Investigates the lives of common sailors engaged in commerce, exploration, privateering and piracy, and naval actions during Tudor and Stuart periods.

Traditionally, the history of English maritime adventures has focused on the great sea captains and swashbucklers. However, over the past few decades, social historians have begun to examine the less well-known seafarers who were on the dangerous voyages of commerce, exploration, privateering and piracy, as well as naval campaigns. This book brings together some of their findings. There is no comparable work that provides such an overview of our knowledge of English seamen during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the tumultuous world in which they lived. Subjects covered include trade, piracy, wives, widows and the wider maritime community, health and medicine at sea, religion and shipboard culture, how Tudor and Stuart ships were manned and provisioned, and what has been learned from the important wreck the Mary Rose. CHERYL A. FURY is an associate professor of history at the University of New Brunswick, and on the editorial board of Northern Mariner (the Canadian journal of maritime history). Contributors: J.D. ALSOP, JOHN APPLEBY, CHERYL A. FURY, GEOFFREY HUDSON, DAVID LOADES, VINCENT PATARINO JR, ANN STIRLAND.

A survey of a wide range of new research on many aspects of life at sea in the early modern period.

The Mary Rose was one of King Henry VIII's favourite warships until she sank during an engagement with the French fleet on 19 July 1545. Her rediscovery and raising were seminal events in the history of nautical archaeology. Apart from the Captain and the Vice Admiral, nothing is known about the crew of the Mary Rose - the only evidence about her complement of 415 men rests with their skeletal remains. In The Men of the Mary Rose A.J. Stirland uses archaeological and skeletal evidence to give the reader a welcome insight into the soldiers of the Mary Rose, from their ages and height to their health, diet and physical condition. This book examines the building, sinking and raising of the Mary Rose and her historical context, before moving on to the examination of what the remain of the crew can reveal to us about the fighting men of that period. Many new findings have been made through analysis of their bones, including the effects of some activities and occupations on the skeletons of the men. This is the first book to deal with the men who made up the crew of the Mary Rose. It provides an exciting glimpse of Tudor life and the Tudor navy, relating archaeological findings to existing documentary evidence, opening a fascinating window into one of Henry VIII's great ships and a frozen moment of sixteenth-century time. This book will appeal both to professionals in the area, and to those for whom Tudor history holds a general fascination.

A deeply researched, analytically rich, and vivid account of England's early maritime empire Drawing on a wealth of understudied sources, historian Eleanor Hubbard explores the labor conflicts behind the rise of the English maritime empire. Freewheeling Elizabethan privateering attracted thousands of young men to the sea, where they acquired valuable skills and a reputation for ruthlessness. Peace in 1603 forced these predatory seamen to adapt to a radically changed world, one in which they were expected to risk their lives for merchants' gain, not plunder. Merchant trading companies expected sailors to relinquish their unruly ways and to help convince overseas rulers and trading partners that the English were a courteous and trustworthy "nation." Some sailors rebelled, becoming pirates and renegades; others demanded and often received concessions and shares in new trading opportunities. Treated gently by a state that was anxious to promote seafaring in order to man the navy, these determined sailors helped to keep the sea a viable and attractive trade for Englishmen.

Britain and the Ocean Road uses new firsthand research and unconventional interpretations to take a fresh look at British maritime history in the age of sail. The human stories of eight shipwrecks serve as waypoints on the voyage, as the book explores how and why Britain became a global sea power. Each chapter has people at its heart – sailors, seafaring families, passengers, merchants, pirates, explorers, and many others. The narrative encompasses an extraordinary range of people, ships and events, such as a bloody maritime civil war in the 13th century, a 17th-century American teenager who stepped from one ship to another - and into a life of piracy, a British warship that fought at Trafalgar (on the French side), and the floating hell of a Liverpool slave-ship, sunk in the year before the slave trade was abolished. The book is full of surprising details and scenes, including England’s rudest and crudest streetname, what it was like to be a passenger in a medieval ship (take a guess), how a fragment of the English theatre reached the Far East during Shakespeare’s lifetime, who forgave who after a deadly pirate duel, why there were fancy dress parties in the Arctic, and where you could get the best herring. Britain and the Ocean Road is the first of two works aimed at introducing a general audience to the gripping (and at times horrifying) story of Britain, its people and the sea. The books will also interest historians and archaeologists, as they are based on original scholarship. The second book, Black Oil on the Waters, will take the story from the age of steam to the 21st century.

10 Political Visions, National Identities, and the Sea Itself: Stanford and Vaughan Williams in 1910 -- 11 Bax's 'Sea Symphony' -- 12 'Close your eyes and listen to it': Special Sound and the Sea in BBC Radio Drama, 1957-59 -- Afterword : Channelling the Swaying Sound of the Sea -- Index