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 first new translation in over 400 years of one of the great works of the Renaissance: an African diplomat's guide to Africa. In 1518, al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan, a Moroccan diplomat, was seized by pirates while travelling in the Mediterranean. Brought before Pope Leo X, he was persuaded to convert to Christianity, in the process taking the name Johannes Leo Africanus. Acclaimed in the papal court for his learning, Leo would in time write his masterpiece, The Cosmography and the Geography of Africa. The Cosmography was the first book about Africa, and the first book written by a modern African, to reach print. It would remain central to the European understanding of Africa for over 300 years, with its descriptions of lands, cities and peoples giving a singular vision of the vast continent: its urban bustle and rural desolation, its culture, commerce and warfare, its magical herbs and strange animals. Yet it is not a mere catalogue of the exotic: Leo also invited his readers to acknowledge the similarity and relevance of these lands to the time and place they knew. For this reason, The Cosmography and Geography of Africa remains significant to our understanding not only of Africa, but of the world and how we perceive it.

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.

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.

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

Memories of Africa, pre-civil war New England, political turmoil in Russia, the end of slavery in Jamaica, and Caribbean pirates; an intrepid black woman experiences many turning points in world history. Nancy Prince paints a blunt picture of the struggle of free blacks to make a living in the North. When Boston failed to provide her with a livable wage, she and her husband found employment on a boat bound for Russia. A black household servant was a rare commodity in the land of the czars, and Prince was well compensated in St. Petersburg.

The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited (and sometimes translated) early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. This volume, edited by Robert Schomburgk and first published in 1848, presents documents written by Sir Walter Raleigh following his expeditions to Guyana in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The title text recounts the events of Raleigh's first voyage, including his encounters with the Spanish and the quest for the legendary city of Manoa, and is accompanied by two documents that had not previously been published. The book also includes a detailed introduction and extensive explanatory notes, providing key biographical and historical information.

A friend of Charles Darwin and a social activist respected by John Stuart Mill, Alfred R. Wallace (1823-1913) was an outstanding nineteenth-century intellectual. Wallace, renowned in his time as the co-discoverer of natural selection, was a young schoolteacher when he began his exciting career as an explorer-naturalist, and set off for Brazil in 1848 with Henry Walter Bates. A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro (1853) is the stimulating and engaging result of this first expedition and a precursor to his best-selling Malay Archipelago (1869). The depth and breadth of Wallace's observations in this book as naturalist, anthropologist and geologist are remarkable, and it is tantalising to learn that half his notes and 'the greater part of [his] collections and sketches' were lost at sea when his ship was burned on his voyage home.

Ibn Battuta was famous in his own lifetime during the 14th Century as the greatest traveller of the age. He traversed the whole Islamic world (from his native Tangier to China), and crossed over its boundaries in Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. He was variously attacked by pirates, shipwrecked, marooned and kidnapped. His observations on political power, and on legal, commercial and cultural practices in the numerous places that he visited. give his Travels an enduring fascination. This narrative of high adventure rivals, or even surpasses, the explorations of Battuta's near contemporary, Marco Polo. Told with hum our, irony and pathos, his travelogue is filled with marvels which blend idealism with reality. L. P. Harvey reviews Ibn Battuta's journeys and discusses the major themes of the Travels. He examines the financing of Ibn Battuta's adventures; how geography and natural history are presented by him; how the Travels engage with issues of race and gender; and the religious milieu through which Ibn Battuta moved. Harvey's account of the traveller reveals the vivid portrait of a man with his fair share of human failings, but who was nonetheless remarkable for his courage, unbounded curiosity, and for the candor and skill with which he reported on the world as he had found it.

Annie, Lady Brassey was a very popular Victorian author. She travelled with her husband, Thomas and their four children aboard their yacht, the Sunbeam. Their eleven month sailing trip around the world in 1876-7 was inmortalized in Anna's book "A Voyage in the Sunbeam." The book ran through many English editions and was translated into many other languages. During her travels, lady Brassey collected many objects of the different cultures they visited. Her large collection of ethnographic and natural history objects were originally shown in a museum at her London house but they were moved eventually to Hastings Museum in 1919. Annie Brassey spent the last ten years of her life mainly at sea. She died suddenly of malaria on the way home from India and Australia in 1887 and was buried at sea at the age of 48.

This book, first published in 1911, is one of the most important and best written travel books from old China. Edwin Dingle recounts his adventures as he travels up the Yangtze River from Shanghai and then by foot southwest across some of China's most wild and woolly territory to Burma. Along the way, Dingle absorbed an enormous amount of about life and society in southwest China, and describes what he sees in a readable and sensitive way.

