The Bounty Trilogy is great. I recommend it but almost no one will bite. mk might have read it on my recommendation back in the day but I'm not certain. It gave me nightmares.

The first book is about the mutiny led by first mate Fletcher Christian against Captain William Bligh. It's the part of the story that you are more likely to be acquainted with. It's the story of a paranoid and vicious captain pushing his crew to the breaking point. It's brutal and gripping.

The second book is the the most boring of the three. It chronicles the voyage of a score of men, including Captain Bligh, cast out to sea in a long boat with few provisions and inadequate navigational tools. They survive a journey of some four thousand miles. People eat their belts, their shoes, lose their teeth and their minds. It's a story of pain and drudgery. If Bligh was a terrible captain in the first volume he's and amazing navigator and leader in the second.

I found the final volume the most interesting. It follows the lives of the half of the crew that wasn't set out to sea to die. One group scattered across the world and part of the book is an account of the English Navy hunting them down and bringing them to justice. The half that didn't scatter packed up the H.M.S. Bounty and sailed it with a group of Tahitian islanders (mostly women) to the uninhabited island of Pitcairn. Pitcairn was a dot on the map that had only been seen by western eye's once before. By the next time a non-mutineer westerner would see it there was only one man, a bunch of Tahitian women and a bunch of kids alive on the island.

The bulk of this third book is the story of the men dividing up into factions and killing each other off on the island of Pitcairn largely over women.

The three books taken together really dig into the nature of power, the fragility of the bonds of humanity and society, the amount of suffering a man can go through before he will break.

Lots of scholarship on the Mutiny has bloodied peoples regard for Nordoff and Hall's trilogy in the past few decades. Some of the criticism is petty stuff along the lines of weather Fletcher Christian put on his left sock or his right sock first other objections study the rate of and quality of the discipline of Royal Navy and say that Captain Bligh wan't so bad a guy. I think it's a worthy read even if some of the scholarship is a bit shaky.

If you can find a copy at a reasonable price, Preble's Boys; Commodore Preble And The Birth Of American Sea Power is a great overview of the early U.S. Navy. Looks like there is a new book that has been well reviewed that might be a good substitute Intrepid Sailors: The Legacy of Preble's Boys and the Tripoli Campaign. Stephen Decatur, The Tripoli Campaign and the Sea Battles of 1812 are facinating historical subjects that few people know much about. A generation of young men trained as midshipmen under Edward Preble and went on glory in Americas early Navy.

I'm writing at work so I don't have my library at hand but another guy with a fascinating story is Oliver Hazard Perry. He was one of the few successful American Naval men that wasn't in the Preble Club. The Battle of Lake Erie is another story from 1812 that is too little known.

I can't recommend one in particular, I'm sure the internet could, but Horatio Nelson is a guy worth reading about. He was a small, almost effete dandy of man, missing an eye and an arm by the end of his career and he had BALLS OF STEEL. Arthur Wellesley might have beaten Napoleon but Nelson gave him the space to do it. Nelson was one of the most courageous, insubordinate and successful Admirals of all time, he was the perfect foil for Napoleon.

Guys getting shipwrecked is a whole sub genera of the Nautical cannon. I've read a bunch but the one that has stuck with me most recently is Skeletons on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival

Everywhere hailed as a masterpiece of historical adventure, this enthralling narrative recounts the experiences of twelve American sailors who were shipwrecked off the coast of Africa in 1815, captured by desert nomads, sold into slavery, and subjected to a hellish two-month journey through the bone-dry heart of the Sahara. The ordeal of these men - who found themselves tested by barbarism, murder, starvation, death, dehydration, and hostile tribes that roamed the desert on camelback - is made indelibly vivid in this gripping account of courage, brotherhood, and survival.

I'm sure there are a few other good nonfiction picks if I combed my library but these are some that come to mind as I sit here at work. I'll post a few fiction picks later on.