|
Books > Earth & environment > Geography > Geographical discovery & exploration
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.
Through its extensive use of primary source materials and
invaluable contextual notes, this book offers a documented history
of one of the most famous adventures in early American history: the
Lewis and Clark expedition. This book is the first to situate the
Lewis and Clark expedition within the political and scientific
ambitions of Thomas Jefferson. It spans a forty-year period in
American history, from 1783–1832, covering Jefferson's early
interest in trying to organize an expedition to explore the
American West through the difficult negotiations of the Louisiana
Purchase, the formation of the "Corps of Discovery," the
expedition's incredible journey into the unknown, and its
aftermath. The story of the expedition is told not just through the
journals and letters of Lewis and Clark, but also through the
firsthand accounts of the expedition's other members, which
included Sacagawea, a Native American woman, and York, an African
American slave. The book features more than 100 primary source
documents, including letters to and from Jefferson, Benjamin Rush,
and others as the expedition was being organized; diary excerpts
during the expedition; and, uniquely, letters documenting the lives
of Lewis, Clark, Sacagawea, and York after the expedition.
This Fully illustrated book covers Germany in Antarctica from the
1900s to the 1940s, starting with Erich von Drygalsky's 1901 Gauss
expedition, then on to the 1939 Schwabenland Expedition which is
well covered in the book with many never seen before photographs.
Within the pages of this book you will be able to follow the
author's detailed research and photos showing how Germans could
have escaped war torn Berlin at the end of the war and be able to
flee Europe, reaching the relative safety of South America. The
author then explores how a phantom convoy of U-boats was used to
move Germans not only to South America but also to hidden
underground bases in Antarctica and he describes how these well
stocked underground complexes were a follow on from the detailed
aerial mapping done by the Schwabenland Expedition.
|
You may like...
Blue Fairy
Lizette Rabe
Paperback
R240
R222
Discovery Miles 2 220
Hondman
Dav Pilkey
Paperback
R275
R258
Discovery Miles 2 580
|