When English naturalist Joseph Banks (1743-1820) accompanied Captain James Cook (1728-1779) on his historic mission into the Pacific, the Endeavour voyage of 1768-71, he took with him a team of collectors and illustrators. Banks and his team returned from the voyage with unprecedented collections of artefacts and specimens of stunning birds, fish and other animals as well as thousands of plants, most seen for the first time in Europe. They produced, too, remarkable landscape and figure drawings of the peoples encountered on the voyage along with detailed journals and descriptions of the places visited, which, with the first detailed maps of these lands (Tahiti, New Zealand and the East Coast of Australia), were afterwards used to create lavishly illustrated accounts of the mission. These caused a storm of interest in Europe where plays, poems and satirical caricatures were also produced to celebrate and examine the voyage, its personnel and many 'new' discoveries. Along with contemporary portraits of key personalities aboard the ship, scale models and plans of the ship itself, scientific instruments taken on the voyage, commemorative medals and sketches, the objects (over 140) featured in this new book will tell the story of the Endeavour voyage and its impact ahead of the 250th anniversary in 2018 of the launch of this seminal mission. Artwork made both during and after the voyage will be seen alongside actual specimens. And by comparing the voyage originals with the often stylized engravings later produced in London for the official account, the book will investigate how knowledge gained on the mission was gathered, revised and later received in Europe. Items separated in some cases for more than two centuries will be brought together to reveal their fascinating history not only during but since that mission. Original voyage specimens will feature together with illustrations and descriptions of them, showing a rich diversity of newly discovered species and how Banks organized this material, planning but ultimately failing to publish it. In fact, many of the objects in the book have never been published before. The book will focus on the contribution of Banks's often neglected artists Sydney Parkinson, Herman Diedrich Spoering, Alexander Buchan as well as the priest and Pacific voyager Tupaia, who joined Endeavour in the Society Islands, none of whom survived the mission. These men illustrated island scenes of bays, dwellings, canoes as well as the dress, faces and possessions of Pacific peoples. Burial ceremonies, important religious sites and historic encounters were all depicted. Of particular interest, and only recently recognised as by him, are the original artworks of Tupaia, who produced as part of this mission the first charts and illustrations on paper by any Polynesian. The surviving Endeavour voyage illustrations are the most important body of images produced since Europeans entered this region, matching the truly historic value of the plant specimens and artefacts that will be seen alongside them.

In 1924 Mount Everest remained unclimbed. Two British expeditions had already tackled what was known to be the highest mountain on Earth. The first, in 1921, found a route to the base. The second, in 1922, attempted the summit, reaching a record height of 27,300 feet before retreating. Two years later, a team that included Colonel E.F. Norton, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine returned to the Himalaya. Armed with greater knowledge and experience, confidence was high. But they were still climbing into the unknown. How high could they climb without supplementary oxygen? Would the cumbersome oxygen equipment help them climb higher? Could they succeed where others had failed, and make the first ascent of the highest mountain on earth? Before they could find out, tragedy struck - George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, climbing high on the mountain, vanished into the clouds. First published in 1925, The Fight for Everest 1924 is the official record of this third expedition to Everest. The compelling narrative by Norton and other expedition members, and Mallory's vivid letters home, present a gripping picture of life in the Himalaya. Notes and observations from the entire team show how far knowledge of the mountain and of high-altitude climbing had advanced by 1924, and make recommendations for future Everest attempts. As well as the full original text and illustrations, this edition reproduces some of Norton's superb pencil sketches and watercolours along with previously unpublished materials from his private archive. These include original planning documents from the expedition, Mallory's last note to Norton, and a moving letter to Norton from Mallory's widow. Together, they add up to one of the most fascinating mountaineering books ever written.

"Finally Fram showed herself in all her glory as the best sea-boat in the world. It was extraordinary to watch how she behaved. ... the Fram gave a wriggle of her body and was instantly at the top of the wave, which slipped under the vessel. Can anyone be surprised if one gets fond of such a ship?" --Captain Nilsen of the Fram, 1912. From her launch in 1892, to the triumphant return to Norway in 1914, the polar expeditionary ship Fram sailed north almost to the North Pole, and south to Antarctica. supporting three of the most daring of all polar adventures. In the centenary year of Roald Amundsen's successful trek to the South Pole, this is the story of his ship, the Fram, and her voyages to the ends of the earth.

