Britain and the Ocean Road: Shipwrecks & People, 1297–1825

The renowned maritime historian and archeologist examines 600 years of shipwrecks to offer a fresh take on British life in the Age of Sail.

In Britain and the Ocean Road, Dr. Ian Friel reexamines how and why Britain became a global sea power. With new firsthand research and provocative insights, the human stories of eight shipwrecks serve as waypoints on the voyage, bringing to life sailors, seafaring families, passengers, merchants, pirates, explorers, and many others.

The narrative encompasses an extraordinary range of people, ships and events, such as a bloody maritime civil war in the thirteenth century; a seventeenth-century American teenager who stumbled into a life of piracy; a British warship that fought at Trafalgar—on the French side; and the floating hell of a Liverpool slave-ship, sunk in the year before the slave trade was abolished.

Britain and the Ocean Road is the first of two works using original documentary research to tell the gripping story of Britain, its people, and the sea. The second book, Black Oil on the Waters, takes the story from the age of steam to the twenty-first century.