For 250 years the Bryan Rostron’s family spread across the globe, helping to expand the British Empire and paint the map red. This is a personal reckoning with that dubious legacy, echoing down to the present in South Africa.

It begins with the ‘discovery’ of Tahiti in 1767 by an ancestor, from whose log book Rostron reveals that his sailors were exchanging the ship’s nails for sex with Tahitian maidens so that HMS Dolphin began, literally, to fall apart.

After the Anglo-Boer war, having emigrated to South Africa, one grandfather became editor of the Sunday Times, voicing racist opinions, and later of the Rand Daily Mail, at that time a voice of the Randlords. Ironically, his other grandfather worked for the Communist Party and printed revolutionary pamphlets for the violent 1922 Rand Revolt. In a bizarre twist, Rostron’s father managed the 1936 South African boxing team at the Berlin Olympics, where from under his nose their star boxer was recruited by the Nazis.

Uncovering family secrets and mistaken myths, Rostron offers a unique insight into modern-day South Africa’s colonial past.

The extraordinary story of how the Endurance, Sir Ernest Shackleton's ship, was found in the most hostile sea on Earth in 2022 On 21 November 1915, Sir Ernest Shackleton's ship, Endurance, finally succumbed to the crushing ice. Its crew watched in silence as the stern rose twenty feet in the air and then, it was gone. The miraculous escape and survival of all 28 men on board have entered legend. And yet, the iconic ship that bore them to the brink of the Antarctic was considered forever lost. A century later, an audacious plan to locate the ship was hatched. The Ship Beneath the Ice gives a blow-by-blow account of the two epic expeditions to find the Endurance. As with Shackleton's own story, the voyages were filled with intense drama and teamwork under pressure. In March 2022, the Endurance was finally found to headlines all over the world. Written by Mensun Bound, the Director of Exploration on both expeditions, this captivating narrative includes countless fascinating stories of Shackleton and his legendary ship. Complete with a selection of Frank Hurley's photos from Shackleton's original voyage in 1914-17, as well as from the expeditions in 2019 and 2022, The Ship Beneath the Ice is the perfect tribute to this monumental discovery.

In 2016, Sandy Winterbottom embarked on an epic six-week tall-ship voyage from Uruguay to Antarctica. At the mid-way stop in South Georgia, her pristine image of the Antarctic was shattered when she discovered the dark legacy of twentieth century industrial-scale whaling. Enraged by what she found, she was quick to blame the men who undertook this wholescale slaughter, but then she stumbled upon the grave of an eighteen-year-old whaler from Edinburgh who she could not allow to bear the brunt of blame. There are two sides to every story. The Two-Headed Whale vividly brings to life the spectacular scenery and wildlife of the vast Southern Oceans, set alongside the true-life story of Anthony Ford, the boy in the grave, as he sailed the same seas and toiled in an industry where profits outranked human life. In this compelling account, Sandy challenges our preconceptions of the Antarctic, weaving in themes of colonialism, capitalism and its link to both environmental and human exploitation. Drawing together threads of nature and travel writing with an unflinching narrative of life onboard a whaling factory ship and the legacy it left behind, The Two-Headed Whale leaves us questioning our troubled relationship with the extraordinary abundance of this planet.