A few years ago, I enjoyed reading Ian Friel's Britain & the Ocean Road: Shipwrecks & People 1297-1825, which as I noted in that review, explored "the evolution of ships and sailors through the lens of eight voyages that ended in shipwrecks." I guess not much of note happened on the oceans for the next 29 years, since 1854 is when Friel picks up the narrative with a look at more recent history.

Breaking Seas, Broken Ships: People, Shipwrecks & Britain 1854-2007 begins with a letter to William Collis, an Irishman living in Philadelphia, informing him that his wife and five children had changed travel plans and would be coming to America on the liner City of Glasgow rather than the City of Manchester as originally planned. The ship set out from Liverpool on March 1, 1854, with crew and passengers totaling 430. The ship never arrived, likely a victim of an iceberg along the way.

It's the first of several stories in the book, all tragic, each thoroughly described and discussed in a slim volume -- just 141 pages, followed by a comprehensive bibliography, copious notes and an index -- that is remarkably light reading, given the dark subject matter.

In each chapter, Friel familiarizes readers with the ships, officers, crew members and passengers involved in the incident in question. He delves deeply into each ship's history, relating its construction, contemporary advances in nautical technology, the ship's various uses, and its history up to the date of its end. He explains the ship's route, the hazards it might face along the way and the location of its sinking.

Perhaps most importantly, he talks intimately about the people involved, giving each calamity a human face. He describes in detail the circumstances leading up to each wreck, explaining exactly what went wrong and, if pertinent, who was to blame. When possible, he also relates the aftermath, such as a court martial to assign guilt or the later lives of survivors.

The second story, set in 1872, follows in the aftermath of a winter storm off the Northumbrian coast, with the small wooden collier brig Russell among several ships lost that day, and a glass soda bottle that survived the tempest and washed ashore carrying a message from a seaman on the Russell to his wife, Ann, who was newly made a widow. Again, Friel frames his exposition with a very human, emotional touchpoint that involves the reader in what otherwise could be dry historical text.

Breaking Seas, Broken Ships contains just seven chapters, each focused on a very different type of ship in a very different situation. Other ships featured include HMS Victoria, which sank in the Mediterranean in 1893 after a vice-admiral made a poor choice in navigation, leading to a collision with another British warship during maneuvers; SS Terence, a merchant ship that went to the bottom in 1917 after duking it out with a German U-boat, U-81, in the Atlantic; HMS Dorsetshire and HMS Cornwall, a pair of heavy cruisers that fell prey to a Japanese air assault in 1942; SS Torrey Canyon, a devastating (and avoidable) calamity involving an oil tanker off the coast of Cornwall; and MSC Napoli, a container ship that in 2007 littered the coast of East Devon with sundry goods after the ship's hull cracked open in heavy weather.

Besides a surprising amount of detail about the ships, crews and other specifics of each doomed voyage, Friel also gives a great deal of information on tangential topics, such as the evolution of the merchant marine and changes in the way oil and other products are transported on the ocean. He also tracks the decline of Britain as the world's foremost naval power, both militarily and commercially speaking. You will certainly come away from this book with a thorough education.

You would be forgiven for thinking that a book about the history of British shipwrecks might be just a bit boring, but Friel's work is anything but dull. Breaking Seas, Broken Ships is a comprehensive look at a small sampling of stories, and it's a fascinating read. Combined with Britain & the Ocean Road, it provides an extensive peek into a vast subject. I would not have complained if this book was even longer.