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Humans have done sufficient damage to every habitat that the bells can always be heard, but we seek to place emphasis elsewhere. How can an audience focus on a drama's denouement until they're invested in the players? Where they live? Who they live with? The conflict and beauty of their lives? Hence our focus on the characters in the oceans, the lives they lead, and the tactics they use to thrive.

We have tried, in our chapters, to bring these characters to life by combining a novel's narrative flair with the scientific accuracy that these subjects demand. And we chose the sea's most extreme life to show what life is fully capable of. We apologize for inaccuracies that may still be present: despite a worldwide network of friends and colleagues, a survey comprising more than 200 topics will never be perfectly accurate while research is ongoing and new results are arriving.

Throughout, we used the scientific literature as the foundation of fact on which our narrative is built—but good storytellers also try to show their subjects in living color, in dynamic movement, and in life and death. And for these elements we sometimes constructed scenes that are fully consistent with the data but may not yet have been witnessed...

There were six of them, five young men and one woman, dressed in brand-new desert camo and pristine combat boots, posing for a cell-phone photo at the terminal gate. They were the sort of soldiers you see everywhere in American airports these days: Guys with Oakley shades perched atop freshly shaved heads, women with hair tucked inside their caps, moving purposefully and a little furtively, separate from everyone else.

Their expressions seemed both confident and a little edgy. No one knows what the future holds, but it is seldom as obvious or meaningful as when a person sets off for armed conflict. From that moment on, anything can happen. The soldiers were documenting a true departure, the beginning of a very personal and potentially fatal group experiment: This is us leaving Atlanta, leaving the known world behind.

The scene has been repeated, in various incarnations, for as long as people have been going off to war. It would have been much the same for Romulus Tolbert, a soldier I was trailing, nearly a century and a half after the fact. In the fall of 1863, Tolbert was waiting with his fellow soldiers in the Indianapolis train station, in his own crisp uniform and unsullied boots, preparing to ship off to the American Civil War. He was about to step across a similar threshold, and he faced the same basic question: Will I make it back? He had no way of knowing how bad things would get, which was probably just as well.

I came across Tolbert's story while researching a comparatively obscure historical episode that had made the local news two decades before, when a farmer and a Memphis lawyer reported rinding what they believed to be the remains of a steamboat known as the Sultana buried beneath an Arkansas soybean field. The Sultana saga was by then largely forgotten, despite its epic proportions and the fact that it branched off into a network of intriguing subplots, one of which concerned Tolbert.

The interwoven stories of the Sultana disaster have a lot to say about human survival, and they are particularly attractive to those of us eating frozen yogurt in Concourse E. They show us what a full onslaught is like, with everything the Fates can throw at you...

We recommend you to have a look into this big, nicely detailed and remarkably thorough instruction book - we are absolutely sure that its content will be found very useful and interesting to anyone willing to learn how to splice ropes. You will get to know how to do it in professional manner. The book covers a huge number of strands, eye splices, round plants, long splices, rope-to-chain connections.

One of the parts in this publication has been solely dedicated to the various tools that are commonly required for splicing. The book will be useful and practical not only for the mariners actually working on board ships but also to the people who just want to know how to make different types of splices, starting from the very simple splices and then proceeding to quite complex ones. The manual was prepared and officially released by SamsonRope company.

From the very beginning of human civilization, the seas have held a real fascination for people. Over so many centuries, people have sought to sail and navigate the sea with huge numbers of vessels for various purposes. Even in the earliest days the ships were able to transport cargoes much faster and also farther than any overland transport.

The present publication lists and describes three hundred of the most famous ships in the maritime history. The author of the book has provided the readers with the detailed technical descriptions and specification of each of the vessels; moreover, there is also some historical note for each vessel.

The volume opens with the introduction where the author tells us the history of the shipping in brief, touching the most important aspects of the development of the shipping industry and describing all stages of the development, from the simplest plank boats through sailing ships and steam ships to the modern technological marvels.

The Cheops ship, Phoenician cargo ship, Greek and Roman war galley, Mediterranean cargo ship, Viking longship, English warship, Chinese junk, Hanseatic cog, Carrack, Caravel, Nao, Galleon, Great Harry, Mediterranean Galley and Ark Royal, Slave Carrack and St. Louis, Fluyt and Sovereign of the Seas, Galeass and Dutch frigate, Le Soleil Royal and Xebec, Endeavour, Bucintoro, Boston, Santissima Trinidad, Victory, South Carolina, Turtle, Bounty, Vanguard, Constitution, Fulton steamboat, Essex, Astrolabe, Claremont, Demologos, Morris, Sirius, Great Western, Congress, Great Britain, Jane Gifford, Bertha, Agamemnon, Washington, Powhatan, Gloire, Bretagne, Warrior, Monitor, Alabama, Banshee, Savannah, Parramatta, Adelaide, Canada, Friedrich Karl, and many others world famous vessels have been included by the author into this world ship encyclopedia.

