S.O.S. MEN AGAINST THE SEA BY BERNARD EDWARDS IN SOUTH AFRICA

 SOS Men Against the Sea is a superbly dramatised chronicle of 29 ships the loss of which history, by and large, passed by.  Few have ever heard of the Cospatrick, a fully rigged ship destroyed by fire off the Cape of Good Hope in 1874 with the loss of 400 lives.  Or the steamer Utopia which skewered itself on the ram-bow of a warship in Gibraltar Bay and sank in five minutes, taking 500 souls with it.  A similar loss of life occurred when the Russian cruise liner Admiral Nakimov collided with a bulk carrier in the Black Sea in 1986.  There was no loss of life when the cruise liner Oceanis sank off the coast of the Transkei, thanks to the actions of a few non-seamen who displayed the true spirit of the Birkenhead. A total of 5683 lives were lost when these ships went down. This book is their epitaph.   Soft cover, fair condition.  The cover is creased in places.  The paper shows slight foxing but the spine is tight.  206 pages.