In this fascinating biography, author Lisa Baile provides a detailed portrait of John Clarke, the man who became British Columbia's most renowned mountaineer by doing it his way. Clarke had no interest in "trophy climbs" and never did ascend many of BC's highest peaks. On the other hand, he explored more virgin territory and racked up more first ascents than any other climber -- perhaps more than any climber who ever lived. Although he came to be honoured far and wide and is one of the few mountaineers to be awarded the Order of Canada, he was a modest man who pursued his passion without fanfare, frequently embarking on gruelling expeditions into unknown territory by himself. His reputation spread and grew to legendary proportions, not just owing to the prodigious scale of his achievements, but because of the way he carried them out -- he travelled light and scorned technology, wearing cotton long Johns and eating home-made granola. He dedicated his life to exploring the numberless, nameless peaks of the Coast Range and worked at odd jobs just long enough to pay for the next season's climbing. He was charismatic and famously attractive to women, but none were able to compete with his first love and he didn't marry until he was almost fifty. Always a popular lecturer, in his later years he devoted his considerable energies to the cause of environmental education. After he succumbed to cancer in 2003, the BC government named Mount John Clarke in his honour -- fitting recognition for the man who had himself named many BC mountains. This book covers this remarkable life from beginning to end, examining Clarke through his own words and pictures as well as through the words of his many friends. All agree it was an honour to have known him, and readers will find it equally inspiring to meet him through these pages.

The European discovery of the northwest coast of America is fully and dramatically recorded in this journal, an invaluable historical and scientific source document. It is also a gripping narrative of human conflict, of nature as the overwhelming adversary, of terror and pain and death, and of final deliverance. In the service of the Russian tsarina, the German naturalist Steller accompanied the great Danish explorer Vitus Bering on a voyage that survived shipwreck and unimaginable hardship to mark the beginning of Alaska's recorded history. This book is a new translation and annotation of Steller's journal of that voyage and the first to be based completely upon a surviving copy of Steller's manuscript dated 1743 (previous translation had been based on a 1793 edition). The journal is the best known of Steller's writings, not so much because of events along the way, or its biological and anthropological observations, not even because of the momentous sight of the Alaskan coast and the subsequent landings, but because of the harrowing events of the return voyage. Thirty-two men of the 78 who set sail died, including Bering himself; 46 survived shipwreck in the winter of 1741-42 on a treeless, uninhabited island, and returned finally to home port on Kamchatka in a small vessel built from timbers of the wrecked ship. On the island, Bering and his lieutenant had become too ill to function and Steller found himself taking the lead in organizing work parties, finding antiscorbutic plant and animal food, nursing the six, and cheering the depressed-actions that kept all from perishing.

Winner of the People's Literature Award, WINTER PASTURE has been a bestselling book in China for several years. Li Juan has been widely lauded in the international literary community for her unique contribution to the narrative non-fiction genre. WINTER PASTURE is her crowning achievement, shattering the boundaries between nature writing and personal memoir. Li Juan and her mother own a small convenience store in the Altai Mountains in Northwestern China, where she writes about her life among grasslands and snowy peaks. To her neighbors' surprise, Li decides to join a family of Kazakh herders as they take their 30 boisterous camels, 500 sheep and over 100 cattle and horses to pasture for the winter. The so-called "winter pasture" occurs in a remote region that stretches from the Ulungur River to the Heavenly Mountains. As she journeys across the vast, seemingly endless sand dunes, she helps herd sheep, rides horses, chases after camels, builds an underground home using manure, gathers snow for water, and more. With a keen eye for the understated elegance of the natural world, and a healthy dose of self-deprecating humor, Li vividly captures both the extraordinary hardships and the ordinary preoccupations of the day-to-day of the men and women struggling to get by in this desolate landscape. Her companions include Cuma, the often drunk but mostly responsible father; his teenage daughter, Kama, who feels the burden of the world on her shoulders and dreams of going to college; his reticent wife, a paragon of decorum against all odds, who is simply known as "sister-in-law." In bringing this faraway world to English language readers here for the first time, Li creates an intimate bond with the rugged people, the remote places and the nomadic lifestyle. In the signature style that made her an international sensation, Li Juan transcends the travel memoir genre to deliver an indelible and immersive reading experience on every page.

