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Shipwrecks, Storms, and Collisions on the Atlantic
W. W. Norton & Company
April 2005
On Sale: March 22, 2005
388 pages ISBN: 0393326519 EAN: 9780393326512 Trade Size
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Non-Fiction History
"Flayhart delivers a gripping chronicle of mishap
and mayhem . . . filled with danger and heroism and rich
with detail."—Sea Power A colorful and deadly history of ocean liner disasters from
the mid-nineteenth century to the present, Disaster at
Sea is a chronicle of the most frightening episodes in
the maritime history of the North Atlantic. From 1850 to the
present day, the Atlantic has been home to hundreds of ocean
liners and cruise ships, each more lavish than the
last...all of them symbols of wealth and luxury. Perhaps
this is why readers have always been fascinated by the lives
of these ships—and their deaths. Many of us know the stories
of the Titanic and the Lusitania. Both
tragedies caused tremendous loss of life, even as they made
the ships immortal. But there are many little-known accounts
of extraordinary survivals at sea, such as the
Inman and International liner City of Chicago
that jammed her bow into an Irish peninsula in 1892 but
stayed afloat long enough for all to be rescued, or the
City of Richmond that survived a dangerous fire in
1891, and a year earlier the City of Paris, whose
starboard engine exploded at full speed in the mid-Atlantic
and yet miraculously still made port. Often such tales are
forgotten even if the ship sank: In 1898 the Holland-America
liner Veendam hit a submerged wreck and sank at
sea, but all lives were saved—so this vessel's dramatic
story seemed less important in maritime history than
incidents involving human loss. As recently as 2000, the
Sea Breeze I sank off the East Coast of the United
States while on a positioning voyage, but all her crew
members were rescued in a heroic effort by U.S. Coast Guard
helicopters. These stories and many others are dramatic, and
acclaimed maritime scholar William Flayhart has spent much
of the last forty years in search of material from which to
create colorful narratives. Author of The American Line: 1871–1902 and coauthor
of Majesty at Sea and the first edition of
QE2, Flayhart retells classic ocean liner disaster
stories while bringing to light never-before-published but
compelling episodes in man's ongoing battle with the sea.
Originally published in hardcover under the title Perils
of the Atlantic.
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