Archive Results For: Shipwrecks
Review: ‘Out of the Depths: A history of shipwrecks’ by A. G. Jamieson
It is estimated that there have been 3 million shipwrecks spanning a period of 4,000 years, and that only 1 per cent have been discovered, mostly over the last 60 years. Can this author, or any author indeed, relate ‘their significance and … the developments over the last sixty years that have made detailed study of those … shipwrecks […] Read More
Filed under: Shipwrecks
Subjects include: Archaeology | Science & Exploration
Review: ‘Samuel Pepys and the Strange Wrecking of the ‘Gloucester’: A true Restoration tragedy’ by N. Pickford,
The North Sea is a shallow but unforgiving sea, susceptible to violent and unpredictable weather, poor visibility, and beset with shifting shallows, nowhere more so than the vicinity of the North Norfolk Sandbanks and particularly the inner two called the Leman and the Ower. Dawn on 6 May 1682 revealed this sea at its worst, […] Read More
Filed under: North Sea | Other (Early Modern) | Shipwrecks
Subjects include: Historic Vessels, Museums & Restoration
Review : ‘Echoes from the Deep: Inventorising shipwrecks at the national scale by the application of marine geophysics and the historical text’ by I. McCartney
The new book by Innes McCartney describing the seabed survey project he led with Bangor University in the Irish Sea marks an important waypoint reached in the practice of archaeology at sea. More particularly it is part of a technological journey, which in England at least, can be said to have begun with pioneers like […] Read More
Filed under: Popular Topics | Shipwrecks
Subjects include: Archaeology
The Wreck of HMS Sceptre and the Danish warship Oldenborg in Table Bay on 5 November 1799
During a hurricane off Cape Town on 5 November 1799, the Royal Navy ship of the line HMS Sceptre was driven ashore and wrecked with the loss more than two-thirds of its crew. Just a few hundred metres from where Sceptre was lost, lay the Danish ship of the line Oldenborg. The two 64-gun ships […] Read More
Filed under: Atlantic | Other (Eighteenth C) | Shipwrecks
Subjects include: Lifesaving & Coastguard
Book Review-‘Breaking Seas, Broken Ships: People, shipwrecks and Britain 1854–2007’ by I. Friel,
This new book by Ian Friel is a follow-on from his earlier Britain and the Ocean Road, which through eight chapters loosely based around shipwrecks explored Britain’s maritime history up to 1825. This new volume continues the same thread up to the modern day. Readers familiar with Britain and the Ocean Road will instantly recognize […] Read More
Filed under: Shipwrecks
Subjects include: Manpower & Life at Sea
Notes:Pieter Adriaensz Blanckert: Another survivor of the Liefde’s voyage to Japan
When the arrival of the first Dutch ship in Japan, the Liefde, in 1600 is examined in the historical literature, one survivor tends to overshadow the rest of the crew, William Adams. Although information about Adams’s early years is very limited, new books about him are published regularly, adding little, if anything, to our knowledge […] Read More
Filed under: Shipwrecks | Pacific
Subjects include: Biography
Book Review-‘Britain and the Ocean Road: Shipwrecks and people, 1297–1825’ by I. Friel, Pen
Britain’s maritime history is often studied by looking at events on the large scale. Friel’s book does something different. This book tells the individual stories of eight different ships, through which we can get a snapshot of events spanning just over 500 years. This is the first of two volumes employing this approach, with the […] Read More
Filed under: Other (Early Modern) | Other (Nineteenth C) | Shipwrecks
Subjects include: Archaeology | Manpower & Life at Sea
Book Review-‘Catastrophe at Spithead: The sinking of the ‘Royal George’’ by H. L. Rubinstein
Hilary Rubinstein’s in-depth research has successfully collated all the relevant information to explain why the 100-gun Royal George should have foundered on 29 August 1782 while at anchor between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight. Certainly, to the many witnesses it was beyond belief that she could just disappear with only her mast visible in […] Read More
Filed under: English Channel | Shipwrecks
Subjects include: Miscellaneous
Book Review-‘Down Amongst the Black Gang: The world and workplace of RMS ‘Titanic’ ’s stokers’ by R. P. Kerbrech
Subjectively the Titanic remains a much hackneyed travesty of maritime disaster research. However, this book is delightfully refreshing, and singularly conjures up the below decks world of the engineers who drove the palatial leviathan ships that plied the Atlantic run. The study is well written, and you can feel and smell the grime, dust and […] Read More
Filed under: Atlantic | Other (Twentieth C) | Shipwrecks
Subjects include: Manpower & Life at Sea | Ocean Liners & Passenger Craft
Book Review-‘1545: Who sank the ‘Mary Rose’? ‘by P. Marsden
One of the questions asked of any shipwreck, whether a recent tragedy or an archaeological find, is why it did sink? Very often the real question being asked is, who is at fault? Modern accident investigation techniques focus on identifying all of the contributing factors to an air crash or ship sinking, such as technical […] Read More
Filed under: Tudors | English Channel | Shipwrecks
Subjects include: Archaeology | Historic Vessels, Museums & Restoration