In May of 1588, on the order of Spain's King Philip, 30,000 soldiers and sailors armed with arquebus and musket set out to sea. A larger fleet had never before been assembled. In the Voyage of the Armada, David Howarth brilliantly conveys the drama of the Spanish Armada's progress and brings to life the personalities of the men who influenced its course, from the dogmatic and irrational Philip II to Don Juan Martinez de Recalde to Don Pedro and Don Diego de Valdes, who were cousins but also bitter enemies, to the Spanish soldiers and sailors who unquestioningly ventured into unknown seas to confront their fates.
For a brief, glorious period in the early 1700s, the Bahamas was ruled by a gang of some of the most famous pirates the seas had ever seen. Edward "Blackbeard" Teach, "Black Sam" Bellamy, and their associates banded together to form a pirate cooperative, culminating in a form of government in which blacks were equal citizens, the rich were imprisoned and common sailors could veto their captain's orders. At the height of their power the gang served Britain, France, and Spain from their New World empires.
The Sailor's Word Book: The Classic Source for Over 14,000 Nautical and Naval Terms
First published in 1867, the "Sailor's Word-Book" is an incomparable alphabetical digest of nautical terms - some 14,000 in all. It defines a huge range of common and rare words, some of which, though now antiquated or obsolete, nevertheless appear regularly in contemporary works, because it remains one of the principal sources for many of the foremost writers of maritime non-fiction and fiction of our times.
A sailor's story: The term "before the mast" refers to the quarters of the common sailors — in the forecastle, in the front of the ship. His writing evidences his later social feeling for the oppressed; he later became a prominent anti-slavery activist and helped found the Free Soil Party.It is of note that he did not set out to write Two Years Before the Mast as a sea adventure, but to highlight how poorly common sailors were treated on ships. It quickly became a best seller.
