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showing 144 library results for 'Bounty'

My inestimable friend / Alastair R. Brown. "In 1779 when William Brown was a fourteen-year-old midshipman on the Frigate Apollo, a French sharp-shooter's musket ball passed through the brim of his hat but injured only his left hand. Many years later, on the deck of HMS Victory, Admiral Lord Nelson would not be so fortunate when a French sharp shooter identified him. One day Alastair Brown was shown a copy of Sherwin's etching, The Death of Lord Robert Manners after the Battle of the Saints by his cousin, who was able to identify William Brown as the midshipman kneeling at the foot of the bed. This chance encounter greatly increased the author's interest in his ancestor's naval career. William remained a midshipman for the five years of peace following the battle until his pursuit of a commission led him to join William Bligh on the Bounty. Perhaps fortunately, he was transferred to another ship by the First Lord of the Admiralty, shortly before the Bounty sailed. In 1805, now commanding the 74-gun Ajax, William received a request from Nelson that Ajax accompany Victory to join the blockade of Cadiz. However, when Nelson later asked him to accompany Admiral Calder back to England for Calder's court martial, William unfortunately missed the Battle of Trafalgar by a few days. William Brown then attended Nelson's funeral before being sent to Malta as the first commissioner for the Royal Navy there. He was Commander-in-Chief at Jamaica when he died there of yellow fever in 1814. Not just a detailed account of the life of an admiral who served at the time of Nelson, the book contains many fascinating insights into life in the Georgian navy and Georgian society at large."--From inside front cover. 2017. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 92BROWN
The sea mark : Captain John Smith's voyage to New England /Russell M. Lawson. "By age thirty-four Captain John Smith was already a well-known adventurer and explorer. He had fought as a mercenary in the religious wars of Europe and had won renown for fighting the Turks. He was most famous as the leader of the Virginia Colony at Jamestown, where he had wrangled with the powerful Powhatan and secured the help of Pocahontas. By 1614 he was seeking new adventures. He found them on the 7,000 miles of jagged coastline of what was variously called Norumbega, North Virginia, or Cannada, but which Smith named New England. This land had been previously explored by the English, but while they had made observations and maps and interacted with the native inhabitants, Smith found that "the Coast is...even as a Coast unknowne and undiscovered." The maps of the region, such as they were, were inaccurate. On a long, painstaking excursion along the coast in a shallop, accompanied by sailors and the Indian guide Squanto, Smith took careful compass readings and made ocean soundings. His Description of New England, published in 1616, which included a detailed map, became the standard for many years, the one used by such subsequent voyagers as the Pilgrims when they came to Plymouth in 1620. The Sea Mark is the first narrative history of Smith's voyage of exploration, and it recounts Smith's last years when, desperate to return to New England to start a commercial fishery, he languished in Britain, unable to persuade his backers to exploit the bounty he had seen there."--Provided by the publisher. [2015] • BOOK • 1 copy available. 910.4(734.1/.6)"16"
Off the Deep End : A History of Madness at Sea /Nic Compton "Confined in a small space for months on end, subject to ship's discipline and living on limited food supplies, many sailors of old lost their minds - and no wonder. Many still do. The result in some instances was bloodthirsty mutinies, such as the whaleboat Sharon whose captain was butchered and fed to the ship's pigs in a crazed attack in the Pacific. Or mob violence, such as the 147 survivors on the raft of the Medusa, who slaughtered each other in a two-week orgy of violence. So serious was the problem that the Royal Navy's own physician claimed sailors were seven times more likely to go mad than the rest of the population. Historic figures such as Christopher Columbus, George Vancouver, Fletcher Christian (leader of the munity of the Bounty) and Robert FitzRoy (founder of the Met Office) have all had their sanity questioned. More recently, sailors in today's round-the-world races often experience disturbing hallucinations, including seeing elephants floating in the sea and strangers taking the helm, or suffer complete psychological breakdown, like Donald Crowhurst. Others become hypnotised by the sea and jump to their deaths. Off the Deep End looks at the sea's physical character, how it confuses our senses and makes rational thought difficult. It explores the long history of madness at sea and how that is echoed in many of today's yacht races. It looks at the often-marginal behaviour of sailors living both figuratively and literally outside society's usual rules. And it also looks at the sea's power to heal, as well as cause, madness."--Provided by the publisher. 2017 • BOOK • 1 copy available. 613.86(26)
The English convict hulks 1600s-1868 : transporting criminals to Australia /Mick Davis. "In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Britain had eased its problem of crowded jails and surplus criminals by packing them into ships and sending them off to the American colonies to be sold as what amounted to slave labour. All this came to an end with the revolution of 1775 and the legal system was stuck with an ever-increasing army of desperate felons. As there was no national prison system, these felons were crammed on to derelict sailing ships, the hulks, and put to hard labour in appalling conditions, mainly along the rivers Thames and Medway. Their story has been largely ignored by generations of historians and here, for the first time, detailed accounts of their plight, along with the lives and careers of the quite extraordinary men who ruled over them, is examined. Duncan Campbell, for instance, was the ship's captain and plantation owner who first organised the hulk system, and Aaron Graham the magistrate who spied upon, and then defended, the leader of the Nore mutiny and employed William Bligh of the Bounty mutiny to captain his ships. There are biographies of some of the colourful rogues, children and gentleman thieves who were crammed together and condemned to spend years in despair, starvation and degradation, often with their arms and legs manacled and subject to vicious punishments for minor infringements of the regulations. In theory, the hulks were simply holding pens until convicts could be shipped off to the new colonies in Australia, but many sentenced to be transported for terms of between seven years to life were destined to serve most of, if not all, their term onboard. Those that did make it to the other side of the world after a harrowing journey were seldom better off and their story is told in the final chapter."--Provided by the publisher. 2024. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 994.02