A stirring tale of life aboard ship during the last great days of the Merchant Navy New junior officer Laddie signs on to the cargo liner Antigone on a voyage to the Far East. He finds himself part of a crew who all have their own stories to tell about life at sea. Over the course of the eventful journey to Hong Kong and Singapore, he comes to know them all, from Captain 'China Dick' Richards and the experienced and remote Master to the vulnerable...

Among the coral outcrops of the island of Rota, lies the wreck of a Spanish galleon, the Santa Margarita - Spring 1601. This is a reconstruction of the Santa Margaritas disastrous last voyage, beset by an extraordinary sequence of typhoons and storms. Based on what little is known of the ships journey overloaded cargo, bad-blood amongst the crew and a curse we are told a story of greed, horror, deprivation and unimaginable hardship by the handful...

"Fear and fighting on the High Seas. When William Kite runs away to sea to escape a charge of murder, he finds himself aboard the Enterprize , a Liverpool Guineaman, or slave ship, destined for the coast of West Africa. Once loaded with slaves, the ship then crosses the Atlantic, bound for the sugar plantations of the West Indies. Despite the accusation hanging over him, Kite's compassion for the slaves' helplessness finds him serving as a surgeon...

For the British, the Battle of the Atlantic was a fight for survival. They depended on the safe transit of hundreds of convoys of merchant ships laden with food, raw materials and munitions from America to feed the country and to keep the war effort going, and they had to export manufactured goods to pay for it all. So Britain's merchant navy, a disparate collection of private vessels, became the country's lifeline, while its seamen, officially non-combatants,...

During the last four years of the Second World War, the Western Allies secured Russian defenses against Germany by supplying vital food and arms. The plight of those in Murmansk and Archangel who benefited is now well known, but few are aware of the courage, determination and sacrifice of Allied merchant ships, which withstood unremitting U-boat attacks and aerial bombardment to maintain the lifeline to Russia. In the storms, fog and numbing cold...

A wartime attack on a defenceless merchant convoy brings the intent of the Admiralty into question. Was it merely a bad tactical decision or something more sinister? Why did Admiral Dudley Pound scatter Convoy PQ17 in the Barents Sea on the evening of 4th July 1942? Most of the merchant ships were destroyed while not a single one of the warships assigned to protect them was lost, casting a long shadow over subsequent events. Why did Pound act as...

Captain John Mackinnon and his ship, the Matthew Flinders, are embarking on their last voyage. Both endangered species, they symbolize the irreversible, quiet decline of the British merchant fleet. But this journey to Hong Kong will prove to be anything but quiet. Internal tensions among the crew provoke unrest and lead to a navigation error, steering them right into the violent, destructive path of Typhoon David. Suddenly the crew of the Matthew...

The part played in the Cold War by the Royal Navy's submarines still retains a great degree of mystery and, in the traditions of the 'Silent Service,' remains largely shrouded in secrecy. Cold War Command brings us as close as is possible to the realities of commanding nuclear hunter-killer submarines, routinely tasked to hunt out and covertly follow Soviet submarines in order to destroy them should there be any outbreak of hostilities. Dan Conley...

"A stirring tale of life aboard ship during the last great days of the Merchant Navy New junior officer Laddie signs on to the cargo liner Antigone on a voyage to the Far East. He finds himself part of a crew who all have their own stories to tell about life at sea. Over the course of the eventful journey to Hong Kong and Singapore, he comes to know them all, from Captain "˜China Dick' Richards and the experienced and remote Master to the vulnerable...