Within 'Sirens and Seriemas', Paul Brooke explores the wild places of Brazil through photography and poetry. A former biologist and naturalist, Brooke travelled the Amazon and Pantanal regions of Brazil studying culture, history and natural history. The poems address pressing environmental issues such as deforestation, extinction, overhunting, overpopulation, urbanization and wildness. The photographs chronicle the amazing beauty and danger, the culture of Amazonian peoples and multi-colored landscapes.

'Their fruits be diverse and plentiful, as nutmegs, ginger, long pepper, lemons, cucumbers, cocos, sago, with divers other sorts...' Scholar, spy, diplomat and supreme propagandist for Elizabethan sea power, Richard Hakluyt's accounts of famed explorers mythologised a nation growing rapidly aware of the size and strangeness of the world - and determined to dominate it. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Richard Hakluyt (c 1552-1616). Hakluyt's Voyages and Discoveries is available in Penguin Classics.

Until the 1880s, British travellers to Arabia were for the most part wealthy dilettantes who could fund their travels from private means. With the advent of an Imperial presence in the region, as the British seized power in Egypt, the very nature of travel to the Middle East changed. Suddenly, ordinary men and women found themselves visiting the region as British influence increased. Missionaries, soldiers and spies as well as tourists and explorers started to visit the area, creating an ever bigger supply of writers, and market for their books. In a similar fashion, as the Empire receded in the wake of World War II, so did the whole tradition of Middle East travel writing. In this elegantly crafted book, James Canton examines over one hundred primary sources, from forgotten gems to the classics of T E Lawrence, Thesiger and Philby. He analyses the relationship between Empire and author, showing how the one influenced the other, leading to a vast array of texts that might never have been produced had it not been for the ambitions of Imperial Britain. This work makes for essential reading for all of those interested in the literature of Empire, travel writing and the Middle East.

West Africa in the 1970s was a volatile melange of old and new; of aspiration, corruption, power and influence. In its midst, Ian Mathie laboured in his role as a water engineer to help improve the lives of ordinary people. His work brought him in contact with presidents, kings, emperors, chiefs and a succession of extraordinary characters. Circumstances contrived to place him at dinners with four heads of state whose rule had immense impact, positive and negative, on their countries and on West and Central Africa: Mobutu of Zaire, Traore of Mali, Senghor of Senegal and Eyadema of Togo. In 'Supper with the President', he recalls the events and the insights they gave him, interweaving those experiences with true stories of other extraordinary brushes with sorcery, slavery, wildlife conservation, desert travel and a jail-break that could only happen in Africa.

In the summer of 1883 Belgian travel writer Jules Leclercq spent ten days on horseback in Yellowstone, the world's first national park, exploring myriad natural wonders: astonishing geysers, majestic waterfalls, the vast lake, and the breathtaking canyon. He also recorded the considerable human activity, including the rampant vandalism. Leclercq's account of his travels is itself a small marvel blending natural history, firsthand impressions, scientific lore, and anecdote. Along with his observations on the park's long-rumoured fountains of boiling water and mountains of glass, Leclercq describes camping near geysers, washing clothes in a bubbling hot spring, and meeting such diverse characters as local guides and tourists from the United States and Europe. Notables including former president Ulysses S. Grant and then-president Chester A. Arthur were also in the park that summer to inaugurate the newly completed leg of the Northern Pacific Railroad. A sensation in Europe, the book was never published in English. This deft translation at long last makes available to English-speaking readers a masterpiece of western American travel writing that is a fascinating historical document in its own right.

Perhaps the funniest travel book ever written, Remote People begins with a vivid account of the coronation of Emperor Ras Tafari – Haile Selassie I, King of Kings; an event covered by Evelyn Waugh in 1930 as special correspondent for The Times. It continues with subsequent travels in throughout Africa, where natives rub shoulders with eccentric expatriates; settlers with Arab traders and dignitaries with monks. Interspersing these colourful tales are three ‘nightmares’ which describe the vexations of travel, including returning home.

The small, handwritten volume which is Robert Marten's diary of his travels in East Anglia is carefully conserved in the Norfolk Record Office. Marten writes of Great Yarmouth, where he landed after the journey by steamer from London, of Norwich as the county town of Norfolk and of Cromer, where he and his family enjoyed several days exploring. His picture of the county in September 1825, combined with the detail in his pencil sketches, reveals an early 19th century world to us. Editor Elizabeth Larby has carefully annotated the text, providing a context to further our understanding of the journey and the age.

