BEYOND HORIZONS

A procession of enterprising and adventurous men in whom fortitude and endurance were dominant, and the small ships of the past, in their awfulness and greatness, make up this compilation, rewritten and personally and vividly interpreted, of chronicles of the sea. From Elizabethan days to the beginning of the 19th century, this describes the hazards for the sailors of those times, the types of ships and the conditions under which the men lived, fought -- and died and centers around individual episodes. A 1740 winter passage around Cape Horn; 1766 and the English landing in Tahiti; the despairing quest of Captain James for a Northwest passage in 1631; the enchantment of English, blown off their course to Virginia, to live on Bermuda in 1609; Alexander Selkirk (Robinson Cruso) and his life as a castaway; good and bad pirates; and Bligh's own account of the mutiny; -- these are tales of survival, of unknown horizons, of ""wooden ships and iron men"", which will never lose their hold for hero worshippers of all ages.