This isn’t a book of shipwrecks, though it contains quite a few. I would rather call the narratives “maritime
dramas” because that covers a much wider field. Given how many thousands have occurred,
choosing them should have been an impossible task, but it was amazing how many of the seventeen chose themselves.
The first on my list was the Rothsay Castle, a ship I had come across in my days at Lloyd’s Register, but not
in any detail; the second had to be the attack by Italian special forces on Alexandria Harbour, and I was determined to write
about another East Indiaman – so I ended up with two. I wanted the book to have an international flavour, and I can
read several languages - with various degrees of incompetence – and that opened
the way for, among others, the Sirio and the Méduse. And so on, until I ended up with seventeen – all very different,
yet with intertwining themes of leadership (or the lack of it) , endurance, courage and cowardice, humanity
and cruelty .
Who is it written for? Anyone who enjoys a good story
of adventure on the high seas and who does not mind a large dose of grim reality. Two of the chapters actually had me in tears
as I was writing certain parts of them, though, embarrassingly, on one of those occasions the tears were for the ship.
I have tried to vary the style of the chapters, from full dramatisation to
very spare narratives, and I freely admit to some scene-setting with invented dialogue. This occurs at
the start and end of “Taken by Storm, and the starts of “Maiden Voyage”, “Worse
Things Happen at Sea”, “Death Sentence” and “The Brotherhood of the Sea”. Elsewhere in those
chapters and throughout the rest of the book, any dialogue is reproduced verbatim or reconstructed from reported speech. The
list of primary sources will allow historians to follow my research, and I am more than happy to clarify points.
List of main ships:
Chapter | Ship Name | Date of Incident
| Links to additional
data
|
| Chapter | Ship
Name
| Date of Incident
| Links to additional data
|
1 | Prince
(Compagnie des Indes) | 1752 | | | 2 | HEICS Doddingtonor Dodington
| 1752 | |
3 | HMS Centaur & HMS Ramillies | 1782 | | | 4 | Albion (timber carrier)
| 1810 | |
5 | Méduse (French frigate)
| 1816 | | | 6 | Rothsay Castle
| 1831 | Passenger List
|
7 | Amphitrite (convict ship) | 1833 | | | 8 | San Francisco (US
paddle steamer)
| 1853 | |
9 | HMS Victoria & HMS Camperdown | 1893 | | | 10 | Sirio (Italian emigrant ship)
| 1906 | |
| 11 | Titanic | 1912 | | | 12 | USS Squalus (submarine)
| 1939 | |
| 13 | R/smg Scirè, HMS Queen Elizabeth,HMS Valiant | 1941 | | | 14 | RMS Laconia and
U-156 | 1942
| |
| 15 | Flying Enterprise and Turmoil | 1951/52
| | | 16
| Kursk and AS-28 (Russian Submarines)
| 2000/2005
| |
