No detailed description available for "Boarding the Ship of Death".

How a ship of British idealists sailed to Africa to end the slave trade but instead ignited a yellow fever pandemic

Geoffrey Fenton is a second-rate officer who embarks on the ship called Saracen. On the high seas, they have an encounter with a brig who claims to have sighted the mythical ghost ship of the Flying Dutchman, cursed ship that can never reach land, condemned to sail forever and ever, bringing bad luck to any ship that crosses its path. This information starts haunting the captain of the Saracen due to the contagious bad luck that this may entail and it turns out to be right when Fenton suffers an accident. He gets rescued by the ghostly crew of the Flying Dutchmen and the infamous Captain Vanderdecken. His only mission becomes to escape from the Death Ship.

Honorable Mention, Theodore Saloutos Book Award, given by the Immigration and Ethnic History Society A vivid, new portrait of Irish migration through the letters and diaries of those who fled their homeland during the Great Famine The standard story of the exodus during Ireland’s Great Famine is one of tired clichés, half-truths, and dry statistics. In The Coffin Ship, a groundbreaking work of transnational history, Cian T. McMahon offers a vibrant, fresh perspective on an oft-ignored but vital component of the migration experience: the journey itself. Between 1845 and 1855, over two million people fled Ireland to escape the Great Famine and begin new lives abroad. The so-called “coffin ships” they embarked on have since become infamous icons of nineteenth-century migration. The crews were brutal, the captains were heartless, and the weather was ferocious. Yet the personal experiences of the emigrants aboard these vessels offer us a much more complex understanding of this pivotal moment in modern history. Based on archival research on three continents and written in clear, crisp prose, The Coffin Ship analyzes the emigrants’ own letters and diaries to unpack the dynamic social networks that the Irish built while voyaging overseas. At every stage of the journey—including the treacherous weeks at sea—these migrants created new threads in the worldwide web of the Irish diaspora. Colored by the long-lost voices of the emigrants themselves, this is an original portrait of a process that left a lasting mark on Irish life at home and abroad. An indispensable read, The Coffin Ship makes an ambitious argument for placing the sailing ship alongside the tenement and the factory floor as a central, dynamic element of migration history.

Macabre tales of death and mourning in Victorian America.

Reproduction of the original: The Death Ship by W. Clark Russell