In the bitter days that followed Trafalgar, Matthew Lawe watched as England mourned her greatest sailor son and then turned sadly away, a man damned to live forever. If damned he was then he'd take the trade of the damned, as master of a slaver bound out of Liverpool for the hellhole ports of Africa and the Caribbean paradise of rum and tobacco and trader's gold ...

From his days as a cadet on the aging training ship Worcester, Captain Philip Rentell's forty-year career has spanned the world's oceans and a huge variety of seagoing experience. He served as a junior officer on numerous freighters and liners, as the navigator of cross-Channel hovercraft, and then as first officer of the Cunard flagship QE2, on which he went to the South Atlantic with over 3,500 British troops and a volunteer crew of 650 during the Falklands War of 1982. SInce leaving Cunard in 1990. he has been and English Channel and North Sea pilot, and has commanded a succession of cruise ships.

Sail with L. Ron Hubbard and navigate his immense nautical legacy. View the ships' logs chronicling his voyages, his photographic records and previously unpublished essays telling of a life at sea and a “Master of Any Vessel on Any Ocean.”

Before he published his first novel in 1895, Joseph Conrad spent twenty years in the merchant navy, eventually obtaining his master's ticket and commanding the barque Otago. This book traces his sea-career, and shows how Captain Jozef Konrad Korzeniowski, master mariner, became Joseph Conrad, master novelist. In addition to a new analysis of Conrad as mariner, the book contains a wealth of detail about the merchant service in the late nineteenth century-the economics of sail, the cargoes, the competition with steam, the skill and teamwork required to maneuver a windjammer, the harsh realities and dangers of everyday life at sea.