Great explorers are known for their hard-earned skills and meticulously honed character traits which have made their astonishing endeavours possible. Valuable lessons are waiting to be learned from the feats attained by the most revered names in exploration – from legendary adventurers such as Ernest Shackleton to lesser-known figures such as Junko Tabei. Life Lessons from Explorers collects 15 of the most highly prized traits shared by those who have scaled mountains and traversed tundras, proposing how these could be applied to your own life, whether you are crossing Antarctica or battling a mental obstacle. Compelling accounts of the life and times of celebrated explorers, highlighting when they have displayed these traits are accompanied by remarkable images of the people who have travelled to the ends of the Earth, and the places they discovered.

The first book to fully document and celebrate Sir Edmund Hillary's contribution to Antarctic history. Written by Nigel Watson of the Antarctic Heritage Trust, it is illustrated with Jane Ussher's stunning photographs, plus historic images and never-before-seen ephemera and diary entries. Hillary and the New Zealand team were supposed to be a support act to the British Commonwealth Antarctic crossing party. By heading on to the South Pole and reaching it before the crossing party, Hillary exceeded the brief. His actions created tensions, unleashed a media storm and denied the British an historic first overland to the South Pole since Captain Scott. Hillary even had the audacity to achieve the feat with three farm tractors. In doing so, Sir Edmund Hillary added another fascinating chapter to the exploration annals of Antarctica and he, and his expedition team, laid the foundations for New Zealand's continuous, and increasingly important, presence in Antarctica.

The system of international co-operation in the Antarctic has been evolving rapidly since the signing of the Antarctic Treaty in 1959. Inextricably linked to this co-operation is the question of the rational management of Antarctic resources. In this book Professor Orrego Vicuna examines in depth the legal framework - the Antarctic Treaty, sovereignty, jurisdiction and the law of the sea - as it relates to the exploitation of Antarctic minerals. This is fast becoming a live issue with the ever-growing potential for the development of these resources. The first part of the book examines the main characteristics of the international legal framework governing the co-operation of states in Antarctica, particularly in relation to resource conservation. Against this background, in the second part of the book, the regime for mineral resources is discussed in sufficient detail to identify the basic issues and interests which have to be accommodated in order to attain an acceptable convention. The final part of the book considers the important set of questions raised by the interest of the world community at large in the Antarctic: most significantly, the initiatives concerning a broader international participation under the auspices of the United Nations.

Darwin's Armada tells the stories of Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Joseph Hooker and Alfred Wallace, four young amateur naturalists from Britain who voyaged to the southern hemisphere during the first half of the nineteenth century in search of adventure and scientific fame. It charts their thrilling voyages to the strange and beautiful lands of the southern hemisphere that reshaped the young mariners' scientific ideas and led them, on returning to Britain, to befriend fellow voyager Charles Darwin. All three crucially influenced the publication and reception of his Origin of Species in 1859, one of the formative texts of the modern world. For the first time the Darwinian revolution of ideas is seen as a genuinely collective enterprise and one that had its birth in a series of gripping and human travel adventures. Many of the most urgent ecological and social issues of our times are seen to be prefigured in this compelling story of intellectual discovery.

Henry Morton Stanley was a cruel imperialist - a bad man of Africa. Or so we think: but as Tim Jeal brilliantly shows, the reality of Stanley's life is yet more extraordinary. Few people know of his dazzling trans-Africa journey, a heart-breaking epic of human endurance which solved virtually every one of the continent's remaining geographical puzzles. With new documentary evidence, Jeal explores the very nature of exploration and reappraises a reputation, in a way that is both moving and truly majestic.

Following his participation in James Cook's circumnavigation in HMS Endeavour (1768-71), Joseph Banks developed an extensive global network of scientists and explorers. His correspondence shows how he developed effective working links with the British Admiralty and with the generation of naval officers who sailed after Cook.