What would you do if you were travelling alone believing that you were joining a tour group for a holiday, only to find that you are the only person in the group? What turned out to be very different holiday from that expected, is shared with warmth and humour. This delightful travelogue in its easy to read style, will not only inspire you to travel solo, but absorb you into the culture and experience of Vietnam. Susan has the rare ability to draw you into her journey, not just physically around Vietnam but also into her private thoughts and feelings as a solo traveller. Adventure, entertainment and sadness are all here, and we feel that we personally know the characters she encounters along the way. This is not a travel guide, although the insights and descriptions from a personal perspective would be a useful addition for any visitor to Vietnam.

Captain Bungle's Odyssey. Singlehanded Round the World. The author describes life as a cruising sailor culminating in an attempted to break the solo circumnavigation record.

The history of Fort Phantom Hill is an interesting saga of defense, a story of both political necessity and individual hubris, and a tale of human perseverance and shortsightedness. The story of the "Post on the Brazos River" has all the elements that characterize human activity with its triumphs and tragedies, victories and defeats.
As time passed, circumstances dictated changing uses for the structures at Fort Phantom Hill, from military outpost to stage station to hunter's outpost. Eventually, opportunities for adaptation ran their course and the stone structures fell into neglect. The frontier was occupied by new immigrants who possessed a more modern technology. The threat of Indians was replaced by the hard daily work of living in a semi-desert environment.
In "Fort Phantom Hill: The Mysterious Ruins on the Clear Fork of the Brazos River," Bill Wright weaves the threads of this story into the larger warp and weft of western history and shows how this small fort was conceived, lived, and died as an important part of the "winning of the West."

The Antarctic is the last, vast terrestrial frontier on Earth. Less than a century ago, no one had ever seen the South Pole. Today, odd machines and adventure skiers from many nations converge there every summer. They arrive from many starting points on the Antarctic coast and go back some other way. But not until very recently had anyone completed a round trip from McMurdo Station, the U.S. support hub on the continental coast. The last man to try that perished in 1912; a surface route remained elusive until John H. Wright and his crew finished the job in 2006. Blazing Ice is the story of the team of Americans who forged a thousand-mile transcontinental “haul route� across Antarctica. For decades, airplanes from McMurdo Station supplied the South Pole. A safe and repeatable surface haul route would have been cheaper and more environmentally benign than airlift, but the technology was not available until 2000. As Wright reveals in this gripping narrative, the hazards of Antarctic terrain and weather were as daunting for twenty-first century pioneers as they were for Norway’s Roald Amundsen or for England’s Robert Falcon Scott when they raced to be first to the South Pole in 1911–1912. Wright and his team faced deadly hidden crevasses, vast snow swamps, the Transantarctic Mountains, badlands of weird wind-sculpted ice, and the high Polar Plateau. Blazing Ice will appeal to Antarctic lovers, adventure readers of all stripes, conservationists, and scientists grappling with the conjunction of institutional culture and their fieldwork.

'A roaring tale ... remains as vivid and exciting today as it was on publication in 1697' Guardian The pirate and adventurer William Dampier circumnavigated the globe three times, and took notes wherever he went. This is his frank, vivid account of his buccaneering sea voyages around the world, from the Caribbean to the Pacific and East Indies. Filled with accounts of raids, escapes, wrecks and storms, it also contains precise observations of people, places, animals and food (including the first English accounts of guacamole, mango chutney and chopsticks). A bestseller on publication, this unique record of the colonial age influenced Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels and consequently the whole of English literature. Edited with an Introduction by Nicholas Thomas

"I am a flight animal, like a horse, so my response was to run away from the evil. I wanted to leave mass humanity, the city, and civilization. I wanted to remove myself from other people and immerse myself in the seclusion of nature. I wanted peace of mind. I wanted solitude." Adam Cruise, disillusioned with his urban lifestyle, persuades his wife Amanda to abandon their business, home and three cats in Cape Town for a six-month journey into the remote interior of southern Africa. Their trip, in an expedition-prepared 4x4 but without any pre-planned idea other than to avoid civilization as much as possible, weaves through the remote recesses of the sub-continent in search of a true wilderness experience where real nature is untrammelled by human activity. Among lions, elephants and other African wildlife the couple find a harmonious and balanced world but one that is under a constant threat from the ravages of human advancement and mistreatment. This book is more than travel as escape; it's a personal quest in search of a solution to the eternal conflict between humanity and the environment. In a philosophical, anecdotal and sometimes witty approach Adam's curiosity and observations both reveal the compelling qualities of nature as well as unveiling the devastating effects of humanity - both African and Western - on even the most secluded places.

