The best books on shipwrecks

Nicola Pierce’s Titanic: True Stories of Her Passengers, Crew and Legacy details not only Titanic’s story, but her sister’s tragedies. It questions whether Bruce Ismay was really a villain and poses the idea that he might be a hero; it critically examines Captain Smith’s behaviour the night of the sinking. It follows the events of the Carpathia and Californian, lending insight into what happened on both ships that night, reminding us the Titanic didn’t just hit an iceberg: She was trapped in an iceberg field. It finishes on the Mackay-Bennett, the funeral ship sent to ferry back as many of Titanic’s dead as they could, reminding us that the tragedy didn’t end on the 15th of April, but would continue for months on end – and for many, years. 

Pierce’s novel was one of my biggest sources for my book. I’d heard of the Mackay-Bennett funeral… show more.

High school student Kip Morgan wins an internship at an oceanographic institute in Hawaii where he, with help of new friend Julie Scott, overcomes multiple personal and engineering challenges to solve an archaeological mystery and raise a sunken ship from the sea floor. This story from the 1970s was a key in guiding me toward a life of science, and the portrayal of a realistic, mentored research experience gave me a vision for what I might do in my own journey through college and into science. I loved the exotic location, scuba diving and seafloor exploration, mystery, adventure, and romance!

This is a classic tale of a wild horse that only one person can tame, a trope that resonates with every horse lover the world over, me included!

A shipwreck leaves horse-mad Alec stranded on a desert island with the Black, a wild Arabian stallion. The pair must learn to trust each other if they are to survive.

But this is as much a story about horse racing as it is a shipwreck tale, and when Alec and the Black return home to America the Black’s incredible speed sees him taking part in a match race against the two fastest racehorses of the day.

The race scores high in the drama stakes, but for me it’s Alec’s bond with the Black that makes this book unforgettable.

In January 1971, the Scotsman Dougal Robertson embarked with his wife and children on what was to be the dream of a lifetime: an extended sea voyage aboard their 43-foot wooden schooner, the Lucette. Eighteen months later, as she plied the Pacific some 200 miles west of the Galapagos, the Lucette was rammed by a pod of killer whales; the Robertsons had barely enough time to flee the ship before it sank. They spent the next 37 days adrift, first in the ship’s inflatable raft and later, after the raft gave out, in its tiny dinghy. They braved storms, sharks, and the perpetual lack of food and fresh water before they were rescued by a passing ship. First published in 1973, Robertson’s gripping, day-by-day account of their ingenious survival tactics is a classic of the castaway-narrative genre.

In the Eye of All Trade is a gigantic book. Do not let the book’s size scare you. It tells the history of Bermuda, and the greater Caribbean, from a maritime perspective. In six chapters, Jarvis traces how Bermuda transitioned from tobacco to maritime society. If you stick with it, you will uncover how Bermudian seafarers traveled as far as Belize to facilitate an inter-island trade in salt, mahogany, and even turtles. Bermudian success rested on adaptability to their isolated location.

I read this play first aged sixteen, and connected strongly with it, because of the young motherless shipwrecked heroine. 

I spent significant periods of time with my grandfathers when I was growing up, and I read Prospero more as a grandfather figure than a father one.

When Freud and I were in the studio for days and weeks and months together, I felt like Miranda on Prospero’s island. The same created world. The same isolation. 

With Lucian as the Prospero figure, summoning a few other characters that came and went to his studio.

No one can go to a fictional island of course, but yet Shakespeare takes us there.

This book gives a great example of what happens when humans try too hard to tinker with nature. Of course, sometimes science does need to tinker with nature for the greater good of humanity and scientific progress but this story is disturbing on many levels because it touches upon various aspects of human responsibility with regard to nature. Mainly on the philosophical and moral levels relating to how much power humans should ultimately wield over nature and what benefits or drawbacks are derived from such control. Obviously, humans can alter nature at a cost but what happens when we do, and what is the potential fallout from meddling with nature?

I just love hidden history, especially the hidden history of strong Southern women, and no one does it better than Patti Callahan. This tale of survival, told in two timelines inspired by the mystery surrounding the sinking of “The Titanic of the South,” explores the themes of friendship, grief, family, second chances, and more. Truly a historical fiction masterpiece.

This is another history that drew me in with a tightly focused story — an 1879 expedition to reach the North Pole — then overwhelmed me with a slowly dawning realization: The expedition was sheer insanity based on assumptions that are whacky beyond belief but were state-of-the-art thinking less than a century and a half ago. George Washington De Long and his crew aboard the Jeanette left San Francisco expecting to spend a single winter trapped in the polar ice before popping into a temperate Arctic Sea and steaming their way straight to the apex of Planet Earth. Instead, the crew endured more than two years of almost unimaginable hardship. That any of them survived to tell the tale testifies to the indomitability of the human spirit.

The Lifeboat is one of the first-period books I ever remember reading, and I was hooked by it from the first page. Told in the first person we follow Grace, as she retells the horrific incidents that have happened to her during the sinking of the Express Alexandra, becoming a widow, and spending three weeks trapped on a cramped lifeboat. I credit this book with being the first to inspire me in the world of historical fiction, both as a reader and writer.

Island novelizes the “purely aesthetic… sacramental vision” Huxley discovered on mescaline. It features mind-altering drugs, spiritualism, and conventional sex. It championed spiritual growth, environmentalism, and peaceful co-existence in an agricultural society. Huxley supposes a remote island where the best (white) people live in spiritual harmony away from the materialism, capitalism, and technological progress that he satirized in his immensely popular novel, Brave New World.

I chose Island because of Huxley’s other-worldly intellectual quietism, which appealed to city-bred, university-educated 60s people disillusioned by materialism. They chose a simpler, traditional, agricultural way of life, emulating Huxley’s rejection of technological progress, capitalism, and revolution.