San Antonio College Library

Looks at the early development of navigation, examining how ancient humans discovered the secrets of wind, tides, and stars that allowed them to make long voyages that profoundly changed human civilization.

Story of the westward movement of the Melody-Harford family from Massachusetts to California. Family members go by clipper ship, "Dream of the West," around the Horn. For twenty days the ship encounters a great calm in the South Atlantic and sits motionless. Esther Jackson noted in 1988: "O'Neill uses the calm as a device to motivate the passengers to reveal an intricate pattern of personal crises, crises which he treats as having parallels in the...

This anthology of essays captures the full sweep of America's maritime experience, with narratives from voyagers from the 17th century to the 20th century. Included are writings from Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Jack London, and more.

This book is an opulent, romantic novel, written in the grand manner, set at the height of Europe's belle epoque, about a handsome young man in his mid-twenties, a golden boy who secures a position as a tutor in the household of one of the most prominent bourgeois families in Amsterdam and his entry into a world of moneyed glamour and dangerous temptations. Piet Barol, blue-eyed, dark-haired, seductive and seductively charged, enters this magnificent...

The 48 first-class passengers and the 900 Spaniards in steerage on a passenger-freighter crossing from Mexico to Germany in 1931 are traveling on a voyage of life. The theme of the novel is the passengers' unavailing withdrawal from a life of disappointment, seeking a kind of utopia, and, "without knowing what to do next", setting out for a long voyage to pre-World War II Europe, a world of prejudice, racism and evil. Mrs. Treadwell, a nostalgic American...

After accepting a job teaching English on a small engineering vessel traveling from Shanghai to Texas, Gillian Kendall embarks on a strange journey with no ports of call but exotic emotional landscapes. She is the only female aboard, surrounded by Chinese men. The cosmopolitan graduate student suddenly has to adjust to an alien world, thick with cigarette smoke, unusual sea creatures, and male sexuality. Kendall invites readers to travel with her...

Includes discussions of fictional pre-Columbian voyages, Vinland voyages, voyages of Cabot, Cartier, Frobisher, and others. Good bibliographies.

This account of the voyage of a sailing ship from Bombay harbour to the Port of London explores the psychological pressures on a group of nineteenth century seamen as they face the extemes of nature and the secrets and evasions of two of their comrades.