95 books like Sea of Glory

Democratically elected captains overseeing multi-ethnic crews in floating meritocracies conducting rogue assaults against an autocratic, kleptocratic, slaveholding world is actually a quite appealing concept.

Yet, this both simplifies and overlooks the often savage and sadistic nature of the violence contained within the so-called Golden Age of Piracy (1650s to 1730s). Johnson deconstructs these complexities through a deep, dive into Henry Every, the 17th Century’s most notorious pirate and his vicious attack on an Indian treasure ship.

His crew was rewarded in rape, murder, mayhem, and financial riches beyond their wildest dreams. I love that the book strips away all our preconception of piracy, both positive and negative, forcing us to consider not just the darker forces of human nature – but also of the social and economic systems that prompted them and which continue to thrive today. 

This is another early American expedition lost to modern memory. In 1810, one of America’s richest men, John Jacob Astor, sent out two expeditions to exploit the riches of the western coast of North America. Unclaimed at the time.

One was to progress overland the other by sea. Both ended in personal and economic disaster. Yet, showcasing moments of heroism and cowardice, selflessness, and greed – but ultimately awakening America to this untapped potential of this rich, rugged, and unforgiving territory.

Stark writes like a novelist weaving rich, character studies Into the narrative that helped invest me in the people and their mostly, unfortunate fates. 

The story of Robert Smalls is one of the lesser-known fantastic tales of the American Civil War.

Smalls was an enslaved man in South Carolina, but such a skilled boat pilot that he was left in charge of a heavily armed Confederate Navy ship, the Planter, while its captain and crew were ashore in Charleston. Audaciously, Smalls planned to steal away not only the ship, but also its entire enslaved crew and their family members. Seventeen people in all.

On the night of May 13, 1862 he did just that. Disguised wearing the captain’s cap, Confederate flag flying from the Planter’s mast, Smalls steamed toward the Union blockade and surrendered the ship. Lineberry brings Smalls and his intrepid feats to life, which only began with the escape and continued with his war service, operating the re-christened U.S.S. Planter as the Union’s first black ship pilot.

In 1789 Lieutenant Fletcher Christian and 18 mutineers turned on the “insufferable” Captain Bligh of the HMS Bounty and set him and 18 loyal crew members adrift in the South Pacific.

The story has loomed so large in popular imagination it has inspired at least 14 books and five films. But the late British journalist, historian, and diver Alexander McKee brought the disparate elements of the story together in perhaps its most accurate, entertaining, and coherent form–way back in 1962.

There’s always more than one side to a story and McKee interrogates them ruthlessly. The journalist in me applauds his efforts to comb through historical records, personal journals, and every piece of flotsam and jetsam he finds to present one of the most compelling true, sea stories ever written.

Not one of villains and heroes, but of the burdens of leadership and the fraying bonds of loyalty within one of… show more.

A few days out of high school, I found myself on a forest fire crew at the North Rim of Grand Canyon, and returned for 15 seasons. The more I pondered the Canyon, the more I wanted to learn about why this strange landscape was valued, which led me to William Goetzmann, who became my grad school advisor.

New Lands, New Men is the third and final volume of a trilogy Goetzmann wrote on the theme. (His second book, Exploration and Empire, won a Pulitzer.) It’s a bit looser, willing to play with the material, and full of the quirky as well as the renown. Its organizing concept that exploration rekindled in the 18th century (with a significant input from modern science) is a major innovation in a field usually devoted to stirring tales of individual adventure and discovery.

Tightwads on the Loose is another honest and well-written account of a couple’s ups and downs, in this case while cruising in the Pacific for seven years; only one year less than my husband and I traveled on our sailboat.

This enticing story also has a lot of parallels with my life: the couple’s age, their sense of adventure, their frugal means, their full-time commitment to their boat for many years, their need to make money, and some of the geographical and cultural experiences. Recognizing experiences and personality traits while reading this book made me enjoy it better.

Luckily, Wendy and her partner did not have to endure numerous dramatic life-altering events. Tightwads on the Loose is an easy-to-read sailing memoir that I highly recommend. 

As if a plague of memory loss that eventually makes you forget how to breathe isn’t scary enough, Cutter takes us deep under the ocean, to a lab where something has gone terribly wrong with our potential saviors. This is the most claustrophobic book I’ve ever read. You can feel the crushing weight of the water and the dark just outside the lab’s walls. There’s a wonderful sort of madness to the whole thing, and one scene, in particular, continues to haunt me.

A small lifeboat is spotted off the coast of Chile in 1821, below the gunnels skeletal men cling to a pile of human bones. Nathaniel Philbrick opens his National Book Award-winning story with an almost incomprehensibly brutal scene and rarely takes a breath for the remaining 300-odd pages. Considered to be the inspiration for Herman Melville's Moby Dick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex is the true story of a ship stove in by a whale in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and the harrowing survival of some of its crew. 

A book that falls between Lummis and Steinbeck chronologically is William Francis Butler’s The Wild North Land: Being the Story of a Winter Journey, with Dogs, Across Northern North America, an account of his retracing of the route of the 18th-century Scottish explorer Alexander McKenzie who traversed much of Canada from Lake Chipewyan in Alberta to the Pacific Ocean. Butler had a dog team whose leader was Cerf-Vola, who distinguished himself for his sagacity and strength. Ultimately, Butler retired him from sled duty to dog companion. That relationship did not prevent Butler from giving the dog to an acquaintance when he returned to England, saying that it broke his heart when he had to lay aside his emotions for “the sterner stuff of civilization.”

A true story of love, loss, and survival at sea. The author’s book cover pretty much tells the true story. There you see two lovers, their heads bowed, and below their profiles the wreckage of a dismasted sailboat, a solitary female figure searching the now calm but empty horizon—the aftermath of pounding rain, gigantic seas, and 140-knot winds. One critic wrote, "this book is life-affirming, a saga of human survival, a tale of loss and victory, proof of the resilience of the human spirit." I totally agree. Be ready to shed a tear or two and maybe read all night. Hollywood made a movie of this book, so it must be a good read.

For the uninitiated sailor, the definition of terms at the back matter is excellent, and learn what happens to a 44’ sailboat in a hurricane. It ain’t pretty, but it is inspiring.