Seafaring before the twentieth century bristled with peril. The safe haven of your vessel might be destroyed by tempest or misadventure, your security scuttled. When you were cast away with only the resources of pluck, stamina, hope – and luck. Where you might end up on the expanse of endless sea facing the prospect of imminent dehydrated, starving death. Or on a safe but potentially forbidding – yet occasionally lush – outcrop of an isolated shore, amongst which perils abounded accounts of courage and companionship. These are narratives of castaways abandoned to fend for themselves, and the ordeals they endured and survived and in remembrance of the seafarers who did not.

True-life stories of seafarers facing danger and death in the 19th and early 20th centuries

The miraculous account of the man who survived alone and adrift at sea longer than anyone in recorded history. For fourteen months, Alvarenga survived constant shark attacks. He learned to catch fish with his bare hands. He built a fish net from a pair of empty plastic bottles. Taking apart the outboard motor, he fashioned a huge fishhook. Using fish vertebrae as needles, he stitched together his own clothes. Based on dozens of hours of interviews with Alvarenga and interviews with his colleagues, search and rescue officials, the medical team that saved his life and the remote islanders who nursed him back to health, this is an epic tale of survival. Print run 75,000.

ADRIFT AT SEA, Tom Tin and his four convict companions are only too glad when they come upon a deserted ship. The boys clamber aboard, not knowing whether they've been saved or set on a course toward doom. But after rescuing two men stranded on a melting iceberg, Tom begins to suspect that these unsavory sailors are dangerous castaways from this very vessel. The more Tom questions the men, the more they dislike him. So, when Tom overhears them plotting to get rid of him, he knows they mean it. But the other boys don't feel threatened - at least not until the sailors attempt to sell them as slaves, a decision that ends with death for some . . . and with Tom sailing the ship home to England. Soon Tom discovers that he has to cast away every ill-intentioned companion from his voyage home before he can truly be free.

Explores the lives of survivors who were shipwrecked, banished, or abandoned during the past several centuries.

The sea realm has ever been mysterious: strange happenings upon it, an unfathomable abyss of 'The Great Unknown' below. Before the scrutiny of scientific Enlightenment and Age of Reason, in the eighteenth century, ghost ships and oceanic monsters were the stuff of superstition, myth and legend to explain the inexplicable, to enthral the imagination – and enliven the unimaginable. Narratives of phantom ships manned by ghostly (sometimes skeletal) crews, or damned like the Flying Dutchman to roam the seas forever; of sinister, sinuous sea serpents; and the lore of the terrible multi-tentacled kraken. Accounts inspired spirited controversy amongst believers and sceptics, in the awestruck thrill of such frightful enigmas.