Presents the story of the Austrian child-bride who, in the "safety" of a royal marriage, was swept up in the political furies of her time and paid with her life for the luxurious excesses associated with her court.

Over 200 vintage engravings, drawings, and photographs of barks, brigs, cutters, and other vessels. Also harpoons, lances, whaling guns, many other artifacts. Comprehensive text by foremost authority. 207 black-and-white illustrations.

In the pages that follow, the story of commercial whaling in the western Arctic is told by a scholar intimately acquainted with the terrain--not only as it can be found in the historical records or at archaeological sites, but from lone experience on the shores and waters where the great adventure was played out. His book is written with such mastery and vigor that we confidently greet it as the finest history yet written on any aspect of American whaling.

Four Years Aboard the Whaleship is a first-hand account of a voyage to the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans in search of the sperm and right whales. The account is by William B. Whitecar, Jr., a Philadelphian who signed on as a common sailor on the New Bedford whaler Barque Pacific. It is based on a detailed journal, which the author kept, as he explains in his preface, "at sea, on a sailor's chest, amongst seamen, by night and by day, amid storm and calm...." The book offers a vivid picture of life at sea, as well as observations on locations on land that the ship passed or stopped at, including the Azores, Madagascar, Australia, New Zealand, and numerous islands in the Pacific. Written just a few years after Herman Melville's literary classic of 1851, Moby-Dick: or The Whale, the book touches upon many of the same topics and themes that Melville covers in his great work of fiction: the long hours at sea, the diversity of the whaling crews and the international character of the whaling industry, "gammoning" with other whaleships at sea, the dangers of the hunt, and the death of fellow crewmen at sea. In his concluding chapter, under the heading "Advice to Landsmen," the author concludes, perhaps somewhat tongue in cheek, by "advising all young men who can gain a livelihood ashore, to stay at home." As arguments against whaling, he cites the low pay (which he calculates at about a dollar a month, after expenses are deducted and the gains from the sale of the barrels of oil apportioned among the crew and ship's owners), and the drudgery of much of the work.