Well, and here is one of the most popular maritime publication in the world and one of the best titles on our website. The present Encyclopedia was first released in Dutch language and, after the success it gained, the author has made a decision to prepare the English version of the book. When preparing it, all shortcomings of the original edition were remedied and several completely new subjects were added.

In a remarkably clear and understandable yet very detailed manner the various important subjects related to the modern ship construction and seamanship as well as today's shipping modes and even the offshore industry have been dealt with in the pages of this Encyclopedia. The author has made a successful attempt to provide readers with a maximum complete overview of the vessels, their propulsion and auxiliary machinery, hull systems, together with the applicable rules and international regulations governing their design, construction and exploitation.

The publication is intended to provide an excellent resource of relevant maritime information for literally all people with an interest in ships and shipping. It will be particularly useful for the basic studies and will be very interesting as the first book for the newcomers to the industry. In the meantime, it will be equally beneficial for the industry participants, when used as a very convenient manual for refreshment of their professional knowledge...

Gary Kinder, who is the author of the present publication, has spent about ten years conducting the researches and writing the work about the shipwreck of the famous SS Central America that occurred approximately two hundred nautical miles offshore North Carolina, during a severe hurricane. First eighty pages of the volume are telling readers how the passengers of the vessel were carrying gold; subject gold was found during the Gold Rush in California.

Five hundred sixty five lives were lost. The author is taking the advantage of the stories told by the survivors to give his readers the really harrowing and true details of their rescue. The publication opens with the brief historical account of that ship, SS Central America, as she was making the run from Panama to the eastern coast of United States. You will be impressed with the content - it is really exciting due to the suspense created by the author in each chapter of the book. It is perfectly written and easy to read. In short, an excellent one for all fans of history.

Here is a very popular book about sharks. Nowadays, their attacks are natural news leaders. The sharks are the perfect showstopping spectacle: horror, blood and guts, and mystery. In addition to that, they are highly videogenic. Even in the case when the camera cannot get a proper shot of shark or its victim, it can still pan the empty beach, the forbidding ocean, focus on the warning signs like "Danger: Sharks" or "Beach Closed".

Such attacks usually dominate the news in the summertime. Magazines, newspapers, magazines, TV and radio news, internet websites keep count of the numerous incidents of supposed carnage. Experts speculate on the meanings and causes of this assault on humanity. The truth is that such hysteria is not justified by statistics or other facts. Though shark attacks seemed to occur more frequently as the twentieth century went on, they leveled off during the 1990s. 60-80 attacks are reported all over the world each year.

Crossing an ocean under sail today is not an especially risky undertaking. Accurate offshore navigation—for so long an impossible dream—has now been reduced to the press of a button, and most modern yachts are strong enough to survive all but the most extreme weather. Even if errors, accidents, or hurricanes should put a boat in danger, radio communications give the crew a good chance of being rescued.

Few sailors now lose their lives on the open ocean: crowded inshore waters where the risk of collision is high are far more hazardous. But it was not always so. When a young man called Alvaro de Mendana set sail from Peru in November 1567 to cross the Pacific with two small ships, accompanied by 150 sailors and soldiers and four Franciscan friars, he faced difficulties so great that his chances of survival, let alone achieving his objectives, were slim. Mendana's orders from his uncle, the Spanish viceroy, were to convert any "infidels" he encountered to Christianity, but the expedition was certainly not motivated entirely by religious zeal.

According to Inca legend, great riches lay on islands somewhere to the west. Were these islands perhaps outliers of the great southern continent that was believed to lie hidden somewhere in the unexplored South Seas? Mendana, who was twenty-five, hoped to find the answer, to set up a new Spanish colony, to make his fortune and win glory. However, any optimism he may have felt as the coast of Peru dipped below the horizon would have been misplaced.

Although Magellan had managed to cross the Pacific from east to west in 1520-21, he had been killed in fighting with local people after reaching the Philippines, and only four out of the forty-four men who sailed with him aboard his small flagship had returned safely to Spain. This first epic circumnavigation was counted as a brilliant success, but other expeditions ended in oblivion.