The Volunteer, a nineteenth-century Yorkshire whaling ship, becomes the stage for a confrontation between brutal harpooner Henry Drax and ex-army surgeon Patrick Sumner, the ship's medic, during a violent, ill-fated voyage to the Arctic.

The fifteen-year-old heir of a once-prosperous seafaring dynasty in New England spends her days in a crumbling ancestral mansion where she studies the secrets of Greek history and navigation before embarking on a voyage that reveals her family's haunted history

Following an incident with an escaped tiger, nineteenth-century London street urchin Jaffy Brown goes to work for Mr. Charles Jamrach, the famed importer of exotic animals, alongside Tim, a good but sometimes spitefully competitive boy. Mr. Jamrach recruits the two boys to capture a fabled dragon during the course of a three-year whaling expedition to the Dutch East Indies. They succeed in catching the reptilian beast, but when the ship's whaling...

A maritime adventure set against a lush historical backdrop.

I n 1871, an entire fleet of whaling ships was caught in an arctic ice storm and destroyed. Though few lives were lost, the damage would forever shape one of America's most distinctive commodities: oil.

New Bedford, Massachusetts, was fertile ground for this country's first multimillion-dollar industry. Founded by assiduous Quaker merchants seeking refuge for their austere

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Consumed by an insane rage, Captain Ahab has but one purpose in life-- revenge on the great white whale who maimed and disfigured him

After more than a century of silence, the true story of one of history's most notorious mutinies is revealed in Joan Druett's riveting "nautical murder mystery" (USA Today). On May 25, 1841, the Massachusetts whaleship Sharon set out for the whaling ground of the northwestern Pacific. A year later, while most of the crew was out hunting, Captain Howes Norris was brutally murdered. When the men in the whaleboats returned, they found four crew members...

Drawing on interviews, official records, private archives, and his own family history, Jason M. Colby tells the exhilarating and often heartbreaking story of how people came to love the ocean's greatest predator. Historically reviled as dangerous pests, killer whales were dying by the hundreds, even thousands, by the 1950s-the victims of whalers, fishermen, and even the U.S. military. In the Pacific Northwest, fishermen shot them, scientists harpooned...