Texas Shipwrecks

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The Texas coastline and offshore waters are flat, shallow, featureless, filled with shoals and subject to extreme weather including hurricanes and nor’easter gales. Throw in two centuries of naval warfare in Texas waters and you get a recipe for shipwrecks. All sorts of shipwrecks, from Spanish treasure fleets to simple working boats. There are ships of pirates, navies, cotton traders, immigrants, anglers, and oil shippers lining the coast, covering the sea bottom, and blanketing the riverbeds of Texas. In this talk, Mark Lardas, author of the new book Texas Shipwrecks, will tell the story of Texas’s maritime history and heritage as revealed through these shipwrecks.

Mark Lardas

Mark Lardas is a freelance writer, amateur historian, model-maker, and one-time engineer who now works as a quality manager at WheelTug, Ltd. Lardas holds a BS in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering from the University of Michigan but spent most of his career as a space navigator and software engineer on the NASA Shuttle program. His earthbound interests include model making and writing. He is president of the Gulf Coast Ship Modeling Society and author of eighteen published books.