This is a comprehensive collection of factual tales of shipwrecks, cyclones, mutinies, the pearling and trepang industries, Aboriginal and Islander resistance, black-birding, hermits and renegades and other colourful events and people of the northern Australian coasts, with associated islands and reefs. The stories begin with legendary arrivals and sixteenth-century European landfalls on the Western Australian coast and end with increasing industrialisation and the beginnings of marine archaeology of the 1960s.