Captain Cook is the greatest explorer-seaman of all time, yet the world has had to wait almost two centuries for the first full-scale biography to do justice to the man and his achievements. Professor J.C. Beaglehole, the leading authority on Pacific exploration, devoted himself for many years to the editing of Cook's copious Journals, a monument of scholarship in four massive volumes, and the Journal of Josepph Banks who accompanied Cook in the Endeavor. The Journals completed, Beaglehole turn to writing as the crown of his life's work this biography of Cook, which was completed but for a final checking when he died. This is not merely a chronological account of events in Cook's life but a deeply revealing study of the growth of a complex character, stubborn and passionate yet patient and judicious, seen in his actions as an unrivalled navigator and explorer and as a commander of men. Those who influenced Cook from childhood up, and those who sailed with him on his voyages, are as clearly and surely drawn as the man himself. The author's first-hand knowledge of the Pacific Islands and the coasts of New Zealand and Australia give a warmth and actuality to the narrative, while his impeccable scholarship and skill in handling the mass of documentary material, his wit, and his elegant literary style, confirm the expectration that this is one of the great historical biographies.

In "Columbus: His Enterprise", Hans Koning describes the personality and motivation of a man who changed the course of hisotry. Exploding the myth of the Great Navigator, the author reveals how Colombus accidentally found a continent and systematically pillaged its resources. This controversial book depicts a Columbus not only obsessed by gold but willing to endorse murder for it. 1992 marks the 500th anniversary of Columbus' arrival in the New World. To the indigenous peoples of Latin America the event is no cause for rejoicing. In an afterwood to "Columbus: His Enterprise", Domitila Chungara, the renowned Bolivian activist, laments "The invasion of our lands, the theft of our riches...the most horrific thing that they could ever do to our people".

An award-winning environmental historian explores American history through wrenching, tragic, and sometimes humorous stories of getting lost "Fascinating. . . . Underlying . . . is a deep belief in the importance of collaboration and cooperation between humans and their environments, as well as between humans and other humans."-Robert Macfarlane, New York Review of Books The human species has a propensity for getting lost. The American people, inhabiting a mental landscape shaped by their attempts to plant roots and to break free, are no exception. In this engaging book, environmental historian Jon Coleman bypasses the trailblazers so often described in American history to follow instead the strays and drifters who went missing. From Hernando de Soto's failed quest for riches in the American southeast to the recent trend of getting lost as a therapeutic escape from modernity, this book details a unique history of location and movement as well as the confrontations that occur when our physical and mental conceptions of space become disjointed. Whether we get lost in the woods, the plains, or the digital grid, Coleman argues that getting lost allows us to see wilderness anew and connect with generations across five centuries to discover a surprising and edgy American identity.

The narratives of the voyages of the Elizabethan and early Jacobean era have served their turn over the centuries as stirring accounts of the daring of the empire-builders. In this collection of the contemporary accounts of three famous 'last voyages', these writings can be seen as a powerful and special kind of literature, having kinship with the great fictional tragedies of the period. Thomas Cavendish attempted in 1591 to repeat his earlier triumphant circumnavigation of the globe, but could not get through the Magellan Straits and died at sea, probably by his own hand, on the voyage home. Henry Hudson, making yet another attempt to find the North-West Passage in 1610-11, was set adrift in the ice by his own crew. Sir Walter Ralegh, released from the Tower, failed to find the Guiana gold in 1617-18 and came home to the executioner's axe. The men who wrote the accounts of these disastrous ventures were the participants themselves: the leaders, the mutineers, young gentlemen, even a poet and a mathematician. Apart from the poet, none were writing for a living, though some of them were writing for their lives, passionately justifying or exonerating themselves, challenging and contradicting each other. Brought together, their accounts form moving documents of endeavour and defeat in difficult seas and hostile terrain. All the narratives, given in modern spelling, have been newly re-edited from the original manuscripts or printings, with ample introductions which correct the existing historical record on a number of points, and with full explanatory commentary.

