In English and many other languages the name 'Kon-Tiki' has become a byword for adventure and the exotic. The journey of the Kon-Tiki from Peru to Polynesia in 1947 became one of the founding myths of the postwar world. In the voyage of six Scandinavians and a parrot on a balsa raft across the Pacific Ocean the classic journey of discovery was re-invented for generations to come. Kon-Tiki spoke of heroism, masculinity, free-spirited rebellion against scientific dogmatism, and the promise of an attainable exotic world, while it updated these mythological staples to fit the times. After years of relentless media exploitation of the 101-day raft journey, Heyerdahl emerged as the protagonist in a legend that helped to create a new postwar West. A Hero for the Atomic Age tells the story of how Heyerdahl organized an expedition to sail a balsa raft from Callao in Peru to the Tuamotu Islands in French Polynesia, and explains how he turned this physical crossing into an epic narrative that became imbued with a universal appeal. The book also addresses, for the first time, the problematic nature of Heyerdahl's theory that a white culture-bearing race had initiated all the world's great civilizations.

From avalanches to glaciers and seals to snowflakes, from igloos to icebergs, permafrost to hoarfrost, chilblains to frostbite, Bill Streever unearths the consistent, ongoing influence of cold on the planet. Evoking history, myth, geography and ecology, Streever's quest for icy, forty-below cold gains purchase in July, while he's taking a dip in an Arctic swimming hole; in September, while excavating our planet's ice ages; and in October, while exploring animals' hibernation habits, from humans to wood frogs to bears. In March he even does his best to escape it, bundling up in layers of polyester, spandex and Primaloft fill to face thermometers reading twenty-three below. Streever visits an underground Cold War-era tunnel, where preserved remains mingle with new-fangled machinery and gear; weighs in on the scientific quest to reach absolute zero (-459 F); and describes how refrigeration evolved from worldwide ice shipping to the chemical coolants we know today.

In early April 1536, Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada led a military expedition from the coastal city of Santa Marta deep into the interior of what is today modern Colombia. With roughly eight hundred Spaniards and numerous native carriers and black slaves, the Jimenez expedition was larger than the combined forces under Hernando Cortes and Francisco Pizarro. Over the course of the one-year campaign, nearly three-quarters of Jimenez's men perished, most from illness and hunger. Yet, for the 179 survivors, the expedition proved to be one of the most profitable campaigns of the sixteenth century. Unfortunately, the history of the Spanish conquest of Colombia remains virtually unknown.

Through a series of firsthand primary accounts, translated into English for the first time, Invading Colombia reconstructs the compelling tale of the Jimenez expedition, the early stages of the Spanish conquest of Muisca territory, and the foundation of the city of Santa Fe de Bogota. We follow the expedition from the Canary Islands to Santa Marta, up the Magdalena River, and finally into Colombia's eastern highlands. These highly engaging accounts not only challenge many current assumptions about the nature of Spanish conquests in the New World, but they also reveal a richly entertaining, yet tragic, tale that rivals the great conquest narratives of Mexico and Peru.

Cook was the greatest explorer of his age and his voyages of discovery are the stuff of legend. During two long journeys, he circumnavigated the globe twice, charted the east coast of Australia, the whole of New Zealand and many islands in the Pacific. "The Fatal Voyage" is the story of Cook's final journey when he led his most dangerous and fabled expedition to search for the elusive Pacific entrance to the North West Passage. He set sail from England in July 1776 and along the way discovered the Hawaiian archipelago before mapping and charting the formidable north west coast of America, from Vancouver Island to the frozen northern coastline of Alaska. He sailed through the Bering Straits and although his ships reached the entrance to the North West Passage they were defeated by a sheer wall of ice blocking their way. Cook returned to Hawaii to rest, but a series of misjudgments between his men and the islanders sparked a violent clash in which Cook was killed at Kealakekua Bay. Peter Aughton has here used letters, log records and the diaries of those involved in the voyage to tell an enthralling account of James Cook's last days at sea and reveal the extraordinary legacy he left behind.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, no place burned more brightly in the imagination of European geographers - and fortune hunters - than the lost city of Timbuktu. Africa's legendary City of Gold, not visited by Europeans since the Middle Ages, held the promise of wealth and fame for the first explorer to make it there. In 1824, the French Geographical Society offered a cash prize to the first expedition from any nation to visit Timbuktu and return to tell the tale. Unwilling to trust in the slender chances of a lone explorer, the British sent several on their way. "The Race for Timbuktu" follows Major Alexander Gordon Laing's arduous trek across an unforgiving Sahara, battling unpredictable elements, crippling illness, vicious attacks - and the clock - to be the first white man in centuries to reach the gates of Timbuktu. In bringing Laing's dramatic story to life, Frank T. Kryza also provides a narrative history of the first phase of the colonization of Africa, which in less than a century would see nearly every square mile of the continent occupied by the nations of Europe.