In 1598 merchants of the City of London paid for a Present to be given by Queen Elizabeth to Sultan Mehmet III of Turkey. In return the merchants hoped to secure trading concessions, and the Virgin Queen to turn the Sultan's military might on her Spanish enemies. The Present was a carved, painted and gilded cabinet about sixteen feet high, six feetwideand five feet deep. It contained a chiming clock with jewel-encrusted moving figures combined with an automatic organ, which could play tunes on its own for six hours - or by hand to the point of exhaustion. The Present was dismantled and dispatched on a merchant ship early in 1599. It took six months to get from London to Constantinople. With it went four craftsmen. They were Thomas Dallam the organ builder, John Harvey the engineer, Michael Watson the carpenter and Rowland Buckett the painter. Dallam was just twenty four years old. On their odyssey they encountered storms, volcanoes, exotic animals, foreign food, good wine, pirates, brigands, Moors, Turks, Greeks, Jews, beautiful women, barbarous men, kings and pashas, armies on the march, janissaries, eunuchs, slaves, dwarves and finally the most powerful man in the known world, the Great Turk himself. Faithfully translated into modern prose, unembellished and unedited, this illuminating historical source reads as if its Elizabethan author were alive today.

'Oliver is an evocative storyteller, vividly bringing his tales to life' BBC History From Genghis Khan's domination on earth to Armstrong's first steps on the moon, discover the 100 moments that defined humanity and shaped our world forever. Neil Oliver takes us on a whistle-stop tour around the world and through a million years to give us this unique and invaluable grasp of how human history pieces together. From the east to the west, north to south, these 100 moments act like stepping stones allowing us to make sense of how these pivotal events have shaped the world we know today. Including many moments readers will expect - from the advent of the printing press to the birth of the internet - there are also surprises, and with them, some remarkable, unforgettable stories that give a whole new insight on our past. From the bestselling author of The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places, this is outstanding new history of how our world was made from 5000 BC to the present. ********************* Praise for Neil Oliver 'Neil Oliver writes beautifully - bringing the past to life and letting us see ourselves in a new light.' - Professor Alice Roberts 'Brilliantly demonstrates Neil's mastery of the broad sweep of British history and landscape.' - Dan Snow 'Highly-crafted...a vivid, pungent history.' - TLS 'Compelling' - Daily Mail

A remarkable collection of charming and eloquent letters that contain the seeds of Tocqueville's later masterful account of American democracy Young Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in the United States for the first time in May 1831, commissioned by the French government to study the American prison system. For the next nine months he and his companion, Gustave de Beaumont, traveled and observed not only prisons but also the political, economic, and social systems of the early republic. Along the way, they frequently reported back to friends and family members in France. This book presents the first translation of the complete letters Tocqueville wrote during that seminal journey, accompanied by excerpts from Beaumont's correspondence that provide details or different perspectives on the places, people, and American life and attitudes the travelers encountered. These delightful letters provide an intimate portrait of the complicated, talented Tocqueville, who opened himself without prejudice to the world of Jacksonian America. Moreover, they contain many of the impressions and ideas that served as preliminary sketches for Democracy in America, his classic account of the American democratic system that remains an important reference work to this day. Accessible, witty, and charming, the letters Tocqueville penned while in America are of major interest to general readers, scholars, and students alike.

Unexpectedly in 1958, an irreverent British journalist and Australian cartoonist duo were granted visas to visit Communist China at its most closed and inscrutable. Emerging from the writings of Kirwan Ward and the drawings of Paul Rigby is a picture of China at a key moment in its history--still feeding off the exhilaration of the creation of "People's China" in 1949 and full of optimism and blind idealism. A rich collection of insights and observations tinged with skepticism and good humor, this record offers a western perspective of China during Mao Tse-tung's leadership.

The Home of the Blizzard is a tale of discovery and adventure, of pioneering deeds, great courage, heart-stopping rescues and heroic endurance. This is Mawson's own account of his years spent in sub-zero temperatures and gale-force winds. At its heart is the epic journey of 1912-13, during which both his companions perished. Told in a laconic but gripping style, this is the classic account of the struggle for survival of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition - a journey which mapped more of Antarctica than any expedition before or since. The photographs included in this book were taken on the journey by Frank Hurley, later to achieve fame on Sir Ernest Shackleton's Endurance expedition. 'One of the greatest accounts of polar survival in history.' - Sir Ranulph Fiennes

A hard-headed but often hilarious guide to the pleasures and pitfalls of travel by one of Britain's favourite writers.

After the War of 1812, British travelers, intensely curious about the United States, poured across the Atlantic. Hundreds published their impressions in lively, quarrelsome books that infuriated and enchanted Americans and Britons alike. Most of these volumes have been out of print for a century or more.

Here Roger Haydon brings together forty-two excerpts from one generation of these travelers' accounts, between 1815 and 1845, when New York State was a microcosm of the country. In his introduction and prefaces to each selection he describes the kinds of tourists who visited and how they traveled, assessing the general accuracy of their accounts, and provides pertinent background information.

The readings follow the period's most popular itinerary up the Hudson Valley through Albany and its environs on to the spas and the Champlain Valley, across the state via the Erie Canal, the Genesee Valley, and the Finger Lakes to the Niagara Frontier, and down into the Southern Tier to record in vivid detail the generation that saw New York State come to dominate the nation. In Upstate Travels, these travelers' voices are accessible again to entertain and inform all who are interested in New York history. Bibliography, index, and dozens of period illustrations are included."