WINNER OF THE TELEGRAPH BEST SPORTS WRITING AWARD 2021 SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD 2021 'One of the best books ever written about the early attempts to conquer Everest. A fine, fine slice of history by a truly special writer who proves time and time again that he is among the best of his generation' Dan Jones, author of The Plantagenets 'A small classic of the biographer's art' Sunday Times In the 1930s, as official government expeditions set their sights on conquering Everest, a little-known World War I veteran named Maurice Wilson conceived his own crazy, beautiful plan: he would fly a Gipsy Moth aeroplane from England to Everest, crash land on its lower slopes, then become the first person to reach its summit - all utterly alone. Wilson didn't know how to climb. He barely knew how to fly. But he had pluck, daring and a vision - he wanted to be the first man to stand on top of the world. Maurice Wilson is a man written out of the history books - dismissed as an eccentric and a charlatan by many, but held in the highest regard by world class mountaineers such as Reinhold Messner. The Moth and the Mountain restores him to his rightful place in the annals of Everest and in doing so attempts to answer that perennial question - why do we climb mountains? 'A towering, tragic tale rescued from oblivion by Ed Caesar's magnificent writing' Dan Snow 'This bonkers ripping yarn of derring-don't is a hell of a ride' The Times 'It's hard to imagine a finer tribute to one of Everest's forgotten heroes' Elizabeth Day

During the period between the publication of Pierre Esprit Radisson's "Voyages" by the Prince Society of Boston in 1885 and the appearance of "Caesars of the Wilderness" in 1943, scholarly journals and books were often enlivened by the historical controversy surrounding Radisson and his fellow explorer, Medard Chouart, Sieur Des Groseilliers. Often referred to as the "Radisson problem," the controversy called into question almost every aspect of the two men's lives, from the authenticity of parts of Radisson's narrative to the exact itinerary the men followed in their travels. The publication of "Caesars in the Wilderness" brought the historical debate to an end. Based on many years of research in repositories throughout France, England, and North America, the books, with its skillful presentation of new evidence, settled many of the questions that had long puzzled scholars.

From an award-winning historian comes a dazzling history of the birth of cultural anthropology and the adventurous scientists who pioneered it—a sweeping chronicle of discovery and the fascinating origin story of our multicultural world.

A century ago, everyone knew that people were fated by their race, sex, and nationality to be more or less intelligent, nurturing, or warlike. But Columbia University professor Franz Boas looked at the data and decided everyone was wrong. Racial categories, he insisted, were biological fictions. Cultures did not come in neat packages labeled "primitive" or "advanced." What counted as a family, a good meal, or even common sense was a product of history and circumstance, not of nature. In Gods of the Upper Air, a masterful narrative history of radical ideas and passionate lives, Charles King shows how these intuitions led to a fundamental reimagining of human diversity.

Boas's students were some of the century's most colorful figures and unsung visionaries: Margaret Mead, the outspoken field researcher whose Coming of Age in Samoa is among the most widely read works of social science of all time; Ruth Benedict, the great love of Mead's life, whose research shaped post-Second World War Japan; Ella Deloria, the Dakota Sioux activist who preserved the traditions of Native Americans on the Great Plains; and Zora Neale Hurston, whose studies under Boas fed directly into her now classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Together, they mapped civilizations from the American South to the South Pacific and from Caribbean islands to Manhattan's city streets, and unearthed an essential fact buried by centuries of prejudice: that humanity is an undivided whole. Their revolutionary findings would go on to inspire the fluid conceptions of identity we know today.

Rich in drama, conflict, friendship, and love, Gods of the Upper Air is a brilliant and groundbreaking history of American progress and the opening of the modern mind.

From the sharp, comic voice of Haunted Inside Passage, Never Cry Halibut is a collection of humorous and thoughtful short essays about hunting and fishing in Alaska. Accompanied by photographs, each story reflects the author's three-decade relationship with the wildest places left in North America as he interacts with brown bears, wolves, wilderness, commercial fishing, and the nearly forgotten act of harvesting food from the wild. From hilarious tales of his nieces outfishing him to reflective ruminations on the human connection to nature, Bjorn captures the liveliness that comes from living so close to the Southeast Alaska wilds.

