This 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 Transkei, thanks to the actions of a few non-seamen who displayed the true spirit of the Birkenhead. A total of 5,683 lives were lost when these ships went down. This book is their epitaph.