No ship, large or small, goes to sea without some benefit of Britain's illustrious four-hundred-year-old tradition of seafaring enterprise and ingenuity. As he did in his highly successful earlier books, Waterloo and Trafalgar, David Howarth has woven together the colored threads of a vast tapestry figured with men, treasure hoards, unexplored coastlines and wild and smoky battles. Sovereign of the Seas begins as a book about British sea power and turns into the story of the British Empire and the tale of the adventuresome men--the admirals, captains, explorers, seamen and pirates--who manned the ships and mastered the waves that the world came to regard as Britain's own. Sovereign of the Seas does not assume a deep knowledge of maritime history. Each period--medieval, Elizabethan, the age of Nelson, the reign of steam and iron, the now-faded ideal of Pax Britannica--is excitingly described through stories of individual ships, sailors, voyages and battles. Lavishly illustrated with 24 pages of color and 24 pages of black-and-white plates plus maps, Sovereign of the Seas is a dramatic and international tale told with enthusiasm and flare by a master storyteller. -- Inside jacket flap.