This book is a handy guide for the visitor to the extraordinary collection of maritime artefacts housed in a former warehouse on the Hamburg waterfront.

The collection itself is largely the original private collection of one man, Peter Tamm, that consists of over 40,000 items including model ships, uniforms, ship designs and construction plans, weapons, decorations, a wide variety of maritime art and curiosities, such as cruise ship menus.
Each of the 10 floors of the magnificent neo-Gothic building, originally built in 1878, and opened as a museum 130 years later in 2008, is devoted to a specific theme, for instance:
* Explorers, navigation and communications
* The development of shipbuilding and engineering
* Sailing ships, life on naval vessels, piracy and merchant shipping
* Maritime art and ship models

Of particular interest for British visitors, the museum`s archive houses over 150 letters from Lord Horatio Nelson, and the reproduction of the `James Caird`, the small life-boat from Shackleton`s Trans-Antarctic Exhibition used by the German explorer Arved Fuchs when he re-lived the journey in 2000.