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A history of the Australian navy focusing on the contribution of the RAN in peace and war to Australia's development and the potential it has to continue this into the future.

In 1837, P&O, or the Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company, won a lucrative mail contract to the Iberian peninsula. In 1840, they added Egypt and the Mediterranean to their routes. In 1843, P&O placed the first cruise advert in The Times, and in 1844 were selling passages to Gibraltar, Malta, Athens, Constantinople and Egypt to tourists, clearly becoming the world's oldest cruise company. In that year, the author William Thackeray was offered a voyage if he would write about it for the...

The story of the Spanish Armada, sent crashing to destruction in stormy seas by English battleships, is one of the most famous and popular of British history. Philip II of Spain's crusade to conquer Protestant England was the culmination of an undeclared war between the two nations which had simmered for years. The dramatic destruction of the Spanish fleet by Howard, Drake and their men ensured that England kept her political and religious freedom - but it was not the end of the story. This hist...

On the morning of May 9, 1980, during sudden violent weather, a 600-foot freighter struck a support pier of the fifteen-mile Sunshine Skyway Bridge. The main span splintered and collapsed 150 feet into Tampa Bay. Seven cars and a Greyhound bus fell over the broken edge and into the churning water below. Thirty-five people died. Skyway tells the entire story of this horrific event. Through personal interviews and extensive research, Bill DeYoung pieces together the harrowing moments of the colli...

Takao was the first of four Takao-class heavy cruisers designed to be an improvement over the previous Myoko-class design. The Myoko had proved to be unstable and required modifications, which were incorporated into the Takao design. The Takao-class ships were approved under the 1927 fiscal year budget as part of the Imperial Japanese Navy's strategy of the Decisive Battle, forming the backbone of a multipurpose long-range strike force. Takao was built by the Yokosuka Naval shipyards, and like...

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, started his literary career with the publication of The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor . . . 'On February 22 we were told that we would be returning to Columbia'In 1955 eight crew members of Caldas, a Colombian destroyer, were swept overboard. Velasco alone survived, drifting on a raft for ten days without food or water. Marquez retells the survivor's amazing tale of endurance, from...

Along with the design and construction of established favorites and lesser-known ships, The Liner explores the human story of the engineers, builders, crew, and passengers. Illustrated throughout with photographs, artworks, and plans, some specially commissioned, this is an essential work for all liner enthusiasts, maritime historians, and anyone who has sailed aboard these fine vessels. Foreword By Stephen Payne, OBE, Chief Naval Architect Of Queen Mary 2.

BRIDLINGTON, just south of Flamborough Head, is in a critical position on the ancient and very busy north-south coastal sea route. There was frequent need to save the lives of mariners at the mercy of the ferocious North Sea storms that swept the coast of East Yorkshire and, in 1805, the men of Bridlington Quay established a Lifeboat at the port. This fascinating new book pilots the reader through two centuries of transformation from a wooden rowing boat, launched by horses and manpower, to the...