Showing titles in Sea Adventures

In 1845, Sir John Franklin led 129 officers and men into the Arctic to try to find the Northwest Passage. None of them returned. Trapped is a novel that tells the harrowing, grueling fascinating story of the disastrous, ill-fated expedition of Sir John Franklin of 1845, which resulted in the deaths of the entire crew of 129 officers and men and the loss of the two expedition ships.

Jock MacNeil, the eldest son of a Highland Catholic family, leaves school at 13 to follow his father's footsteps and become a blacksmith. But after a family tragedy changes his plans, Jock boards a schooner and heads to the New World. Soon, he befriends the retired Royal Navy Surgeon, James Gunn, and David Llewellyn of the CSS Alabama. Living among the seamen, Jock learns how to take responsibility - and how to defend himself. But can Jock survive the perilous journey, and what awaits him on the other side of the Atlantic?

The burgeoning 1840s New Holland wool market is irresistible to entrepreneurial souls prepared to brave the open oceans. Having survived unimaginable tragedy together, Grace and Seamus Fitzwilliam plan a fresh start aboard their new ship, Elias. Lucius Chittenden, the new first mate, comes highly-recommended, and with the return of the trusted crew, the journey promises smooth sailing. The Elias is bursting with goods for the colony as well as shepherds for Gilly Downs, but it is not long before a theft is discovered, souring the mood aboard.

John Franklin always wanted to be a sailor. As a volunteer in the Royal Navy at age fourteen, he found himself in the Battle of Copenhagan, but nothing could prepare him for the adventure of a lifetime, when he set off in 1801 with his cousin Matthew Flinders on HMS Investigator as it sought to chart the first circumnavigation of Australia. Taking on responsibility for the chronometers, under the jealous eye of Flinders' younger brother, the young midshipman found all the action, adventure and excitement he'd hoped for in his new life at sea.

In the year 2514, the only thing more dangerous than the seas is those who sail them. Life aboard the mercenary ship Man o’ War is rarely dull, as hurricanes, swarms of jellyfish, and man-eating squid pose daily doses of danger. As intrigue and subterfuge from enemies old and new begin to surround its captain, the infamous Miranda Stillwater, even an uncanny sense of direction won’t be enough to help Compass Rose navigate these dangerous straits.

Two perilous events, half a century apart...Connected by one sunken ship. It's 1974, the dawn of Disco, and cocaine is pouring into Miami. Whitey Snow is in too deep with Peruvian drug lords and hatches a last-ditch scheme to get out before it’s too late. When his cold-blooded boss becomes suspicious, things turn deadly. Forty-five years later, divemaster AJ Bailey meets a mysterious client interested in wreck diving. Soon, AJ discovers her new friend’s motives have less to do with a vacation, and more to do with what happened in '74.

Buried for nearly 300 years and now brought triumphantly to light by Dr. Livesey, this is, at last, the true story of what happened on the fateful Treasure Island.... The truth about Captain Flint and his fabled death. The truth about Long John Silver and his coveted wife. And the truth about Jim Hawkins, that double-dealing turncoat of the first order: the traitor of Treasure Island.

More than one hundred years after Columbus blundered onto Hispaniola, the West Indies are held in Spain's iron fist, and no threat to that absolute rule is tolerated. But such total control cannot last, and one threat will emerge as the most dangerous of all: the buccaneers. Camped on the shore of Hispaniola, these half-wild men eke out a living hunting the island's feral livestock. Among them, Jean-Baptiste LeBoeuf lives out his exile, content that no one in the hunters' camp is curious about his past. But when a hurricane sweeps through the Caribbean, it upends their rough existence.

Coral branches rarely wear a wristwatch. That was Jesse McDermitt’s first thought when he found a partially denuded human arm, teeming with crab, lobster, and fish life, during his morning ocean swim. The discovery of a drifting mega-yacht the following day while fishing the Gulf Stream, causes quite a stir among the many alphabet agencies of the federal government, not to mention one shaggy canine.

