Blows of an angry element, heat, thirst, hunger, serious illnesses and, of course, crashes and fatal fires on the high seas - today it is difficult to even imagine how many deadly dangers lay in wait for sailors in the era of the sailing fleet. On the death of the 74-gun ship "Tolskaya Bogoroditsa," which for its time became an event equal in scale to the death of a nuclear submarine "Kursk," about the sad fate of the squadron of the Black Sea Fleet, which died in the Tsemess Bay in 1848, about the crash of the frigate "Polyus", which for a long time became a symbol of the most cruel fate for the sailors of the Baltic Sea, as well as other well-known and unknown disasters of Russian sailing ships, dead and miraculously surviving teams, is told in his book by an excellent connoisseur of the sea, captain 1st rank, journalist and writer Vladimir Shigin.