Five stories of loss at sea For all its soul-stirring romance, the tall-ship renaissance has a tragic side, and professional mariner and maritime scholar Dan Parrott explores it in this groundbreaking reconstruction of five controversial sea disasters of the past half century. Working from official documents, survivor and expert interviews, and his own considerable tall-ship experience, Parrott re-creates the losses of five sail-training vessels: the 316-foot Pamir (1957), 117-foot Albatross (1961), 117-foot Marques (1984), 137-foot Pride of Baltimore (1986), and 125-foot Maria Asumpta (1995), which together claimed 112 lives. In Tall Ships Down, he reveals that, contrary to official findings, ignorance of and disregard for age-old practices of seamanship were at least as responsible for the tragedies as "acts of God." He vividly re-creates the final voyage of each and the events surrounding the disasters. The book's final section, an unforgettable seminar on seamanship, explores the roles played by ship stability, structural integrity, weather, human error, and standards of risk in tragedies at sea. Read Less