Famous Shipwrecks.

" Famous Shipwrecks." By Captain Frank H. Shaw. (Elkin, Mathews & Marrot, Ltd. 12s. &d. net.) THIS is a book which everyone interested in the Life-boat Service should read—an account of the most famous wrecks of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, told by a man who is an experienced seaman and fine writer. It is a book of the major tragedies of the sea, but no one con- nected with the Life-boat Service needs to be reminded that to know the tragedies of the sea is not only to know the terrible price which we have paid for sea-power, but to have witnessed the spirit of the sea at its finest. All these stories of sudden destruction and death have some examples of discipline unbroken and courage undismayed in the face of disaster, to lighten their darkness ; so that this book of tragedies is heartening as well as pitiful. It is a vigorous, vivid and moving book.

Among the famous wrecks which Captain Shaw describes are those of the Birkenhead, the Titanic, the Lusitania, the less well-known wreck of H.M.S.

Victoria—strangest and most mysterious of all wrecks—and the Duncan Dunbar, which provides him with, we think, his finest chapter. It could only have been written by a seaman familiar with the old sailing ships, and able to fill in from- his own experience the details of a disaster which only one man sur- vived.

The last six of the nineteen chapters are about the Life-boat Service. One is a brief and admirable sketch called " Genesis of the Life-boat." There are, however, one or two slips in it. The number of lives rescued in the fourteen years from 1852 to 1865 was 7,564, and not 432 as given by Captain Shaw, and, in his account of the designing of the first Life-boats, he gives more credit than is due to Henry Greathead, for he omits to mention that Would- have was the discoverer of the self- righting principle—embodied in his model in 1789, though not adopted until over seventy years later—and that Lukin designed the first of the big Sailing Life-boats. The other five chapters describe the wreck of the Mohegan on the Manacle Rocks, near The Lizard, in October, 1898, with the gallant rescue by the Porthoustock Life-boat, and five Life-boat disasters.

These five are that glorious and terrible day at Whitby, in 1861, when the crews of eight vessels were rescued, and the whole Life-boat Crew, with one exception, lost their lives; the wreck of the Life-boats at Southport and St. Anne's in 1886, the wreck of the Caister Life-boat in 1907, the wreck of the Fethard Life-boat in 1914 and the wreck of the Rye Life-boat in 1928. It would be as well to note three misprints in the names in these accounts.

The hero of the Caister disaster was Haylett, not Hazlett, the scene of the Fethard disaster was Bannow, not Bannon, Bay; and Fethard itself wrongly appears as Zetland. We point these out because we hope that the book will not only be widely read, but go into more editions. For even those who are most familiar with the stories of these Life-boat disasters will read them again with fresh feelings of pity and pride in Captain Shaw's moving narrative..