Beatrice Grimshaw was born in Ireland. She was an adventurer at heart since childhood and an independent soul who longed to travel to far away places. Until 1903 she had been a freelance journalist, a tour organiser and an emigration promoter but her dream was to go to the South Pacific islands. Embarking from San Francisco in 1904, she sailed first to Tahiti, followed by a four month voyage through the South Pacific and an additional two months on the island of Niue. During this trip, she visited Tonga, Samoa, Fiji, Rarotonga and some of the Cook islands. She returned to London and published "In the Strange South Seas" in 1907. In the book, Grimshaw not only recounts her adventures but she also describes the customs and lifestyles of the native populations as well as giving an exhaustive picture of the region's fauna and wildlife. The book also contain accounts of cannibalism, head-hunting, poisoning and tribal magic.

At the height of his fame, Mark Twain, the great writer and humorist from Missouri, was facing financial ruin from one of his failed business ventures. Broke but much loved he embarked on a money-raising lecture tour around the equator, making a stop in Australia. The Wayward Tourist republishes Mark Twain's Australian travel writing in which he recounts impressions of Sydney ('God made the Harbor but Satan made Sydney') and his view of Australian history (' it reads like the most beautiful lies'). In his introduction, Don Watson brilliantly pays homage to America's 'funny man' who brought his swagger, love of language and wicked talent for observation to our shores.

Eliza Rumaha Scidmore was born October 14, 1856 in Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America and died November 3, 1928 in Geneva, Switzerland. She was a journalist and a traveller and spent long periods in in Alaska, Japan, China, Java and India. In this book about Java written in 1912, Scidmore, who clearly loved the subject is very enthusiastic about the country and the traditions that have made Java such a unique place. It still remains a little known country nowadays but by reading Eliza Scidmore, we are transported to the beauty of the tropical gardens, the volcanoes, the magnificent buddhist temple of Borobudur, the impact of the conquest by Islam, its unique culture and so many places that I bet you did not even know they existed.

Popular English travel guides from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries asserted that women who wandered too far afield were invariably suspicious, dishonest, and unchaste. As the essays in Travel and Travail reveal, however, early modern women did travel, often quite extensively, with no diminution of their moral fiber. Female travelers were also frequently represented on the English stage and in other creative works, both as a reproach to the ban on female travel and as a reflection of historical women's travel, whether intentional or not. Travel and Travail conclusively refutes the notion of female travel in the early modern era as "an absent presence." The first part of the volume offers analyses of female travelers (often recently widowed or accompanied by their husbands), the practicalities of female travel, and how women were thought to experience foreign places. The second part turns to literature, including discussions of roving women in Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish, and Thomas Heywood. Whether historical actors or fictional characters, women figured in the wider world of the global Renaissance, not simply in the hearth and home.

In Travels, the celebrated 1791 account of the "Old Southwest," William Bartram recorded the natural world he saw around him but, rather incredibly, omitted any reference to the epochal events of the American Revolution. Edward J. Cashin places Bartram in the context of his times and explains his conspicuous avoidance of people, places, and events embroiled in revolutionary fervor. Cashin suggests that while Bartram documented the natural world for plant collector John Fothergill, he wrote Travels for an entirely different audience. Convinced that Providence directed events for the betterment of mankind and that the Constitutional Convention would produce a political model for the rest of the world, Bartram offered Travels as a means of shaping the new country. Cashin illuminates the convictions that motivated Bartram-that if Americans lived in communion with nature, heeded the moral law, and treated the people of the interior with respect, then America would be blessed with greatness.

Journal of a Tour of Discovery Across the Blue Mountains in New South Wales in the Year 1813 was first published in 1823. It is a romantic and descriptive narrative of the journey to find a path across the Blue Mountains and received a great reception both in England and in Australia.

" The crossing of America's first great divide -- the Appalachian Mountains -- has been a source of much fascination but has received little attention from modern historians. In the eighteenth century, the Wilderness Road and Ohio River routes into Kentucky presented daunting natural barriers and the threat of Indian attack. Running Mad for Kentucky brings this adventure to life. Primarily a collection of travel diaries, it includes day-to-day accounts that illustrate the dangers thousands of Americans, adult and child, black and white, endured to establish roots in the wilderness. Ellen Eslinger's vivid and extensive introductory essay draws on numerous diaries, letters, and oral histories of trans-Appalachian travelers to examine the historic consequences of the journey, a pivotal point in the saga of the continent's indigenous people. The book demonstrates how the fabled soil of Kentucky captured the imagination of a young nation.