In 1700, a young man named John Lawson left London and landed in Charleston, South Carolina, hoping to make a name for himself. For reasons unknown, he soon undertook a two-month journey through the still-mysterious Carolina backcountry. His travels yielded A New Voyage to Carolina in 1709, one of the most significant early American travel narratives, rich with observations about the region's environment and Indigenous people. Lawson later helped found North Carolina's first two cities, Bath and New Bern; became the colonial surveyor general; contributed specimens to what is now the British Museum; and was killed as the first casualty of the Tuscarora War. Yet despite his great contributions and remarkable history, Lawson is little remembered, even in the Carolinas he documented. In 2014, Scott Huler made a surprising decision: to leave home and family for his own journey by foot and canoe, faithfully retracing Lawson's route through the Carolinas. This is the chronicle of that unlikely voyage, revealing what it's like to rediscover your own home. Combining a traveler's curiosity, a naturalist's keen observation, and a writer's wit, Huler draws our attention to people and places we might pass regularly but never really see. What he finds are surprising parallels between Lawson's time and our own, with the locals and their world poised along a knife-edge of change between a past they can't forget and a future they can't quite envision.

In an adventure of a lifetime, Alexander Armstrong wraps up warm and heads ever north to explore the hostile Arctic winter - the glittering landscape of Scandinavia, the isolated islands of Iceland and Greenland, and the final frontier of Canada and Alaska. Along the way he learns from the Marines how to survive sub-zero temperatures by eating for England, takes a white-knuckle drive along a treacherous 800-mile road that's a river in summer and, with great reluctance, strips off for a dip in the freezing Arctic waters - and that's all before wrestling Viking-style with a sporting legend called Eva as part of an Icelandic winter festival. Sharing the wonder of the Arctic in his inimitable style, Land of the Midnight Sun is a brilliantly entertaining travelogue that takes readers on an exhilarating and hilarious journey to the farthest reaches of the globe. Through his witty exploration of the region's remarkable landscape and lifestyle, and its even more remarkable people, Armstrong proves himself the ideal travel companion.

The Last Overland is the story behind the four-part documentary series on All 4 - the extraordinary journey of filmmaker Alex Bescoby and his team across 13,000 miles to recreate the legendary overlanding expedition of 1956. In 1955, a young TV producer named David Attenborough was approached by six recent graduates from Oxford and Cambridge universities determined to drive the entire length of Eurasia, as it was then known, from London to Singapore. It was the 'unclimbed Everest of motoring' - many had tried, none had succeeded. Sensing this time might be different, Attenborough gave The Oxford and Cambridge Far Eastern Expedition enough film reel to cover their attempt. The 19,000-mile journey completed by Tim Slessor and the team was told in Attenborough's Travellers' Tales, and captivated a nation emerging from postwar austerity. Tim's book, The First Overland, was published shortly after and soon became the Bible of the overlanding religion. Inspired by Attenborough's comment fifty years on that it was a journey 'that I don't think could be made again today', Alex made contact with now eighty-six-year-old Tim and together they planned an epic recreation of the original trip, this time from Singapore to London. With their improbable team and the prospect of getting the original 'Oxford' - arguably the world's most famous Land Rover - home to London, their goal was to complete the heroic journey started more than sixty years earlier. In awe of the unstoppable Tim, and haunted by his own grandfather's deterioration due to tragedy and then dementia, Alex soon finds himself on the defining trip of his lifetime and discovers how the world has changed for better, and for worse, since the First Overland.

"Zambesi" tells the story of David Livingstone's Zambesi Expedition. It exposes the rivalry among some of Victorian Britain's leading establishment figures and institutions - including the Foreign Office, the Royal Society, Royal Geographical Society, British Museum, Kew Gardens and the Admiralty - as abolitionists, scientists, and entrepreneurs sought to promote and protect their differing interests. Making use of letters, documents and materials neglected by previous writers and researchers, the author reveals how tensions arose from the very beginning between those in pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and the proponents of the civilizing missions who saw scientific knowledge as the utilitarian means to a social end. The result is an exciting story involving one of England's most feted Victorian heroes that offers important new insights in the practice and politics of expeditionary science in Victorian England. This is the definitive account of the expedition to date.