On August 1, 2008, no fewer than eight international teams of mountain climbers--some experienced, others less prepared--ascended K2, the world's second-highest mountain, with the last group reaching the summit at 8 p.m. Then disaster struck. A huge ice chunk came loose above a deadly three-hundred-foot avalanche-prone gully, destroying the fixed guide ropes. More than a dozen climbers--many without oxygen and some with no headlamps--faced the nearly impossible task of descending in the blackness with no guideline and no protection. Over the course of the chaotic night, some would miraculously make it back. Others would not.

In this riveting work of narrative nonfiction, journalist Graham Bowley re-creates one of the most dramatic tales of death and survival in mountaineering history.

Following his participation in James Cook's circumnavigation in HMS Endeavour (1768-71), Joseph Banks developed an extensive global network of scientists and explorers. His correspondence shows how he developed effective working links with the British Admiralty and with the generation of naval officers who sailed after Cook.

One bright April morning a dozen years ago, Clarence Wood and I stood on the crest of a birch knoll, looking out over the upper Kobuk valley. Before us, thousands of caribou grazed, dark specks trailing off into the blue-white distance. Clarence turned, his weathered Eskimo face split by a wide grin. "Lots," he said quietly. "Lots." The longer I live here and write, the more I find myself following Clarence's cue-turning to simpler words, and fewer of them. My hope, in these twenty-eight brief essays about life in the Alaskan arctic, is to find words not big enough, but small enough for a landscape and a place without end. ---- In A Place Beyond, Nick Jans leads us into his "found" home-the Eskimo village of Ambler, Alaska, and the vast wilderness around it. In his powerful essays, the rhythms of daily arctic life blend with high adventure-camping among wolves, traveling with Inupiat hunters, witnessing the Kobuk River at breakup. The poignancy of a village funeral comes to life, hordes of mosquitoes whine against a tent, a grizzly stands etched against the snow-just a sampling of the images and events rendered in Jans's transparent, visual prose. Moments of humor are offset by haunting insights, and by thoughtful reflections on contemporary Inupiaq culture, making A Place Beyond a book to savor.

The lifeline for all the writers collected here is the ocean's edge. Stephen Crane, Frank Stockton, Norman Duncan, Thomas Raddall, Alistair MacLeod, Silver Donald Cameron and others share blustering tales about ready ships and sailors longing to put to sea. The stories cover both modern and historical events.

A journey of adventure, tragedy, love, and loss on the summit of Mt. Hood.

In December 2006, millions of people across the world prayed and waited in anguish to learn the fate of 3 climbers trapped on Mt. Hood. The worst storm in the last decade was pounding the mountain with hurricane-force winds that would not permit the army of rescue workers to do their work. No one below could forget the last phone call Kelly James placed to his wife, telling her that he was trapped in a snow cave just below the summit. What happened next would change the lives of everyone involved and deeply touch millions of people who desperately hoped to see a Christmas miracle.

For more than a week, the search dominated the news as family members huddled below, praying for the climbers' safe return. But the story did not end when Kelly James's body was airlifted off the mountain and the cameras stopped rolling. For Karen, the year after Kelly's death was spent searching for answers to what really happened on the mountain. In this journey of adventure, tragedy, love and loss, she reveals never-released information about the fateful climb and behind-the-scenes details of how the family coped with the shocking news.

At the start of the 18th century there were no maps, anywhere in the world. No one knew, with any certainty, the shape of the earth or what lay beneath its surface. Was it hollow or solid? Were the Andes the highest mountains on the Earth or was it the peak of Tenerife? Was the Earth a perfect sphere or slightly squashed as Sir Isaac Newton prophesized? In Weighing the World, master-surveyor and bestselling author Edwin Danson presents the stories of the scientists and scholars who cut their way through jungles, crossed the artic tundra, and braved the world's highest mountains to discover the truth about our Earth. Danson also recounts the extraordinary experiment, conducted on a desolate Scottish peak by Astromer Royal Neville Maskelyne, to understand the so-called "attraction of mountains," the curious capability mountians have to bend gravity, without which it would be impossible to accurately map Earth's surface. A spell-binding scientific adventure story, Weighing the World will intrigue anyone curious about the shape of our planet and how we have come to know it.

