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In The Cruise of the Arctic Star, Scott O'Dell takes a voyage up the length of the California coast in his cedar-hulled offshore cruiser named Arctic Star.

Spanish seminarian Julián Escobar, known to the Mayas as Lord Kukulcán and worshipped as a god, witnesses the fall of the Mayan and Incan civilizations with the coming of Cortés and Pizarro.

Jim Lynne is idly playing darts in Liverpool when his brother, Ted, calls him over to a table to ask a question about the ship that he's working on. It seems the ship, enigmatically named the 290, is not the cargo ship that people are saying it is. Whatever its purpose, it is certainly built for speed. But Jim thinks he knows that purpose: it is being built for the Confederate navy.

Hattie Owen prefers to be steeped in the familiarity of her small-town life than to think about the vast world beyond her own. Her family's boarding house is where she feels most at home, with its eccentric tenants and predictable routines, so different from the controlling and repressive home of her well-to-do grandparents who live nearby.