maritime tragedy. For Pickford, forty-five minutes of terror upon the sea become a grand backdrop for the broader history of Restoration England. John Galluzzo Hanover, Massachusetts
the early morning of a clear day. Even with companion ships and yachts nearby retrieving the crew and passengers as they flounder in the water, more than a hundred souls are lost. What possibly could have gone wrong? A witness to the scene was Samuel Pepys, the great diarist, letter writer, and gossiper. Despite his constant desire to hobnob with England’s elite and an invitation to sail with the would-be king, he was not aboard the ill-fated Gloucester. Instead, he took a berth aboard a different vessel of lesser stature. Did he, perhaps, have reason to avoid sailing aboard Gloucester? Did he know something about the state of the ship that others did not? Author Nigel Pickford pieces together the story through logbooks, journals, letters, and even artifacts recovered from the wreck site. Courts-martial were held to vilify—or exonerate—the navigators responsible for plotting the vessel’s route, widows were paid bounties, and the future king claimed to have been saved by divine providence, signifying, therefore, his right-
ful path to the throne. The book brings to life the coffeehouses of the late seventeenth century, the seedy back-door dalliances of the men and women of the upper classes, and the scheming mind of Samuel Pepys as he reacts to this seemingly inexplicable
Giants of the Sea: Ships & Men Who Changed the World by John D. McCown Jr. (self-published, USA, 2020, 335pp, tables, biblio, $29.95hc) With a background that includes decades as a shipping industry executive, John McCown Jr. covers the business of the maritime transportation realm from inception to the modern era admirably well in his recent book Giants of the Sea. This selfpublished tome covers the history of maritime commerce across the ages and zeroes in on nine visionaries of the last century whose stories of innovation and risk combined with the nuts and bolts of ship finance, manning, environment, and regulation made them titans of the shipping industry and set the course that global maritime commerce would take going into the 21st century.
CIVIL WAR AT SEA The Union Blockade in the American Civil War
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THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE PRESS 61