Nearly three centuries before Lewis and Clark's epic trek to the Pacific coast, an African slave named Esteban Dorantes became America's first great explorer and adventurer--the first pioneer from the Old World to explore the entirety of the American South. Shipwrecked off the Florida coast, Esteban guided a small band of survivors on an incredible, eight-year-long journey westward--enduring famine, disease, and Native American hostility as the company made their way across what is now Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, traveling as far as the Gulf of California.

Drawing on contemporary accounts, long-lost records, and Dr. Robert Goodwin's groundbreaking research in Spanish archives, "Crossing the Continent" is a riveting true story of physical endurance, natural calamities, geographical wonders, and strange discoveries--a remarkable chronicle that offers a radical new interpretation of American history.

Ernest Oberholtzer (1884-1977) is one of the great unsung heroes of the American conservation movement of the twentieth century. Selected as one of the 100 influential Minnesotans of the twentieth century by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, a friend and contemporary of both Aldo Leopold and Sigurd Olson, and one of founders of The Wilderness Society, "Ober" was best known for his pioneering work to preserve one of the last remaining wilderness areas east of the Rockies--the Quetico-Superior region of northern Minnesota and southern Ontario.
The long campaign by Ober and many others to preserve this area made a significant and lasting impression on conservation and wilderness preservation efforts around the world. Keeper of the Wild is the first book to document and explore the life of the man who led the fight to save the area that eventually became Voyageurs National Park and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (today the most visited wilderness area in the United States), and the successful effort to preserve Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario as a protected wilderness area.
Drawing on a lifetime of notebooks, letters, and speeches, as well as interviews with the people who knew him best, Paddock maps Ober's transformation from a daring young outdoorsman and adventurer to an equally fierce defender of our country's disappearing wilderness areas.
Along with his desire to preserve the natural beauty of the boundary waters, Ober was also committed to preserving the culture of the native peoples of the northern wilderness. He befriended and traveled with them, learned to speak Ojibwe fluently, and began a life-long study of the legends and oral tradition of their culture. Because of his efforts on their behalf, the Ojibwe called him "Atisokan," meaning "legend" or "teller-of-legends."
JOE PADDOCK is a poet, oral historian, and environmental writer. A founding member of the Land Stewardship Project, he is the principal author of Soil and Survival: Land Stewardship and the Future of American Agriculture. His poetry collections are "Handful of Thunder: A Prairie Cycle," "Earth Tongues," and "Boars' Dance "and he edited the oral history collection "Things We Know Best."

This is a study of the nature and role of science in the exploration of the Canadian Arctic. It covers the century that began with the British Royal Naval expeditions of 1818 and ends with the Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913-1918. Professor Levere focuses on the imperialistic dimensions and nationalistic aspirations that informed arctic science, and situates its rise in the context of economic and military history of nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe and North America. Accessibly written and prodigously researched, Science and the Canadian Arctic should appeal to an audience of historians, environmental scientists, and anyone interested in the Arctic.

On January 2, 1678, a fleet of French ships sank off the Venezuelan coast. This proved disastrous for French naval power in the region, and sparked the rise of a golden age of piracy.

Tracing the lives of fabled pirates like the Chevalier de Grammont, Nikolaas Van Hoorn, Thomas Paine, and Jean Comte d'Estrées, The Lost Fleet portrays a dark age, when the outcasts of European society formed a democracy of buccaneers, settling on a string of islands off the African coast. From there, the pirates haunted the world's oceans, wreaking havoc on the settlements along the Spanish mainland and -- often enlisted by French and English governments -- sacking ships, ports, and coastal towns.

More than three hundred years later, writer, explorer, and deep-sea diver Barry Clifford follows the pirates' destructive wake back to Venezuela. With the help of a lost map, drawn by the captain of the lost French fleet, Clifford locates the site of the disaster and wreckage of the once-mighty armada.

