Is there any tale more thrilling than a shipwreck? 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. Before Homer composed The Odyssey, sailors were already telling their terrifying stories, and Anthony Brandt has culled only the very best for this essential and engrossing chronicle of shipwrecks through the ages. Brandt's selections range from Icelandic sagas to Mark Twain to Titanic and beyond. The Tragic History of the Sea draws from tales around the globe: the doomed Medusa, whose survivors were abandoned to their fate, to live on only in a famous painting in the Louvre; the infamous Essex and her fatal cruise which inspired Melville's Moby Dick; or the harrowing wreck of the Wager, which left kinsman to poet Lord Byron, starving on Patagonia's bleak shores.