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

Lucy is forty-two when it hits: the stunning realization that her life went off-track years before and never regained its footing. She hardly noticed at the time, too busy raising three kids and navigating the ups and downs of marriage to an admittedly adoring husband. She loves her family dearly, yet she can't escape the nagging sense that her life doesn't match the dreams of her youth. Further complicating matters is the reappearance of Matthew, her first love and the father of her first child. In a fit of midlife rebellion, she rashly agrees to a rendezvous with Matthew in Las Vegas, never suspecting that her illicit vacation will force her to confront another long-buried secret. In Vegas, Lucy must reexamine each of her life choices, her ideas of friendship and love, even the truth and power of her own sexuality. Sure to ring familiar with women of "a certain age," this novel of rediscovery is humorous and poignant, an irreverent portrait of one woman's quest for happiness.

The book is about my own personnal account of the expedition to recover the stricken submarine Kursk from the bottom of the Barrent sea. All the problems associated working with the Russians Dutch & Norwegians on such a dangerous job.

Award-winning cultural historian Iain McCalman tells the stories of Charles Darwin and his staunchest supporters: Joseph Hooker, Thomas Huxley, and Alfred Wallace. Beginning with the somber morning of April 26, 1882 the day of Darwin's funeral Darwin's Armada steps back and recounts the lives and scientific discoveries of each of these explorers, who campaigned passionately in the war of ideas over evolution and advanced the scope of Darwin's work."

The English explorer Henry Hudson devoted his life to the search for a water route through America, becoming the first European to navigate the Hudson River in the process. In Fatal Journey , acclaimed historian and biographer Peter C. Mancall narrates Hudson's final expedition. In the winter of 1610, after navigating dangerous fields of icebergs near the northern tip of Labrador, Hudson's small ship became trapped in winter ice. Provisions grew scarce and tensions mounted amongst the crew. Within months, the men mutinied, forcing Hudson, his teenage son, and seven other men into a skiff, which they left floating in the Hudson Bay. A story of exploration, desperation, and icebound tragedy, Fatal Journey vividly chronicles the undoing of the great explorer, not by an angry ocean, but at the hands of his own men.

'This is the gripping and inspirational account of two ordinary blokes ...double-handedly proving that the Age of Adventure is not over!' PETER FITZSIMONS With more than two thousand kilometres of treacherous seas and dangerously unpredictable weather and currents, it was little wonder no-one had ever successfully crossed the Tasman by kayak. Australian adventurer Andrew McAuley had come close just months earlier - tragically, though, not near enough to save his life. But two young Sydneysiders, James Castrission and Justin Jones, reached the sand at New Plymouth - and a place in history - on 13 January 2008, 62 days after they'd set off from Forster on the mid-north coast of New South Wales. In the process, they had to face dwindling food supplies, a string of technical problems, 14 days trapped in a whirlpool, and two terrifying close encounters with sharks. When they arrived in New Zealand, their friendship stronger than ever, they were sunburnt, bearded, physically and mentally wasted ...and, most of all, happy to be alive. "...nothing prepared them for the 62 days of rapture, despair and euphoria ...ultimately this is a story of the triumph of the human spirit." Lincoln Hall

Presenting a study of the Antarctic explorers Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton as well as their most heroic expeditions, the author looks in detail at just how and why their individual reputations have evolved over the course of the last century. This book covers the two most famous expeditions of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration, Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova expedition of 1910-12 and Ernest Shackleton's Endurance expedition of 1914-16. For decades after his tragic death on the return journey from the South Pole, to which he had been beaten by five weeks by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, Scott was regarded as a saint-like figure with an unassailable reputation born from his heroic martyrdom in the frozen wastes of the Antarctic.In recent years, however, Scott has attracted some of the most intense criticism any explorer has ever received. Shackleton's reputation, meanwhile, has followed a reverse trajectory. Although his achievements were always appreciated, they were never celebrated with nearly the same degree of adulation that traditionally surrounded Scott. Today, Scott and Shackleton occupy very different places in the polar pantheon of British heroes. Stephanie Barczewski explores the evolution of their reputations and finds it has little to do with new discoveries regarding their lives and characters, but far more to do with broader cultural changes and changes in conceptions of heroism in Britain and the United States.