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE STANFORD DOLMAN TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR** Alev Scott's odyssey began when she looked beyond Turkey's borders for contemporary traces of the Ottoman Empire. Their 800-year rule ended a century ago - and yet, travelling through twelve countries from Kosovo to Greece to Palestine, she uncovers a legacy that's vital and relevant; where medieval ethnic diversity meets 21st century nationalism, and displaced people seek new identities. It's a story of surprises. An acolyte of Erdogan in Christian-majority Serbia confirms the wide-reaching appeal of his authoritarian leadership. A Druze warlord explains the secretive religious faction in the heart of the Middle East. The palimpsest-like streets of Jerusalem's Old Town hint at the Ottoman co-existence of Muslims and Jews. And in Turkish Cyprus Alev Scott rediscovers a childhood home. In every community, history is present as a dynamic force. Faced by questions of exile, diaspora and collective memory, Alev Scott searches for answers from the cafes of Beirut to the refugee camps of Lesbos. She uncovers in Erdogan's nouveau-Ottoman Turkey a version of the nostalgic utopias sold to disillusioned voters in Europe and the U.S. And yet - as she relates with compassion, insight and humour - diversity is the enduring, endangered heart of this fascinating region.

In the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century, an unprecedented number of Indigenous people - especially Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabeg, and Cree - travelled to Britain and other parts of the world. Who were these transatlantic travellers, where were they going, and what were they hoping to find? Travellers through Empire unearths the stories of Indigenous peoples including Mississauga Methodist missionary and Ojibwa chief Reverend Peter Jones, the Scots-Cherokee officer and interpreter John Norton, Catherine Sutton, a Mississauga woman who advocated for her people with Queen Victoria, E. Pauline Johnson, the Mohawk poet and performer, and many others. Cecilia Morgan retraces their voyages from Ontario and the northwest fur trade and details their efforts overseas, which included political negotiations with the Crown, raising funds for missionary work, receiving an education, giving readings and performances, and teaching international audiences about Indigenous cultures. As they travelled, these remarkable individuals forged new families and friendships and left behind newspaper interviews, travelogues, letters, and diaries that provide insights into their cross-cultural encounters. Chronicling the emotional ties, contexts, and desires for agency, resistance, and negotiation that determined their diverse experiences, Travellers through Empire provides surprising vantage points on First Nations travels and representations in the heart of the British Empire.

Eduard Fischer takes us on an exploration of myth, art, science, and the sacred space of high mountains. This is an account of adventure and deep reflection accompanied by a selection of the author's stunning colour photographs. After first visiting the Trans-Himalayan region of Ladakh in 1985, he returned again and again, seeking to catch a glimpse of the phantom of the Himalayas - the elusive snow leopard. During these visits he became enthralled with the unique culture of this ancient mountain kingdom, one of the oldest enclaves of Buddhism. The phantom cat itself becomes, at turns, Eduard's quarry, nemesis, obsession, and finally, in a surprising twist of destiny, his teacher.

In the nineteenth century, Jules Verne imagined a journey round the world. At the start of the twentieth century, an American millionaire, Charles J. Glidden, did it for real - though it took many more than eighty days. Assisted by Charles Thomas, a Sussex engineer, the millionaire took his Napier car twice around the world, to places that had never seen a powered vehicle. The journeys took them across thirty-nine countries on four continents. In Switzerland they were arrested for driving on a forbidden road. Later they fitted the car with railroad wheels and drove to Vancouver on the tracks of the Canadian Pacific. During their travels they met people of all kinds, from impoverished pilgrims to maharajahs. In Fiji there was an encounter with the last cannibal; in militarist Japan they experienced anti-Western attitudes. Andrew Jepson tells the fascinating story of these ground-breaking journeys with the aid of images taken from Charles Thomas' own photograph albums. This is a must-read for all motoring enthusiasts.

Listen to a short interview with Tom Griffiths Host: Chris Gondek - Producer: Heron & Crane

From Scott and Shackleton to sled dogs and penguins, stories of Antarctica seize our imagination. In December 2002, environmental historian Tom Griffiths set sail with the Australian Antarctic Division to deliver the new team of winterers. In this beautifully written book, Griffiths reflects on the history of human experiences in Antarctica, taking the reader on a journey of discovery, exploration, and adventure in an unforgettable land.

