-by-blow of historical discovery—what we learned, when we learned it, who made the discovery, and how. Vanished! is an illustrated tour of history’s most confounding cases of disappearance from Amelia Earhart to Jimmy Hoffa; DB Cooper; Alcatraz escapists Frank Morris, John Anglin, and Clarence Algin; Jim Thompson; Judge Joseph Force Crater; and more. Starting with the first 30 days surrounding each incident, and then looking at efforts up to this very day to solve each case, this book covers in photos and text history’s most perplexing vanishings.




Crusoe, Castaways and Shipwrecks in the Perilous Age of Sail


Book Description

“Fascinating” stories of real-life people and events that inspired the author of the classic adventure novel Robinson Crusoe (Historical Novel Society). This book looks at some of the stories that inspired Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe—stories of bravery, determination, and good fortune, as well as human negligence, sheer stupidity, and bad luck. In addition to an overview of Defoe’s life and his monumentally successful novel, it also considers some of the reasons why people found themselves cast away—as a result of being wrecked, abandoned as a punishment, or marooned by pirates, or even out of deliberate choice. Major hurricanes in the eighteenth century causing huge damage to shipping and loss of life are also covered, along with catastrophes when ships were lost, and astonishing tales of survival in the face of adversity—down in the Falklands, in the Caribbean, and off the coast of Australia. It looks at how being cast away brings out the best in some—and in others the very worst. And it examines perhaps the most astonishing story of them all—sixty slaves abandoned on a desolate treeless island in the Indian Ocean and left there for fifteen years, some of whom survived against all odds.




The Shipwreck That Saved Jamestown


Book Description

In this2gripping account of shipwreck, mutiny, perseverance, and deliverance, the epic story of the wreck of the "Sea Venture" and its consequences for the survival of Jamestown . . . is told for the first time.--James Horn, author of "A Land As God Made It."




117 Days Adrift


Book Description

The Bailey's is a fantastic human story of adaption to totally alien conditions. It is a story of amazing courage, resolution and endurance. Essential reading for all who enjoy a gripping true story, 117 Days Adrift is an inspiring tale that has become one of the classics of the sea.