San Antonio College Library

During the Napoleonic Wars, a British frigate, the HMS Surprise, and the larger French warship, Acheron, stalk each other off of the coast of South America. Lucky Jack, as he is referred to by his crew, is well regarded by his men, who trust him implicitly, even after the first devastating battle and an apparent personal vendetta against the French captain. The ship's surgeon balances the violence of his chosen life with the quiet demeanor of the...

No ship, large or small, goes to sea without some benefit of Britain's illustrious four-hundred-year-old tradition of seafaring enterprise and ingenuity. As he did in his highly successful earlier books, Waterloo and Trafalgar, David Howarth has woven together the colored threads of a vast tapestry figured with men, treasure hoards, unexplored coastlines and wild and smoky battles. Sovereign of the Seas begins as a book about British sea power and...

"This wide-ranging book spans the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and charts England's rise to international and colonial power. That rise was achieved, first through a growing awareness and then a conscious exploitation of England's powerful Atlantic situation and maritime potential." "Medieval England had been the focus of a fluctuating land based empire which had embraced much of France, but Early Modern England turned away from such aspirations...

This book presents a comprehensive overview of the activities of the British navy in the Mediterranean Sea from the earliest times until the twentieth century. It traces developments from Anglo-Saxon times, through the Crusades, and to the seventeenth century, when the Barbary corsairs became a major problem. It outlines Britain's involvement in the wars of the long eighteenth century, when Britain obtained bases at Gibraltar, Minorca and Malta and...

"Admiral Nelson captures our imaginations like few other military figures. A mixture of tactical originality, raw courage, cruelty, and romantic passion, Nelson in action was daring and direct, a paramount naval genius and a natural-born predator. Now, in The Nelson Touch, Terry Coleman provides a portrait of Britain's most revered naval figure, based on much fresh research in primary sources."--Jacket.

"Mackey's book demonstrates that the failure of the shadow war can be traced both to poor Confederate command, which allowed irregulars to prey on their own neighbors, and to effective Union countermeasures. As a result, by 1865, the Confederacy had collapsed on both conventional and unconventional fields of conflict."--Jacket.

Admiral Thomas Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald, 1775-1860, was a legend in his lifetime. This biography makes clear that he achieved enough to fill several lifetimes, first as an audacious and brilliant naval tactician in the final years of the struggle against Napoleon, but also as a politician, reformer, inventor, and single-handed campaigner against corruption in the Admiralty. Following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 Cochrane commenced...