Disasters at Sea

Every so often I pick up a book written about a complex subject which has been tackled by an author who knows exactly what he is talking about. This is such a book. According to the all-too-short-biography which appears inside the back cover, Richard Cahill spent 40 years of sea and over half that time in command of ships. But this is no ordinary seafarer because he is also a Fellow of the Royal Institute of Navigation and of the Nautical Institute and a graduate of the United States Merchant Marine Academy where he was appointed the first visiting professor in 1981. In short, this man knows his ships and has written two previous books about collisions at sea and strandings. I purchased this particular book in order to discover the truth about the loss of certain ships. After an informative introduction, Cahill tackles the thorny subject of the Titanic in a very refreshing way and I was particularly pleased to see he avoided using a typical cliché picture of the Titanic on the book's cover. Chapter 2 is headed "The Ro-Ro: An Unsafe Design" were have his carefully constructed exposé of no fewer than four ferry disasters. From there on we have chapters headed; Foundering, Fire, Explosion, Collision and Stranding as he includes a number of examples of different accidents disaster and, in some instances, tales of downright incompetence. Apart from the Titanic, other notable inclusions are; The Herald of Free Enterprise, Pamir, Morro Castle, Lakonia, Andrea Doria, Torrey Canyon, Amoco Cadiz and Exxon Valdez - to name but some. This book is so thorough, I can recommend it to anyone who wants to know exactly what happened to cause the ships included here to be lost. NM

I worked on U.S. merchant tankers as a radio operator from 1987 to 1995, and this was required reading for the captains and mates with one of the companies I worked for. This book covers all the major disasters from the time frame indicated. It is written by a British merchant ship captain that has since died. It is written strictly from the perspective of someone on the bridge when the accident occurs. It gives exact details about what the captain/mate was thinking and what communications took place on the bridge VHF radio, etc. It doesn't overwhelm you with details, but it gives you the important things you want to know. The chapters are catergorized like "groundings", "sinkings", "explosions", etc. The book is not written from the perspective of "how did this impact the environment?", etc. If you really want to know what is going on, this is a great read. I especially liked the description of the collision between the Andrea Doria and the Stockholm and what the officers on the bridge were thinking before the collision.