The Loch Sloy was built for Aitken, Lilburn & Co of Glasgow. She sailed between Britain and Australia for more than twenty years. In that time she established a reputation as a crack wool clipper. Windjammer, the story of the clipper ship Loch Sloy is not an adventure nor is it a romance or a tragedy, even though it contains elements of all three.The ship, her captains, officers, crew and passengers, all those her sailed upon her call out from the past to have their stories told. The Loch Sloy's' keel was laid down in mid-1877. By August the construction of the hull and deck fittings had been completed. After her first marine survey, the masts were stepped in, and by the end of October the Loch Sloy was all but complete. The clipper lasted twenty one years before coming to grief on the jagged shore of Kangaroo Island during the predawn hours of April 24th 1899. The final chapter of the Loch Sloy like her unfortunate passengers and crew was buried beneath the ever shifting sands of Maupertuis Bay.

"David Abulafia's new book guides readers along the world's greatest bodies of water to reveal their primary role in human history. The main protagonists are the three major oceans-the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Indian-which together comprise the majority of the earth's water and cover over half of its surface. Over time, as passage through them gradually extended and expanded, linking first islands and then continents, maritime networks developed, evolving from local exploration to lines of regional communication and commerce and eventually to major arteries. These waterways carried goods, plants, livestock, and of course people-free and enslaved-across vast expanses, transforming and ultimately linking irrevocably the economies and cultures of Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas"--

In the fall of 1636, Adam, fourteen-year-old heir to the House of Windjammer, must find a way to keep his family afloat after his father dies and tulip fever sweeps Amsterdam.

Covers a full range of exciting, dangerous, and everyday shipboard experiences