In the 450 years since Jacques Cartier's arrival, Prince Edward Island's history has been tied to the sea and to ships. From the first explorers, through immigrants, traders, sailors, and fishermen, thousands of seafaring people and their ships have come and gone - many lost to the relentless sea.

Julie V. Watson has dug through the archives and unearthed accounts of many harrowing tales: some stories have become legends on the Island; others have been nearly lost to history; but the author has revived them here.

The expulsion of the Acadians in the 1750's led to a disastrous voyage for 1,500 who were sent as British prisoners to France. Twenty years later, sixty Scottish families emigrating to the New World on the Annabella in 1770 experienced a trip only a seafarer could imagine. A similar voyage by a group of English settlers, five years later, is told in the personal account of a ten-year-old girl. Here also is the amazing 1836 adventure of Tommy Tuplin, six, who was washed overboard in a storm, then washed back into the ship's rigging.

Shipwrecks & Seafaring Tales of Prince Edward Island includes fascinating stories of buried treasure, legends of ghost ships, accounts of a visit by renegades from the American War of Independence, and tales of storms which have become part of the Island's history and folklore - the Yankee Gale of 1851, which took 100 lives and a number of ships, and the August Gale of 1873.

Readers will marvel at the dedication of 1829 postal workers who provided winter mail service by ice boat across the Northhumberland Strait; the dramatic rescue of the Amitie by the Jenny Lind in 1847; the sad fate of the Marco Polo: the incredible story of Jack MacPhee and how he survived to become a judge - in China; and the rum-running Nellie J. Banks, which was finally captured by the RCMP in 1938.

Add to this stories of seal hunts, waterspouts, U-boats, airmen rescued from an ice floe, storms, ice traps, sharks, and the rescue of sperm whales, and you start to share in what it means to be an Islander - and what the unforgiving sea can yield.