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, travelling within North American borders or beyond to exotic locations was difficult at best and disastrous at worst. Mary Schaffer, born into a Pennsylvania-based Quaker family in 1861, not only conquered international travel but also excelled as an explorer, surveyor and photographer in the backcountry of Canada's Rocky Mountains and the isolated communities of Japan and Formosa (now Taiwan). Michale Lang's new book features more than 200 of Mary Schaffer's colourful, hand-painted lantern slides from the archives of the Whyte Musem of the Canadian Rockies. These unique works of art detail some of the indigenous people and breathtaking landscapes of the Rocky Mountains, along with tribal communities of Japan and Formosa. Schaffer's writing, Michale Lang's accompanying narrative and the book's overall design (inspired by the work of Barbara Hodgson, author and designer of "The Tattooed Map," "No Place for a Lady and Opium") opens a unique window on the Victorian obsession with international travel and discovery.

Goethe’s account of his passage through Italy from 1786 to 1788 is a great travel chronicle as well as a candid self-portrait of a genius in the grip of spiritual crisis.

The most comprehensive portrait yet of Richard Hakluyt, indefatigable promoter of English colonization in America Richard Hakluyt the younger, a contemporary of William Shakespeare, advocated the creation of English colonies in the New World at a time when the advantages of this idea were far from self-evident. This book describes in detail the life and times of Hakluyt, a trained minister who became an editor of travel accounts. Hakluyt's Promise demonstrates his prominent role in the establishment of English America as well as his interests in English opportunities in the East Indies. The volume presents nearly 50 illustrations-many unpublished since the sixteenth century-and offers a fresh view of Hakluyt's milieu and the central concerns of the Elizabethan age. Though he never traveled farther than Paris, young Hakluyt spent much of the 1580s recording information about the western hemisphere and became an international authority on overseas exploration. The book traces his rise to prominence as a source of information and inspiration for England's policy makers, including the queen, and his advocacy for colonies in Roanoke and Jamestown. Hakluyt's thought was shaped by debates that stretched across Europe, and his interests ranged just as widely, encompassing such topics as peaceful coexistence with Native Americans, the New World as a Protestant Holy Land, and in, his later life, trade with the Spice Islands.

In the 1920's, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands were among the world's last wild places. Largely unmapped and inhabited by headhunters and cannibals, these jungle islands of the Coral Sea captured the popular imagination as examples of the unknown. Many adventurers went to these remote islands, the least likely of whom were two young American women, Caroline Mytinger and Margaret Warner who set out from San Francisco in 1926 armed with little more than art supplies and a ukelele, used by Margaret to entertain sitters while Caroline painted their portraits. Mytinger and Warner went chasing adventure in the name of science, something rarely done by women at the time, and they did it in the face of universal dissapproval and even terror on the part of their families, who didn't expect them to come back alive. Not only that, but they had virtually no money and no scientific support or backing. But live they did, and they brought back beautiful paintings and the fascinating stories contained in this fine book.

This is the first English translation of the famous risala, letters by the tenth-century traveler Ibn Fadlan, one of the great Medieval travelers in world history, akin to Ibn Batutta. Ibn Fadlan was an Arab missionary sent by the Caliph in Baghdad to the king of the Bulghars. He journeyed from Baghdad to Bukhara in Central Asia and then continued across the desert to the town of Bulghar, near present Kazan. He describes the tribes he meets on his way and gives an account of their customs. His is the earliest account of a meeting with the Vikings, called Rus, who had reached the Volga River from Sweden. His description of the Rus, or Rusiya as he calls them, has produced much discussion about their origins, shockingly free sexual morals standards, customs, treatment of slaves and women, burial traditions, and trading habits, all explained in detail by Ibn Fadlan. The story of his travels has fascinated scholars and even prompted Michael Chrichton to write the popular novel ""Eaters of the Dead,"" which was made into a film entitled ""The 13th Warrior.

An unflagging traveler and diarist, the Reverend Andrew Burnaby embarked on a two-year tour of the American colonies in 1759. Originally published in England in 1775, his account of his travels includes commentaries about people, politics, taxes, trade, and the state of the arts and sciences; detailed descriptions of the natural surroundings; amusing anecdotes; and predictions about the future of the colonies. It remains a vivid and valuable primary source on life in the American colonies before the Revolution. Also included in this volume is Burnaby's "Diary of the Weather," kept between January 1760 and December 1762.

Andrew Burnaby's Itinerary: Virginia (Williamburg, King William, Fredericksburg, Colchester, Mount Vernon, Winchester) Maryland (Annapolis, Fredericktown) Delaware (New Castle) Pennsylvania (Philadelphia) New Jersey (Trenton, Princeton, Perth-Amboy) New York (New York City, Long Island) Rhode Island (Newport, Providence) Massachusetts (Boston) New Hampshire (Portsmouth)

Cooper published, eventually, five volumes of travel writings in epistolary form on his journeys around western Europe, all now available from CSP. This volume describes his travels and observations with his family in large parts of Italy.