Instead of shipboard romance we found dramatic cactus deserts and oceans seething with marine life.
"UNHCR's experience over the years with shipboard processing has generally not been positive.
They would have liked their ambassador in Congo to attend last weekend's shipboard talks.
Readers expecting another gripping shipboard drama, along the lines of Mr Philbrick's bestselling "In the Heart of the Sea" (about an ill-fated whaling ship), will be disappointed.
A worldwide shipboard system for monitoring ocean sinks, building on projects like that involving the Benguela Stream, would be a boon.
Shame and silence are cousins, as Ivan Turgenev, perhaps the finest psychologist among the great 19th-century Russian writers, knew from his own experience: he spent a lifetime denying that, during a shipboard fire, he had scrambled into a lifeboat shouting, "Let me on, I'm my mother's only son!"In other respects, Ms Preston, like Mr Ramsay, is commendably historical.
Just as the threat of weapons of mass destruction proved illusory in Iraq, so the sinking of the battleship USS Maine in Havana harbour, the pretext for intervention in Cuba, was not a Spanish plot but, he insists, almost certainly a shipboard accident.
Leaving Porus, he then proceeded down the river and into the Indus, with half his forces on shipboard and half marching in three columns down the two banks.
On shipboard he met a married Polish woman with whom he shared an adulterous love for the next four years, after which time it was mutually renounced.
After being subjected to bouncing waves, corrosive salt sprays, and unpredictable variations in temperature, pressure, and humidity, most shipboard clocks either stopped running or became too unstable to permit accurate navigation.
Besides delivering a bomb with enough velocity to damage a capital ship, the dive bomber forced the addition shipboard of large numbers of automatic guns, of 40 millimetres or less, to supplement the more powerful but slower-firing three- to five-inch antiaircraft guns.
