Joan Druett

Auckland Island is a godforsaken place in the middle of the Southern Ocean, 285 miles south of New Zealand. With year-round freezing rain and howling winds, it is one of the most forbidding places in the world. To be shipwrecked there means almost certain death.In 1864 Captain Thomas Musgrave and his crew of four aboard the schooner Grafton wreck on the southern end of the island. Utterly alone in a dense coastal forest, plagued by stinging blowflies...

Wiki Coffin plays many parts on the U.S. Exploring Expedition--sailor, linguist, navigator, and, as half-Maori, cultural go-between. But, then the brig Swallow reaches the coast of Patagonia, an area infamous for its rough gauchos and revolutionary spirit, and he must take on his other role, that of agent of U.S. law and order. A New England whaler shows up, desperate to find the devious trader who has cheated him of a thousand dollars and a schooner....

He was an expert navigator who drew a chart of the Pacific encompassing 2,500 miles and locating nearly 100 islands totally unknown to Europeans. This man was also a translator, an artist, a high priest, a brilliant orator, and a most devious politician. A European polymath? No, merely the greatest known Polynesian navigator of the 18th century. Tupaia sailed with Cook from Tahiti, piloted the Endeavour across the South Pacific, and interceded on...

Condemned to death by the Sultan of Brunei, Nelson O'Cain seeks to save himself with a tattoo of a dragon, a rampant dragon with wings outstretched, the same dragon that was carved on an obelisk on a small island at the mouth of a river in Borneo. Not only was the pillar supposed to be a man who had been turned to stone, but the carved dragon was a vital clue to where Hochman the pirate buried a great treasure. Captain Michael Gardiner and his seafaring...

That the Gosling Company should become a theatrical company was a preposterous idea, as crazy as the actual fact that Captain Jake Dexter, once a respectable Yankee mariner, was now an infamous pirate. Yet, he had already travelled such a long, strange path as a fortune-hunting adventurer that metamorphosing into the manager of the first theatre in Sacramento, California, was just another step. But, Jake Dexter could never imagine the danger that...

It was not just the men who lived on the brink of peril when under sail at sea. Lucretia Jansz, who was enslaved as a concubine in 1629, was just one woman who endured a castaway experience. Award-winning historian Joan Druett (Island of the Lost, The Elephant Voyage), relates the stories of women who survived remarkable challenges, from heroines like Mary Ann Jewell, the "governess" of Auckland Island in the icy sub-Antarctic, to Millie Jenkins,...

Money ships were wrecks of treasure-galleons belched up from the bottom of the sea after tremendous storms, yielding doubloons and all kinds of precious treasure ... gold bars and bullion, chests of brilliant gems. Oriental adventurer Captain Rochester spun an entrancing tale to Jerusha, seafaring daughter of Captain Michael Gardiner - a story of a money ship, hidden in the turquoise waters of the South China Sea, which was nothing less than the...

Like a phantom dogging Harriet Gray's trail, Frank Sefton is polished, charming-and utterly ruthless. Once, he abandoned the actress, to a miserable fate on the far-flung shores of New Zealand. Now, he is back in her life-full of devious schemes to rob and mortify her, far from the protection of Captain Jake Dexter, and his gold-seeking crew.

It is February 1839, and the ships of the United States Exploring Expedition are thrashing about dreaded Cape Horn, on their way to a rendezvous at Orange Harbor, Tierra del Fuego, on a crazy mission to be the first to find Antarctica. A sealing schooner hails the brig Swallow with a strange tale of a murdered corpse on an iceberg-surely a case for Wiki Coffin, half-Maori, half-Yankee "linguister," who is the representative of American law and order...

A celebration of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. A collection of heart-warming sea rescue stories, historic and contemporary, from RNLI stations across the UK and Ireland. It will shed light on the terrifying experiences of the rescued, as well as the bravery and commitment of the RNLI volunteers who began saving lives in the 1820s and who continue to reunite an average of 22 people per day with their loved ones.