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Shipwreck! A Chronicle of British Columbia Marine Disasters and Shipwrecks (2nd edition)

by John MacFarlane 2021

Shipwreck!

Shipwreck! A Chronicle of British Columbia Marine Disasters and Shipwrecks (2nd edition) (Photo from the John MacFarlane collection.)

Author John MacFarlane has carefully curated the stories of 1,900 British Columbia shipwrecks and nautical disasters. The waters of British Columbia are dangerous – and have claimed thousands of vessels and thousands of lives over the last 250 years. The best–selling author is a wellknown authority on BC’s nautical history who has been researching these vessels for more than 45 years.

This is the second edition of a collection of the most significant of those disasters. Each one is documented with detailed accounts in an easy–to–read, easy–to–access book that will please the casual reader as well as the most dedicated nautical historian. In these carefully researched accounts, the author has separated myth from fact to tell true stories of British Columbia marine historical events.

Whether it is reading by a casual browser, or historian reference material, this book will delight anyone interested in shipwrecks. Also included are about 80 photographs (many of them not previously published) of actual wrecks – (there would have been more but in history wreck scenes were seldom "Kodak Moments").

ISBN 978–0–9936954–8–3 (softcover) Available online from AMAZON.


To quote from this article please cite:

MacFarlane, John (2021) Shipwreck! A Chronicle of British Columbia Marine Disasters and Shipwrecks (2nd edition). Nauticapedia.ca 2020. http://nauticapedia.ca/Gallery/Book_Shipwreck.php

Nauticapedia

Site News: January 14, 2025

The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 94,957 vessel histories (with 16,337 images and 13,935 records of ship wrecks and marine disasters).

The mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,599 entries (with 3998 images).

My thanks to Ray Warren who is beginning a long process of filling gaps in the photo record of the vessel histories in the vessel database. Ray has been documenting the ships of Vancouver Harbour for more than 60 years.

Thanks to contributor Mike Rydqvist McCammon for the hundreds of photos he continues to contribute to illustrate British Columbia’s floating heritage.

My very special thanks to our volunteer IT adviser, John Eyre, who (since 2021) has modernized, simplified and improved the update process for the databases into semi–automated processes. His participation has been vital to keeping the Nauticapedia available to our netizens.

Thanks to John Spivey who is beginning his 4th year of fact checking all of the entries in the vessel database.

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