Delilah — James A. Michener

The ship of the title is an over-age U.S. destroyer in the far Pacific. Its crew ranges from the most upright and spotless of officers to the lowest and most brutish of stokers. By the time you finish the chronicle of deep, and its encounters with the delights and dangers of the shore, you will have experienced and unequalled evocation of a vanished era of the maritime past, and an enduring emboditment of adventure as timeless as the eternal love affair between man and the sea