In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for England. At mealtimes he is seated at the "cat's table"--as far from the Captain's Table as can be--with a ragtag group of "insignificant" adults and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys tumble from one adventure to another, bursting all over the place like freed...

Charles Marlow embarks on his first seafaring journey to the East as a young man on board the Judea, a barque headed towards Bangkok under the command of Captain John Beard. The Judea sets sail on a journey that is meant to take about 150 days, but bad luck and danger follow the vessel wherever she goes. "Youth" is a semi-autobiographical short story based on author Joseph Conrad's own experiences aboard the ship the Palestine in 1882. Much of the...

From the author of the number-one international bestseller The History of Bees, a captivating story of the power of nature and the human spirit that explores the threat of a devastating worldwide drought, witnessed through the lives of a father, a daughter, and a woman who will risk her life to save the future. In 2019, seventy-year-old Signe sets sail alone on a hazardous voyage across the ocean in a sailboat. On board, a cargo that can change...

Considered by many to be Conrad's masterpiece, it is a story of revolution, deception, and self-betrayal. Running throughout is the theme of man's struggle against his greatest enemy--himself. The agent of destruction is stolen silver. When revolution breaks out, Nostromo is told to remove the silver treasure, and he hides it on a desert island. Later he lets it be known that the ship carrying the silver had sunk to the bottom of the sea. From that...

It was the largest moving object on the face of the earth, but for Carolyn and Peter Hardin it was a towering wall of steel bursting out of a squall at full speed, bearing down on their ketch Siren. In a few dramatic moments, Siren was shattered by the indifferent juggernaut. Struggling for his life, Peter Hardin felt the hand of his wife being torn from his grip as the huge white letters on the supertanker's stern - Leviathan - steamed away. Thus...

Having gone back to sea as second ship's boy, Tim befriends Ginger, the first ship's boy, and rescues him during a great storm.

"A captivating, atmospheric return to historical fiction that is every bit as convincing and engrossing as Martin's landmark Mary Reilly. In 1872 the American merchant vessel Mary Celeste was discovered adrift off the coast of Spain. Her cargo was intact and there was no sign of struggle, but the crew was gone. They were never found. This maritime mystery lies at the center of an intricate narrative branching through the highest levels of late- nineteenth-century...

At the time of the French Revolution, one of Britain's most skillful naval officers is young lieutenant Charles Saunders Hayden, the son of an English father and a French mother. His abilities and his loyalty to the king of England are beyond dispute, but his career seems doomed by his "mixed" heritage and lack of political connections. Consequently, Hayden is assigned to an aging frigate, the Themis, under the command of Captain Josiah Hart, a

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