Shipwrecked with the Captain


Book Description

All she remembers...is feeling safe in his arms! Shipwrecked governess Claire Tilson wakes in Captain Lucien Roper's arms - with amnesia! Her handsome rescuer believes she's a member of the aristocracy he detests yet he risks all to see her 'home', where she learns she's betrothed to a wealthy stranger. Claire is convinced she doesn't belong here...and Lucien is the only man she trusts to uncover her past and claim her future!




Adrift


Book Description

A story of tragedy at sea where every desperate act meant life or death The small ship making the Liverpool-to-New York trip in the early months of 1856 carried mail, crates of dry goods, and more than one hundred passengers, mostly Irish emigrants. Suddenly an iceberg tore the ship asunder and five lifeboats were lowered. As four lifeboats drifted into the fog and icy water, never to be heard from again, the last boat wrenched away from the sinking ship with a few blankets, some water and biscuits, and thirteen souls. Only one would survive. This is his story. As they started their nine days adrift more than four hundred miles off Newfoundland, the castaways--an Irish couple and their two boys, an English woman and her daughter, newlyweds from Ireland, and several crewmen, including Thomas W. Nye from Fairhaven, Massachusetts--began fighting over food and water. One by one, though, day by day, they died. Some from exposure, others from madness and panic. In the end, only Nye and the ship's log survived. Using Nye's firsthand descriptions and later newspaper accounts, ship's logs, assorted diaries, and family archives, Brian Murphy chronicles the horrific nine days that thirteen people suffered adrift on the cold gray Atlantic. Adrift brings readers to the edge of human limits, where every frantic decision and desperate act is a potential life saver or life taker.




Skeletons on the Zahara


Book Description

b.A masterpiece of historical adventure, ISkeletons on the Zahara The western Sahara is a baking hot and desolate place, home only to nomads and their camels, and to locusts, snails and thorny scrub -- and its barren and ever-changing coastline has baffled sailors for centuries. In August 1815, the US brig Commerce was dashed against Cape Bojador and lost, although through bravery and quick thinking the ship's captain, James Riley, managed to lead all of his crew to safety. What followed was an extraordinary and desperate battle for survival in the face of human hostility, starvation, dehydration, death and despair. Captured, robbed and enslaved, the sailors were dragged and driven through the desert by their new owners, who neither spoke their language nor cared for their plight. Reduced to drinking urine, flayed by the sun, crippled by walking miles across burning stones and sand and losing over half of their body weights, the sailors struggled to hold onto both their humanity and their sanity. To reach safety, they would have to overcome not only the desert but also the greed and anger of those who would keep them in captivity. From the cold waters of the Atlantic to the searing Saharan sands, from the heart of the desert to the heart of man, Skeletons on the Zahara is a spectacular odyssey through the extremes and a gripping account of courage, brotherhood, and survival.




The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books


Book Description

This impeccably researched and “adventure-packed” (The Washington Post) account of the obsessive quest by Christopher Columbus’s son to create the greatest library in the world is “the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters” (NPR) and offers a vivid picture of Europe on the verge of becoming modern. At the peak of the Age of Exploration, Hernando Colón sailed with his father Christopher Columbus on his final voyage to the New World, a journey that ended in disaster, bloody mutiny, and shipwreck. After Columbus’s death in 1506, eighteen-year-old Hernando sought to continue—and surpass—his father’s campaign to explore the boundaries of the known world by building a library that would collect everything ever printed: a vast holding organized by summaries and catalogues; really, the first ever database for the exploding diversity of written matter as the printing press proliferated across Europe. Hernando traveled extensively and obsessively amassed his collection based on the groundbreaking conviction that a library of universal knowledge should include “all books, in all languages and on all subjects,” even material often dismissed: ballads, erotica, news pamphlets, almanacs, popular images, romances, fables. The loss of part of his collection to another maritime disaster in 1522, set off the final scramble to complete this sublime project, a race against time to realize a vision of near-impossible perfection. “Magnificent…a thrill on almost every page” (The New York Times Book Review), The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books is a window into sixteenth-century Europe’s information revolution, and a reflection of the passion and intrigues that lie beneath our own insatiable desires to bring order to the world today.




Sufferings in Africa


Book Description

In 1815, Captain James Riley and his crew were shipwrecked off the coast of Africa, captured by nomads, sold into slavery, and subjected to the harsh conditions of the Sahara Desert. Sufferings in Africa is Riley's harrowing account of his experiences, detailing the cruelty of his captors, the extreme hardships he endured, and his eventual rescue and return to civilization. This compelling narrative offers a fascinating glimpse into the lives of both the nomadic tribes and the European slaves, while also serving as a testament to the strength of the human spirit in the face of unimaginable adversity.




The Cat and the Captain


Book Description

Does Matthew Flinders find fame and fortune? This intrepid explorer was the first man to chart the coast of Australia in 1801 accompanied by his mischievous but faithful cat, Trim. Faced with a leaking ship, stormy seas, sickness and an unknown land, Matthew and Trim overcame every obstacle, until they were finally shipwrecked on the Great Barrier Reef. Saved, they sailed on to Mauritius, only to be imprisoned by the French as spies. What was to become of them?




The Princess and the Captain


Book Description

Malva is the princess of Galnicia, destined to marry the Prince of Andemark. Or so her parents think. On the eve of her wedding, she escapes at dead of night from under her parents' noses, little realising that she is letting herself in for a life of peril and adventure, including being shipwrecked in a huge storm and captured as part of a harem. Hugely visual, the book tells of the wonder of frozen steppes and oriental palaces, of sailing ships and treasure islands. This is a book of drama, magic and excitement, where challenges have to be overcome, friendships cemented and hearts broken.




Hanging Captain Gordon


Book Description

On a frosty day in February 1862, hundreds gathered to watch the execution of Nathaniel Gordon. Two years earlier, Gordon had taken Africans in chains from the Congo -- a hanging offense for more than forty years that no one had ever enforced. But with the country embroiled in a civil war and Abraham Lincoln at the helm, a sea change was taking place. Gordon, in the wrong place at the wrong time, got caught up in the wave. For the first time, Hanging Captain Gordon chronicles the trial and execution of the only man in history to face conviction for slave trading -- exploring the many compelling issues and circumstances that led to one man paying the price for a crime committed by many. Filled with sharply drawn characters, Soodalter's vivid account sheds light on one of the more shameful aspects of our history and provides a link to similar crimes against humanity still practiced today.







Shipwreck Season


Book Description

In 1880, forced to work with his uncle at a lifesaving station on Cape Cod, sixteen-year-old Daniel finds himself maturing as he encounters unexpected comradeship, challenges, and danger.