After more than a century of silence, the true story of one of history's most notorious mutinies is revealed in Joan Druett's riveting "nautical murder mystery" (USA Today). On May 25, 1841, the Massachusetts whaleship Sharon set out for the whaling ground of the northwestern Pacific. A year later, while most of the crew was out hunting, Captain Howes Norris was brutally murdered. When the men in the whaleboats returned, they found four crew members...

Auckland Island is a godforsaken place in the middle of the Southern Ocean, 285 miles south of New Zealand. With year-round freezing rain and howling winds, it is one of the most forbidding places in the world. To be shipwrecked there means almost certain death.In 1864 Captain Thomas Musgrave and his crew of four aboard the schooner Grafton wreck on the southern end of the island. Utterly alone in a dense coastal forest, plagued by stinging blowflies...

Wiki Coffin, linguist aboard the U.S. Exploring Expedition, the famous voyage meant to put America at the forefront of 19th century scientific discovery, brings many skills to his job. Whether he's translating native languages, assisting his good friend Captain George Rochester as unofficial first mate, or upholding the rule of law as deputy to the sheriff of the port of Virginia, Wiki is never far from the action aboard the seven ships that make...

It is February 1839, and the ships of the United States Exploring Expedition are thrashing about dreaded Cape Horn, on their way to a rendezvous at Orange Harbor, Tierra del Fuego, on a crazy mission to be the first to find Antarctica. A sealing schooner hails the brig Swallow with a strange tale of a murdered corpse on an iceberg-surely a case for Wiki Coffin, half-Maori, half-Yankee "linguister," who is the representative of American law and order...

It was not just the men who lived on the brink of peril when under sail at sea. Lucretia Jansz, who was enslaved as a concubine in 1629, was just one woman who endured a castaway experience. Award-winning historian Joan Druett (Island of the Lost, The Elephant Voyage), relates the stories of women who survived remarkable challenges, from heroines like Mary Ann Jewell, the "governess" of Auckland Island in the icy sub-Antarctic, to Millie Jenkins,...

Wiki Coffin plays many parts on the U.S. Exploring Expedition--sailor, linguist, navigator, and, as half-Maori, cultural go-between. But, then the brig Swallow reaches the coast of Patagonia, an area infamous for its rough gauchos and revolutionary spirit, and he must take on his other role, that of agent of U.S. law and order. A New England whaler shows up, desperate to find the devious trader who has cheated him of a thousand dollars and a schooner....

Condemned to death by the Sultan of Brunei, Nelson O'Cain seeks to save himself with a tattoo of a dragon, a rampant dragon with wings outstretched, the same dragon that was carved on an obelisk on a small island at the mouth of a river in Borneo. Not only was the pillar supposed to be a man who had been turned to stone, but the carved dragon was a vital clue to where Hochman the pirate buried a great treasure. Captain Michael Gardiner and his seafaring...

Like a phantom dogging Harriet Gray's trail, Frank Sefton is polished, charming-and utterly ruthless. Once, he abandoned the actress, to a miserable fate on the far-flung shores of New Zealand. Now, he is back in her life-full of devious schemes to rob and mortify her, far from the protection of Captain Jake Dexter, and his gold-seeking crew.

He was an expert navigator who drew a chart of the Pacific encompassing 2,500 miles and locating nearly 100 islands totally unknown to Europeans. This man was also a translator, an artist, a high priest, a brilliant orator, and a most devious politician. A European polymath? No, merely the greatest known Polynesian navigator of the 18th century. Tupaia sailed with Cook from Tahiti, piloted the Endeavour across the South Pacific, and interceded on...

ABOUT THE PROMISE OF GOLD TRILOGY The Indians had tales of a lake of gold, and a race of women who lived there, who ate off gold, lived off gold, wore gold clothing, and a queen called Calafia who named her territory California... The Gosling, a brig of questionable ownership, has a captain who is driven by the same quest for Conquistador gold that had once drawn Henry Morgan, pirate. But, if there were dark secrets below the decks of the Gosling,...