Product Description

"Flayhart delivers a gripping chronicle of mishap and mayhem . . . filled with danger and heroism and rich with detail." A colorful and deadly history of ocean liner disasters from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, is a chronicle of the most frightening episodes in the maritime history of the North Atlantic. From 1850 to the present day, the Atlantic has been home to hundreds of ocean liners and cruise ships, each more lavish than the last...all of them symbols of wealth and luxury. Perhaps this is why readers have always been fascinated by the lives of these shipsand their deaths. Many of us know the stories of the and the . Both tragedies caused tremendous loss of life, even as they made the ships immortal. But there are many little-known accounts of extraordinary survivals at sea, such as the and International liner that jammed her bow into an Irish peninsula in 1892 but stayed afloat long enough for all to be rescued, or the that survived a dangerous fire in 1891, and a year earlier the , whose starboard engine exploded at full speed in the mid-Atlantic and yet miraculously still made port. Often such tales are forgotten even if the ship sank: In 1898 the Holland-America liner hit a submerged wreck and sank at sea, but all lives were savedso this vessel's dramatic story seemed less important in maritime history than incidents involving human loss. As recently as 2000, the sank off the East Coast of the United States while on a positioning voyage, but all her crew members were rescued in a heroic effort by U.S. Coast Guard helicopters. These stories and many others are dramatic, and acclaimed maritime scholar William Flayhart has spent much of the last forty years in search of material from which to create colorful narratives. 26 illustrations