The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea, 2d ed

The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea. I.C.B. Dear and Peter Kemp, editors. Oxford University Press. [pounds sterling]30.00. ix + 678 pages. ISBN 0-19-860616-8. This exhaustive reference book was first published in 1976, and we here have a much expanded and improved second edition. There are over 2,600 entries and 250 illustrations.

Entries have been updated where necessary and, when new scholarship and discoveries demand, rewritten. There are new entries to take account of changes based on satellite navigation and new devises and designs such as the Seacat. The volume includes famous ships such as the CSS Virginia, the Titanic and the Mary Rose, famous navigators such as Columbus, Prince Henry of Portugal or Raleigh, famous fictional characters associated with the sea, such as Robinson Crusoe, famous battles such as Trafalgar or Midway. There are also entries for writers associated with the sea such as Defoe, Melville or C.S. Forester, and statistics on merchant shipping and modern navies. (There is, surprisingly, no entry for the battle of Midway.) The book's scientific adviser, Dr Martin Angel, has contributed a variety of new entries on topics that were little heard of in the 1970s: climate change, marine pollution, and tsunamis are but three. (T.B.)

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