maritime history
Saviours of souls: the heroism of lifeboat crews
Helen Doe’s moving history of the RNLI celebrates the volunteers who, over the centuries, have risked their own lives for those in peril on the sea
From hearts of oak to hulls of steel: centuries of the British at sea
An ocean of clichés surrounds Britain’s maritime history, from Chaucer’s Shipman to the ‘little ships’ at Dunkirk. Tom Nancollas, whose…
Another fallen idol: the myth of Ferdinand Magellan debunked
Ferdinand Magellan’s fame was largely undeserved. Horatio Clare sees the explorer cut down to size
Man’s first instinct has always been to return to the sea
Travelling the Indus valley late in the third millennium BC you would have been awed by two Bronze Age megacities,…
The wildest waters in the world
‘Below the Forties there is no law, and below the Fifties there is no God.’ Most sailors know some version…
‘Doorways to the unknown’: Clive James’s Latest Readings
In the preface to his great collection of essays The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden claimed: ‘I prefer a critic’s notebooks…
