The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea (2nd edition)

This is a brand new edition of a work first published in 1976. It aims to explore every aspect of life on and under the seas – from shanties, shipwrecks, and oceanography to biographies of the great sailors, explorers and inventors of the maritime world. The present editor is I.C.B. Dear who has taken over from the late Peter Kemp. Both the editor and the numerous contributors are all well known and respected in their fields of expertise.

As such, it is a totally absorbing work; one of those books which one can open to check a reference and find...