Captain MacWhirr cannot fathom anything outside the facts of his own life. His first mate, Mr. Jukes, is the perfect contrast as an imaginative man prone to speaking in figurative language. Though they are opposites, MacWhirr and Jukes respect each other and run a tight ship, until the crew notices the barometer predicting a serve storm. Jukes and the crew suggest alternate paths to MacWhirr, but he is unconvinced. Since MacWhirr has not experienced...

"Samuel Pipps is the greatest detective of his day...but now he's a prisoner, accused of an unknown crime by one of the world's most powerful men. Along with his faithful sidekick, Arent Hayes, they're sailing back to Amsterdam from the East Indies, where he'll stand trial. But no sooner are they out to sea than devilry begins to blight the voyage. Still shackled in his cell, Pipps sends Hayes to solve a mystery that connects every passenger on board....

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,...

A strange glowing stone picked up on a sea voyage captivates a ship's crew and has a terrible transforming effect on them.

But strange as the journey may be, it's nowhere near as strange as what they will find waiting at its end. One of the lesser known novels by Jules Verne, but certainly a novel that is worth reading, An Antarctic Mystery or The Sphinx of the Ice Fields is a fictional travelogue that describes the narrator's adventures as he travels from Kerguelen Islands, a group of islands in the Indian Ocean, towards the South Pole. The novel is the account of the...

Captain Blood is an adventure novel by Rafael Sabatini. The protagonist is the sharp-witted Dr. Peter Blood, a fictional Irish physician who had had a wide-ranging career as a soldier and sailor (including a commission as a captain under the Dutch admiral De Ruyter) before settling down to practice medicine in the town of Bridgwater in Somerset. The book opens with him attending to his geraniums while the town prepares to fight for the Duke of Monmouth....

Once a celebrated Naval officer, John Rowland has fallen from grace. After slipping into alcoholism, Roland is dismissed from the Navy and shamed. Having lost everything, Rowland now works as a deckhand on the Titan, operating deck machinery and keeping watch. However, Rowland is just as shocked and horrified as the civilian passengers when the mighty ocean liner collides with an iceberg, beginning the ship's slow sink to ruin. As the Titan sinks,...

One of the first books published after the tragic loss of the Titanic, The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters is a detailed account of the events the night of April 14-15, 1912, and how the tragic loss of life could have been averted. The largest ocean liner of her time, Titanic was on her maiden voyage when she struck an iceberg and sank in the frigid North Atlantic, taking more than 1,500 passengers and crew with her. The Sinking of...

The Mortzestus is reputed to be haunted but the crew dismisses the rumors as preposterous - at first. Two weeks out of port the rigging suddenly goes slack, a ghostly form arises from the sea, and shadows thicken around the vessel. The frightened sailors, convinced that supernatural powers are afoot, plot mutiny and demand to be set ashore. But a dense mist descends around the ship, threatening to swallow the craft and its men without a trace. The...

A renewed interest in "Moby-Dick" in the early 20th century would help to establish it as an outstanding work of Romanticism and the American Renaissance, firmly placing it amongst the greatest of all American novels. Based on the real life events depicted in the "Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex" and the legend of "Mocha Dick", an albino sperm whale, whose killing is described in the May 1839 issue...