More than two hundred years later, the "voyage of discovery"--with its outsized characters, geographic marvels, and wondrous moments of adventure and mystery--continues to draw us along the Lewis and Clark Trail. Stephenie Ambrose Tubbs first fell under the trail's spell at sixteen and has been following in Lewis and Clark's path ever since. In essays historical and personal, she revisits the Lewis and Clark Trail and its famous people, landmarks, and events, exploring questions the expedition continues to raise, such as, What really motivated Thomas Jefferson to send out his agents of discovery? What "mutinous expressions" were uttered? What happened to the dog? Why did Meriwether Lewis end his own life? In the resulting trip through history, Tubbs recounts her travels along the trail by foot, Volkswagen bus, and canoe--at every turn renewing the American experience inscribed by Lewis and Clark.

Robert Falcon Scott’s 1901–4 expedition to the Antarctic was a landmark event in the history of Antarctic exploration, creating a sensation comparable to the Arctic efforts of the American Robert E. Peary. Scott’s initial expedition was also the first step toward the dramatic race to the South Pole in 1912, which resulted in the tragic deaths of Scott and his companions. Since then Scott’s reputation has vacillated between two extremes: Was he a martyred hero, the beau ideal of a brave and selfless explorer, or a bumbling fool whose mistakes killed him and his entire party? Pilgrims on the Ice goes beyond the personality of Scott to remove the first expedition from the shadow of the second, to study objectively its purpose, its composition, and its real accomplishments. This Bison Books edition includes a new preface by the author.

2009 Best Travel Book (Lowell Thomas Gold Award), Society of American Travel Writers

Book of the Year Award Finalist (adventure), "ForeWord Reviews"

It was an idea born while hiking the famed Camino de Santiago across Spain. Two men shared a dream of trekking from Europe to the Middle East on the ultimate road trip. It just happened to be a path walked by thousands of Crusaders, pilgrims and merchants during the Middle Ages, a time when wars, unforgiving weather, wild dogs, and an ever changing cast of weird characters tested even the toughest traveler.

As they say, The more things change, the more they stay the same. Two modern-day travelers discover the truth when they take on that same ultimate challenge to hike the Templar Trail across 11 countries and 2,600 miles to Jerusalem. Throwing themselves out into the universe with bad maps, blisters, but plenty of optimism, they face identical challenges in search of adventure, life s meaning and lasting peace. Proving that even today, there s nothing like a little war to shake your strongest resolve.

With 44 photos, maps and illustrations

Simply one of the most remarkable adventure stories of our time... Richard Bangs, legendary adventurer, co-founder Mountain Travel Sobek

More than the mere adventure of two brave men, it is a grand and noble quest for peace... Combines a marvelous sense of Zen with good humor, and his personal style makes you feel as if you were there taking part in it all... Mayra Calvani, "Midwest Book Review"

A travel lodestone a magical quest, a warts-and-all journey This is a special book hovering above its obvious travel-shelf slot into a spot of its own. Marilis Hornidge, "Courier-Gazette," Maine

Strictly fast-forward... Wilson's remarkably attractive account will galvanize couch potatoes..." "ForeWord Reviews"

The vivid prose and passion for adventure makes this book an exciting read You can live vicariously, although I must say I am more inspired than ever to walk each day. (5 stars) "The Rebecca Review," Amazon Top 10 Reviewer

Fast-moving and inspiring Readers of Brandon s other books will be snapping this up. Great, touching and hugely interesting. Jessica Roberts, BookPleasures.com

Richard Burton makes a forbidden pilgrimage to Mecca; Mary Kingsley wanders alone in the jungles of West Africa; Fridtjof Nansen tries to walk to the North Pole; Mary Mummery describes a harrowing first ascent in the Alps; Francis Parkman hunts buffalo with the Sioux in the Black Hills. This remarkable collection contains stories from the most compelling and celebrated odysseys of the century, some of them long-forgotten classics of their time. From polar navigation to the search for the source of the Nile to the first crossing of the Himalayas to a quest for the origin of species, this book ranges the globe and captures the restlessness of the human spirit. "What emerges again and again in the writings Whybrow has compiled are not the ways in which an explorer destroys or inflates or distorts but the ways an explorer comes to see." Edward Rothstein, New York Times"