Competently written and the product of considerable research, this book tells of casualties of the sea from the early days of sail to the And Do. Warships are lacking from its pages and so are pirates, for here the elements are the villains, with a few exceptions, such as occasional mutineers and one true monster of the deep, the huge sperm whale, prototype of Moby Dick, that sank the whaler Essex in 1819. Ships great and small sail across the pages and vanish; Grosvenor, bound from Bombay to England in 1782 with the fabulous Peacock Throne of the Moguls aboard and foundering, with the throne, off West Africa; La Fl, a galleon of the Armada, now lying in Tobermory Bay off Argyleshire and resisting centuries of efforts at salvage; Madagascar and Royal Charter, Mor Castle, burning off the New Jersey coast; Titanic, the unsinkable ship, and endless others. Many of the accounts are of necessity apocryphal and there are a few obvious errors, while purists will deplore the author's habit of reporting thoughts and conversations of long-dead men, but these are minor defects in a readable and exciting book. This is no volume to be read in a storm on the North Atlantic, but dry-land travelers who relish tales of disaster at sea should enjoy it. This is more up to the minute than Hanson Baldwin's Sea Fights and Ship (1954), which it overlaps to some extent, though in this book the handling is more dramatic and colorful. The market should be the same.