Behind the great polar explorers of the early twentieth century - Amundsen, Shackleton, Scott in the South and Peary in the North - looms the spirit of Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930), the mentor of them all. He was the father of modern polar exploration, the last act of territorial discovery before the leap into space began.
Nansen was a prime illustration of Carlyle's dictum that 'the history of the world is but the biography of great men'. He was not merely a pioneer in the wildly diverse fields of oceanography and skiing, but one of the founders of neurology. A restless, unquiet Faustian spirit, Nansen was a Renaissance Man born out of his time into the new Norway of Ibsen and Grieg. He was an artist and historian, a diplomat who had dealings with Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, and played a part in the Versailles Peace Conference, where he helped the Americans in their efforts to contain the Bolsheviks. He also undertook famine relief in Russia. Finally, working for the League of Nations as both High Commissioner for Refugees and High Commissioner for the Repatriation of Prisoners of War, he became the first of the modern media-conscious international civil servants.
 

In 1322 Sir John Mandeville left England on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Thirty-four years later, he returned, claiming to have visited not only Jerusalem, but India, China, Java, Sumatra and Borneo as well. His book about that voyage, THE TRAVELS, was heralded as the most important book of the Middle Ages as Mandeville claimed his voyage proved it was possible to circumnavigate the globe. In the nineteenth century sceptics questioned his voyage, and even doubted he had left England. THE RIDDLE AND THE KNIGHT sets out to discover whether Mandeville really could have made his voyage or whether, as is claimed, THE TRAVELS was a work of imaginative fiction. Bestselling historian Giles Milton unearths clues about the journey and reveals that THE TRAVELS is built upon a series of riddles which have, until now, remained unsolved.

In the 1380s and 90s, Nicolo and Antonio Zen journeyed from Venice up the North Atlantic, encountering warrior princes, fighting savage natives and, just possibly, reaching the New World a full century before Columbus. The story of their adventure travelled throughout Europe, from the workshop of the great cartographer Mercator to the court of Elizabeth I. For centuries, the brothers were international celebrities, until, in 1835, the story was denounced as a 'tissue of lies' and the Zens faded into oblivion. Following in their footsteps Andrea di Robilant sets out to discover the truth about the Zen voyages in a journey that takes him from the crumbling Palazzo Zen in Venice to the Orkney Islands, the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland. Part history, part travelogue, Venetian Navigators is a charming tale of great journeys, fine detective work and faith, against the odds.

Part adventure, part love story, part inquiry into the mystery of connection between humans and dogs, Fast into the Night is an exquisitely written memoir of a woman, her dogs, and what can happen when someone puts herself in that place between daring and doubt-and soldiers on.

Aviation in the 1950s was a positive, exciting sequel to the most destructive war in history. It gave birth to the jet age for passengers, fostering remarkable social changes. Venture into the Stratosphere is a memoir about the exhilaration and challenges in flying the first jetliners. It brings to life a story of diverse elements, such as technical matters in layman's terms, a love story, social interactions, engineering philosophy, the post-war ethos, and the intimate details of the flight deck in routine flying and emergency situations. Readers enjoy the stories that make all their flights fascinating and exciting for years to come!

When the Soviets experienced a series of setbacks in their space program the USSR switched emphasis in their manned space program away from the Moon towards the creation of orbital scientific research platforms, the Space Station. With the success of Apollo, the Soviets claimed they had never actually intended to fly to the Moon, and that the space station was always their long-term goal. However, recently disclosed Russian archives show that, contrary to official statements in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a planned Soviet program to send cosmonauts around the Moon and eventually to land on the surface. For the Americans, having lost their only competitor in the race for the Moon, the need for the Apollo program was questioned even before the first landing was achieved. With the near tragic flight of Apollo 13 in 1970 the pressure was on to cut the program and redirect efforts towards more Earth-focused objectives. At the height of success, the Apollo missions were reduced from 20 to 17, and plans for extending the flights to include lunar stays of 14 days to create a lunar base were scrapped. the Moon by either America or Russia. The final Soviet Luna probe flew in 1976 and the following year the network of scientific experiments left on the Moon by the Apollo astronauts were switched off. Whilst many plans were put forward to return to the Moon, only two probes, Clementine and Lunar Prospector have supplemented information from the Apollo era.