A narrative of Captain Scott's expedition to the Antarctic. This book provides a record of various aspects of the expedition which set out from Dundee in 1901, from the realities of daily routine to their wonder at discovering strange landscapes, as well as the trials of harsh weather conditions, food shortages and illness.

One hundred and fifty years ago, the young naturalists Alfred Wallace, Henry Walter Bates, and Richard Spruce were on a journey. Their destination, Amazonia the world s largest tropical forest with the greatest river system and richest ecosystem was then an almost-undiscovered environment to Western explorers and scientists. In Naturalists in Paradise, Amazon expert John Hemming weaves the riveting stories of these three men s experiences in the Amazon and assesses their valuable research that drastically changed our conception of the natural world. Each of the three naturalists is famous for a particular discovery: Wallace is credited, along with Charles Darwin, for developing the theory of evolution; Bates uncovered the phenomenon of protective mimicry among insects; and Spruce transported the quinine-bearing Cinchona tree to India, saving countless lives from malaria. Drawing on the letters and books of the three naturalists, Hemming reaches beyond the well-known narratives, offering unrivaled insight into the often lawless frontier life in South America as seen through the lives of the great pioneers of modern disciplines: anthropology, tribal linguistics, archaeology, and every branch of natural science."

Ice Ghosts weaves together the epic story of the Lost Franklin Expedition of 1845-whose two ships and crew of 129 were lost to the Arctic ice-with the tale of the incredible discovery of the flagship's wreck in 2014. Paul Watson, who was on the icebreaker that led the discovery expedition, tells a fast-paced historical adventure story: Sir John Franklin and the crew of the HMS Erebus and Terror setting off in search of the fabled Northwest Passage, the hazards they encountered and the reasons they were forced to abandon ship hundreds of miles from the nearest outpost of civilization, and the decades of searching that exposed rumours of cannibalism and a few scattered papers and bones-until a combination of Inuit lore and the latest science yielded a discovery for the ages.

In 1644, the news that Antonio de Montezinos claimed to have discovered the Lost Tribes of Israel in the jungles of South America spread across Europe fuelling an already febrile atmosphere of messianic and millenarian expectation. By tracing the process in which one set of apocalyptic ideas was transmitted across the Christian and Islamic worlds, this book provides fresh insight into the origin and transmission of eschatological constructs, and the resulting beliefs that blurred traditional religious boundaries and identities. Beginning with an investigation of the impact of Montezinos's narrative, the next chapter follows the story to England, examining how the Quaker messiah James Nayler was viewed in Europe. The third chapter presents the history of the widely reported - but wholly fictitious - story of the sack of Mecca, a rumour that was spread alongside news of Sabbatai Sevi. The final chapter looks at Christian responses to the Sabbatian movement, providing a detailed discussion of the cross-religious and international representations of the messiah. The conclusion brings these case studies together, arguing that the evolving beliefs in the messiah and the Lost Tribes between 1648 and 1666 can only be properly understood by taking into account the multitude of narrative threads that moved between networks of Jews, Conversos, Catholics and Protestants from one side of the Atlantic to the far side of the Mediterranean and back again. By situating this transmission in a broader historical context, the book reveals the importance of early-modern crises, diasporas and newsgathering networks in generating the eschatological constructs, disseminating them on an international scale, and transforming them through this process of intercultural dissemination into complex new hybrid religious conceptions, expectations, and identities.

'Like Sir David Attenborough, he has the rare ability to be an excellent communicator and has written an engaging book sprinkled with mind-blowing facts about the deep oceans' - Daily Express 'A new informed perspective on the wide, watery world we inhabit' - Coast magazine 'Book of the month' 'The gripping story of how ocean science has advanced in recent years is captivatingly told by Jon Copley in this introduction to the deep ocean' - China Dialogue 'Deftly conjures the wonders of a bathynaut's world' - Nature It is often said that we know more about space than we do our own oceans, but is that really the case? Or do we in fact know a great deal more about the oceans than many people realise. The wellbeing of our oceans and the life contained within and around them has never been more important. But to truly understand the vital role they play, we need to first understand how the oceans work, how we explore them and learn about the mysteries they hold, and what our effect is on them. Between these pages is everything you need to know about our oceans, explained in 25 questions. Combining untold history of ocean exploration and personal account of what it's like to be a 'bathynaut' diving in a mini-submarine, Ask an Ocean Explorer brings to light weird and wonderful deep-sea creatures and how the oceans and their future is connected to our everyday lives.

