Recounts tales of hidden treasures in Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, and describes attempts to recover them.

Discusses buried treasures along the Atlantic coast, describing the types of treasures and attempts to retreive them

From the national bestselling author of The Food Explorer, a fascinating and rollicking plunge into the story of the world’s most famous shipwreck, the RMS Titanic On a frigid April night in 1912, the world’s largest—and soon most famous—ocean liner struck an iceberg and slipped beneath the waves. She had scarcely disappeared before her new journey began, a seemingly limitless odyssey through the world’s fixation with her every tragic detail. Plans to find and raise the Titanic began almost immediately. Yet seven decades passed before it was found. Why? And of some three million shipwrecks that litter the ocean floor, why is the world still so fascinated with this one? In Sinkable, Daniel Stone spins a fascinating tale of history, science, and obsession, uncovering the untold story of the Titanic not as a ship but as a shipwreck. He explores generations of eccentrics, like American Charles Smith, whose 1914 recovery plan using a synchronized armada of ships bearing electromagnets was complex, convincing, and utterly impossible; Jack Grimm, a Texas oil magnate who fruitlessly dropped a fortune to find the wreck after failing to find Noah’s Ark; and the British Doug Woolley, a former pantyhose factory worker who has claimed, since the 1960s, to be the true owner of the Titanic wreckage. Along the way, Sinkable takes readers through the two miles of ocean water in which the Titanic sank, showing how the ship broke apart and why, and delves into the odd history of our understanding of such depths. Author Daniel Stone studies the landscape of the seabed, which in the Titanic’s day was thought to be as smooth and featureless as a bathtub. He interviews scientists to understand the decades of rust and decomposition that are slowly but surely consuming the ship. (It is expected to disappear entirely within a few decades!) He even journeys over the Atlantic, during a global pandemic, to track down the elusive Doug Woolley. And Stone turns inward, looking at his own dark obsession with both the Titanic and shipwrecks in general, and why he spends hours watching ships sink on YouTube. Brimming with humor, curiosity and wit, Sinkable follows in the tradition of Susan Orlean and Bill Bryson, offering up a page-turning work of personal journalism and an immensely entertaining romp through the deep sea and the nature of obsession.

Featuring the accounts of twenty-five ill-starred vessels -- some notorious and some forgotten until now -- this anthology provides a fascinating history of a local maritime culture and charts how the catastrophic events along the Delmarva coast significantly affected U.S. merchant shipping as a whole.

Who does not know the phrase "Have some madeira, m'dear"? Madeira is one of the world's greatest wines, with a fascinating history few others can equal. Capable of evolution over decades and with seemingly indefinite longevity, precious centenarian bottles are sought by wine connoisseurs world wide, but to the ordinary wine lover more commercial wines offer a wide range of delicious and varied drinking. Once dismissed as a cooking wine, discriminating drinkers enjoy it on its own and, increasingly, as an accompaniment to food. Over a million tourists visit this small island every year, and expanding export markets indicate that the recent revival of interest in madeira continues to gain strength. This book, originally published in 1998, was short-listed for the André Simon Award and quickly established itself as a wine classic. Alexander Liddell, recognised as the leading authority on madeira, has known the island and its wine for over forty years, and this completely revised new edition brings matters up to date.