Ocean sailing needed skill, courage, and experience, and the sea chart was the tool by which ships of trade, transport, or conquest navigated. This examines the history and development of the chart and the nautical map, in both scientific and aesthetic terms as a means of safe and accurate seaborne navigation. The Italian merchant-venturers of the early thirteenth century developed the earliest "portolan" pilot charts of the Mediterranean. The subsequent speed of exploration by European seafarers to the New World, around the Cape of Good Hope, and on trade routes to the East, India, and...

A familiar sight on the Thames at London Bridge, HMS Belfast is Royal Navy light cruiser, one of a group of ten Town-class cruisers, built in Belfast and launched in March 1938. Commissioned in early August 1939 shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, Belfast was initially part of the British naval blockade against Germany. In November 1939 she struck a German mine requiring repairs that lasted two years.

She returned to action in November 1942 with improved firepower, radar equipment, and armor, and saw action escorting Arctic convoys to the Soviet Union and...