He weaves together meditations on shipboard life during his three-week voyage with fascinating forays into the history and nature of Antarctica. He brings alive the great age of sail in the initiation of travelers to the great winds of the "roaring forties." No continent is more ruled by wind, and Griffiths explains why Antarctica is a barometer of global climatic health. He charts the race to the South Pole, from its inception as part of the drive to map Earth's magnetism, to the reasons for Robert Scott's tragic death. He also offers vivid descriptions of life in Antarctica, such as the experience of a polar night, the importance of food for morale, and coping with solitude.

A charming narrative and an informative history, "Slicing the Silence" is an intimate portrait of the last true wilderness.

THE UNCONQUERED TELLS THE EXTRAORDINARY TRUE STORY OF A JOURNEY INTO THE DEEPEST RECESSES OF THE AMAZON TO TRACK ONE OF THE PLANET'S LAST UNCONTACTED IN DIGENOUS TRIBES.
Even today there remain tribes in the far reaches of the Amazon rainforest that have avoided contact with modern civilization. Deliberately hiding from the outside world, they are the unconquered, the last survivors of an ancient culture that predates the arrival of Columbus in the New World. In this gripping first-person account of adventure and survival, author Scott Wallace chronicles an expedition into the Amazon's uncharted depths, discovering the rainforest's secrets while moving ever closer to a possible encounter with one such tribe--the mysterious "flecheiros, "or "People of the Arrow," seldom-glimpsed warriors known to repulse all intruders with showers of deadly arrows. On assignment for "National Geographic, "Wallace joins Brazilian explorer Sydney Possuelo at the head of a thirty-four-man team that ventures deep into the unknown in search of the tribe. Possuelo's mission is to protect the Arrow People. But the information he needs to do so can only be gleaned by entering a world of permanent twilight beneath the forest canopy.
Danger lurks at every step as the expedition seeks out the Arrow People even while trying to avoid them. Along the way, Wallace uncovers clues as to who the Arrow People might be, how they have managed to endure as one of the last unconquered tribes, and why so much about them must remain shrouded in mystery if they are to survive. Laced with lessons from anthropology and the Amazon's own convulsed history, and boasting a Conradian cast of unforgettable characters--all driven by a passion to preserve the wild, but also wracked by fear, suspicion, and the desperate need to make it home alive--"The Unconquered "reveals this critical battleground in the fight to save the planet as it has rarely been seen, wrapped in a page-turning tale of adventure.

"From the Hardcover edition."

In April 2011, four soldiers - each a veteran of recent conflicts, who suffered devastating injuries in the line of duty - set out on an extraordinary challenge: a two-hundred mile trek, unsupported, to the North Pole. Joined by patron Prince Harry, the charity founders, a polar guide and a film crew, the team achieved their goal despite facing hurdles an able-bodied athlete would baulk at, and having seen their resilience tested to the limit. They returned with a story that proves strength of mind can be every bit as powerful as strength of body, and as an inspiration to us all.

Turning his back on the British legal profession and the requirement to account for every six minutes of his time, Geoff Steward and his lucky five-inch articulated Doctor Who figure go off-grid and on the road across America. From New York to Alaska, he tries to fend for himself without his trusty PA and life support, the unflappable Charmaine, for whom contentment lies in Jesus Christ and custard creams. With his blend of waspish wit and mischievous charm, Steward seeks out normal Americans, such as Joe le Taxi, the former NYPD officer who was one of the first on the scene at the Twin Towers and now runs an extortionate executive taxi service; Pam and Bob, a paranoid psychiatrist and a failed actor who once saw the back of Meryl Streep's head; Taylor the Alaskan bushwhacker who was raised by wolves and revels in their scat; Jeb the Yosemite inn-sitter who lives his life at the pace of a Ford Model T; Kacey Musgraves, the controversial country music star staying at the farm in Tennessee; and Sheriff Duke of Calhoun County, South Carolina, who reintroduces Steward to the long (and armed) arm of the law.For anyone at a crossroads, contemplating a temporary or permanent career break, this affectionate travel romp is essential reading. Journeying coast-to-coast across the US with Steward might just remind you that, despite the post-Trump hysteria, there are many normal and decent Americans out there.