The motto of this richly illustrated book from 1934 ("The ship depends more on the rudder than the rudder on the ship") simultaneously symbolizes its content: It is also about the people who have defied the great dangers of seafaring for centuries, who sacrificed their lives and those who returned home. The book describes the era of the great sailing ships, the specifics of their voyages, the strains of extreme travel times, the challenges around Cape Horn, and much more. Other chapters deal with the clipper ships and the backgrounds of their emergence, which were nothing other than the opium trade, and describe the fates of well-known and unknown sailors, such as the Maria Rickmers, the Preussen, several Laeisz sailors, the training ship Pommern, the Bulgaria, and many others. It also addresses shipwrecks and catastrophic losses of then-modern vessels like the Guten.