Turning away from the privileged world of the " eminent Victorians, " Gertrude Bell (1868-- 1926) explored, mapped, and excavated the world of the Arabs. Recruited by British intelligence during World War I, she played a crucial role in obtaining the loyalty of Arab leaders, and her connections and information provided the brains to match T. E. Lawrence's brawn. After the war, she played a major role in creating the modern Middle East and was, at the time, considered the most powerful woman in the British Empire.

In this masterful biography, Janet Wallach shows us the woman behind these achievements- a woman whose passion and defiant independence were at odds wit the confined and custom-bound England she left behind. Too long eclipsed by Lawrence, Gertrude Bell emerges at last in her own right as a vital player on the stage of modern history, and as a woman whose life was both a heartbreaking story and a grand adventure.

When gold fever struck in 1849, John S. Darcy - prominent physician, general, and president of the New Jersey Railroad - assembled a company to travel overland to California. In Jersey Gold, Margaret Casterline Bowen and Gwendolyn Joslin Hiles tell the story of that colorful company of some thirty stalwarts and adventurers. Jersey Gold chronicles the experiences of the New Jersey argonauts from their lives before the gold rush to the widely varying fortunes each ultimately found. Animated by the trekkers' own words and observations and illustrated with maps, photographs, and drawings by one of the company's own men, Jersey Gold follows the Newark Overland Company's journey by rail, stage, and riverboat to the Missouri frontier town of Independence, the group's jumping-off point for the Oregon-California trail. There, the company splintered. Their divergent paths afford views of the westward journey from multiple perspectives as the companies faced the perils of the wilderness and the treachery of human nature. Once in gold country, many booked immediate passage home, but some remained with Darcy to work a successful mining operation before returning east with comfortable fortunes. A few, enchanted by the opportunities of the Golden Coast, took up permanent residence there - and in their stories we witness the emergence of California amid unprecedented lawlessness, the controversy of slavery, and diverse nationalities. The story of the Newark Overland Company - in many ways a panorama of the nineteenth century - ranges from the wildness of the frontier through the chaos of the Civil War to the throes of early industrialization, and features such notables as John Sutter, Brigham Young, and Henry Clay. In chronicling this journey, Jersey Gold vividly re-creates a defining chapter in American history.

On March 8, 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen set sail from China to "proceed all the way to the ends of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas." When the fleet returned home in October 1423, the emperor had fallen, leaving China in political and economic chaos. The great ships were left to rot at their moorings and the records of their journeys were destroyed. Lost in the long, self-imposed isolation that followed was the knowledge that Chinese ships had reached America seventy years before Columbus and had circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan. And they colonized America before the Europeans, transplanting the principal economic crops that have since fed and clothed the world.

A popular guide to the state's canoe country from Rainy Lake east to Lake Superior tells of the famous explorers, great fur traders, voyageurs, Indians, and loggers who passed that way. Photographs and maps support the fascinating, authoritative text.

The book draws on the history of economics, literary theory, and the history of science to explore how European travelers like Alexander von Humboldt and their readers, circa 1750-1850, adapted the work of British political economists, such as Adam Smith, to help organize their observations, and, in turn, how political economists used travelers' observations in their own analyses. Cooper examines journals, letters, books, art, and critical reviews to cast in sharp relief questions raised about political economy by contemporaries over the status of facts and evidence, whether its principles admitted of universal application, and the determination of wealth, value, and happiness in different societies. Travelers citing T.R. Malthus's population principle blurred the gendered boundaries between domestic economy and British political economy, as embodied in the idealized subjects: domestic woman and economic man. The book opens new realms in the histories of science in its analyses of debates about gender in social scientific observation: Maria Edgeworth, Maria Graham, and Harriet Martineau observe a role associated with women and methodically interpret what they observe, an act reserved, in theory, by men.