"This new edition of C. R. Boxer's translations of famous Portuguese shipwreck stories also includes a new translation of the tragic tale of Captain Manuel de Sousa Sepulveda, who was shipwrecked with his family and crew near the Cape of Good Hope in 1552. After enduring treacherous storms that completely destroyed their ship and its cargo, a few hundred passengers and slaves were forced to go ashore, where they struggled for several weeks with starvation and thirst, treks through rugged terrain, attacks and manipulation by African tribes, and conflicts within their own group. Only a handful of survivors reached Mozambique in 1553 after their dreadful and extreme ordeal."--BOOK JACKET.

Disaster at sea is an ever-present peril, inspiring ancient legends, great works of fiction, and countless yarns of deadly typhoons, vessels consumed by fire, and desperate castaways alone on an empty ocean.

At 8:43 a.m. on the morning of Sunday, October 6, 1918, HMS Kashmir rammed HMS Otranto off Islay, Scotland. Both ships were former British passenger liners from the P&O Steamship Company that had been pulled into the war to ferry American soldiers between New York and various British ports. On this stormy morning, however, they were part of Convoy HX-50 carrying troops to Liverpool. On board were 372 British officers and sailors and 701 American soldiers. The Americans were mostly Southern farm boys from Fort Screven in Savannah under the command of Lt. Sam Levy, a Georgia Tech graduate from Atlanta. The Kashmir managed to back away and follow the harsh wartime order that required her to ignore any maritime disasters that might befall her sister ships and to continue on her prescribed course rather than stop and take on survivors. Thus it was that—with winds blowing at 70 to 75 mph and waves at more than 60 feet—the severely damaged Otranto was left dead in the water with more than a thousand souls aboard. Many Were Held by the Sea: The Tragic Sinking of HMS Otranto, tells the story of what happened during that voyage—mostly from the perspective of the American soldiers—and builds to the disastrous conclusion. The narrative details the courage of the young men on board, men who, for the most part, had never seen the ocean or learned to swim. It tells of the anguish from the home front, as family members had to wait weeks to learn the fate of their relatives. In addition, Scott’s narrative tells the personal story of Lieutenant Craven of the Royal Navy, serving as Commander of the rescue ship, who was forced to gamble with the lives of those on both ships in order to save the maximum number of passengers.

Edited from the original Portuguese and translated. The narratives by Diogo do Couto, João Baptista Lavanha and Francisco Vaz d'Almada, translated from the original editions of accounts which were subsequently included in the 'História Trágico-Marítima' edited by Bernardo Gomes de Brito at Lisbon in 1735-6. The introduction and appendices discuss the 'Carreira da Índia'. For a further selection from the same source, see Second Series 132. This is a new print-on-demand hardback edition of the volume first published in 1959. Owing to technical constraints it has not been possible to reproduce the sketch map of 'Figure 1:The Carreira da India, 1589-1622' which faced the first page of the book in the first edition.

'Being about to write down the disastrous voyage of this great ship, it occurred to me how rash men are in their undertakings, chief among which, or one of the greatest is confiding their lives to four planks lashed together, and to the discretion of the furious winds.' So wrote Henrique Dias, an eye-witness of the wreck of the Sao Paulo off Sumatra and the subsequent fate of the survivors. His account is one of three narratives, here translated into English for the first time, of certain shipwrecks which befell the Portuguese in the mid-16th century. The other two describe the wrecking of two East Indiamen off the East African coast, and the misadventures of a voyage from Brazil to Lisbon. In his introduction, Professor Boxer describes the lives of the three chroniclers, and gives bibliographical details of their works. The narratives are translated from the original accounts which Bernardo Gomes de Brito included in his História Trágico-Marítima (Lisbon, 1735-36). The present volume forms a companion to Professor Boxer's earlier work The Tragic History of the Sea, 1589-1622 (Hakluyt Society, 1959). This is a new print-on-demand hardback edition of the volume first published in 1968.

The harrowing story of five men who were sent into a dark, airless, miles-long tunnel, hundreds of feet below the ocean, to do a nearly impossible job—with deadly results A quarter-century ago, Boston had the dirtiest harbor in America. The city had been dumping sewage into it for generations, coating the seafloor with a layer of “black mayonnaise.” Fisheries collapsed, wildlife fled, and locals referred to floating tampon applicators as “beach whistles.” In the 1990s, work began on a state-of-the-art treatment plant and a 10-mile-long tunnel—its endpoint stretching farther from civilization than the earth’s deepest ocean trench—to carry waste out of the harbor. With this impressive feat of engineering, Boston was poised to show the country how to rebound from environmental ruin. But when bad decisions and clashing corporations endangered the project, a team of commercial divers was sent on a perilous mission to rescue the stymied cleanup effort. Five divers went in; not all of them came out alive. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents collected over five years of reporting, award-winning writer Neil Swidey takes us deep into the lives of the divers, engineers, politicians, lawyers, and investigators involved in the tragedy and its aftermath, creating a taut, action-packed narrative. The climax comes just after the hard-partying DJ Gillis and his friend Billy Juse trade assignments as they head into the tunnel, sentencing one of them to death. An intimate portrait of the wreckage left in the wake of lives lost, the book—which Dennis Lehane calls "extraordinary" and compares with The Perfect Storm—is also a morality tale. What is the true cost of these large-scale construction projects, as designers and builders, emboldened by new technology and pressured to address a growing population’s rapacious needs, push the limits of the possible? This is a story about human risk—how it is calculated, discounted, and transferred—and the institutional failures that can lead to catastrophe. Suspenseful yet humane, Trapped Under the Sea reminds us that behind every bridge, tower, and tunnel—behind the infrastructure that makes modern life possible—lies unsung bravery and extraordinary sacrifice.