From atop the choppy waves to the choking darkness of the abyss, the seas are full of mystery and rife with tales of inexplicable events and encounters with the unknown. In this anthology we see a thrilling spread of narratives: sailors are pitched against a nightmare from the depths, invisible to the naked eye, a German U-boat commander is tormented by an impossible transmission via Morse Code, a ship ensnares itself in the kelp of the Sargasso Sea and dooms a crew of mutineers, seemingly out of revenge for her lost captain.

Sir Oliver Tessilian, a Cornish nobleman, is abandoned or betrayed by everyone he ever loved. He is framed for murder, affronted and shunned by his fiancee and sold into slavery by his half-brother.

A colony of giant pistol shrimp, grotesquely mutated from toxic exposure, have invaded the Florida coast. Their snapping claws are capable of producing intense heat and thunderous shockwaves. Like a swarm of locusts, they will stop at nothing to devour anything inhabiting the water.

Breeze is made an offer he can't refuse. A three-million-dollar yacht is his for the taking, but there are strings attached. He's sent to Panama to repossess the vessel from its current captain, who becomes an unlikely ally during a mission to Colombia. He desperately wants to get home to Florida, but the return trip is fraught with problems and complicated by the uneasy relationship with his passenger. Any attempt to come to terms with the loss of his lover must wait for the completion of the journey.

In this haunting poem, a guest on his way to a wedding reception is stopped by the Ancient Mariner. With his "glittering eye" he transfixes the guest and then relates a compelling tale of a sea voyage fraught with strange happenings. The Mariner tells of journeying through tyrannous storms to ice mast-high, through mist and snow to the deadly inertia of the doldrums. There are unearthly visitations, ill omens, and supernatural happenings - all leading to the revelation of the Mariner's strange fate.

In 1797, young Billy Budd is impressed into naval service. It is a perilous time for a British Royal Navy still reeling from mutinies and marauding French ships. When Billy is forcibly transferred to HMS Bellipotent, he evokes the wrath of John Claggart, the ship's master-at-arms. Claggart falsely accuses Billy of conspiracy to mutiny, a charge that will have a profound effect on the fates of both seamen.

The year 1777 is bleak indeed for the cause of American Independence, with the British army twice defeating Washington and taking the capital city of Philadelphia and the Royal Navy sweeping aside the defenses of the Delaware Bay. For Captain Isaac Biddlecomb and the men of the half-built frigate Falmouth, things are direr still. After managing to slip through a British blockade, they find themselves trapped in a desolate harbour on the New Jersey coast and menaced not by the British but by the outlaw bands that terrorise the countryside and see Falmouth as a potentially valuable prize.

The year is 1796, and a trading ship arrives in the vibrant trading town of Newburyport, Massachusetts. But it's a ghost ship - her entire crew has been decimated by a virulent fever which sweeps through the harbor town, and Newburyport's residents start to fall ill and die with alarming haste. Something has to be done to stop the virus from spreading further.

A Navy captain near the end of a decorated career, Stephen Rensselaer is disciplined, intelligent, and determined always to do what’s right. In defending the development of a new variant of warship, he makes an enemy of the president of the United States, who assigns him to command the doomed line’s only prototype­—Athena, Patrol Coastal 15­­—with the intent to humiliate a man who should have been an admiral. Rather than resign, Rensselaer takes the new assignment in stride.

Rocks and Shoals is the seventh of the Carlisle & Holbrooke naval adventures. The series follows Carlisle and his protégé George Holbrooke through the Seven Years War and into the period of turbulent relations between Britain and her American colonies in the 1760s.

New York, 1910. George Dillman and Genevieve Masefield have crossed the Atlantic Ocean numerous times in their capacity as ship’s detectives. On those crossings they’ve had the pleasure, and in some cases the trouble, of sailing with very famous passengers. Dukes. Duchesses. Artists. Actors. Musicians. Royalty. But few names have quite the level of fame and fortune as their fellow traveller Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.