In this paper, a nonlinear adaptive fault-tolerant control strategy is developed to force an underactuated ship with thruster redundancy to follow a predefined path, despite the presence of unknown system parameters and environmental disturbances induced by wave, wind and ocean current.The techniques involved in the design and analysis include the backstepping, parameter projection techniques and a traverse function.It is shown that with our proposed controller, the reference path can be tracked globally with an arbitrarily small tracking error.Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed controller.