In this succinct dual biography, Laura Chmielewski demonstrates how the lives of two French explorers - Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit missionary, and Louis Jolliet, a fur trapper - reveal the diverse world of early America. Following the explorers' epic journey through the center of the American continent, Marquette and Jolliet combines a story of discovery and encounter with the insights derived from recent historical scholarship. The story provides perspective on the different methods and goals of colonization and the role of Native Americans as active participants in this complex and uneven process.

First published in 1964. This book is concerned with impressions of Arabic culture on the British before the First World War. More particularly, it is concerned with three Victorian travellers, all of whom knew Arabic culture first hand through their travels in the Middle and Near East, and especially in Arabia, Arabic North Africa, and the seaboard of the eastern Mediterranean. This title will be of interest to students of history.

In this succinct dual biography, Laura Chmielewski demonstrates how the lives of two French explorers - Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit missionary, and Louis Jolliet, a fur trapper - reveal the diverse world of early America. Following the explorers' epic journey through the center of the American continent, Marquette and Jolliet combines a story of discovery and encounter with the insights derived from recent historical scholarship. The story provides perspective on the different methods and goals of colonization and the role of Native Americans as active participants in this complex and uneven process.

This volume recounts the experiences of female missionaries who worked in Uganda in and after 1895. It examines the personal stories of those women who were faced with a stubbornly masculine administration representative of a wider masculine administrative network in Westminster and other outposts of the British Empire. Encounters with Ugandan women and men of a range of ethnicities, the gender relations in those societies and relations between the British Protectorate administration and Ugandan Christian women are all explored in detail. The analysis is offset by the author's experience of working in Uganda at the close of British Protectorate status in the 1960s, employed by the Uganda Government Education Department in a school founded by the Uganda Mission.

When this book was first published in 1958, Arabia was even then one of the least known corners of the globe. The foreigner was strictly forbidden from entering, except those with the Imam's personal consent, and then under close supervision. Foreigners were only allowed as far as the capital, and what lay beyond was practically unexplored. To Hans Helfritz the only hope of seeing the forbidden area was to make a secret journey, approaching it in disguise by the back door. He decided to reach the borders of the Yemen by a wide detour through the interior, crossing a desert previously considered impassable and still recorded on the maps as a blank. Beginning on the coast at the eastern extremity of the Gulf of Aden, he made his way through the Hadhramaut, the Rub' al Khali and the Yemen to the Red Sea, the first crossing ever of the south-western part of the peninsula. From this journey he brought back a fascinating record of adventure and exploration, together with many wonderful pictures of cities never before photographed.

The Triumphs, Struggles, and Secrets of a Captain's Life Richard Metz was a Great Lakes captain for 20 years. He experienced wild weather, close calls, near misses, and events that can only be described as "unimaginable." He has incredible sea stories to tell, and now they are yours to enjoy. Take an entertaining look at life aboard a variety of Great Lakes ships. Read 26 compelling tales of a Great Lakes crewmate and captain, including stories about the Gales of November, the night of the Edmund Fitzgerald's sinking, and more. Plus, you'll be fascinated by the details and full-color photographs of the ships themselves. If you're a history buff, a Great Lakes enthusiast, a ship watcher, or a fan of a good yarn, Sea Stories is for you!

First published in 2006. These unique sketches of Japan and Japanese life were written by Frank Hughes. foreign correspondent of the London Times, Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Post. Shrines, mountains, traditional drums, misty rains and the shrill wailing of Shinto music come to life in Hedges' brief, lyrical descriptions and lovers of Japan are sure to be overwhelmed by memory.

First published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Franz Josef Land is a forbidding place, isolated by geography and history. Lying above the Arctic Circle in the northernmost province of Russia, this remote series of islands was only discovered by Westerners in 1873, and remains little known today. A few intrepid explorers ventured there in the late 19th century as a stepping-stone in attempts to reach the North Pole. Chicago journalist Walter Wellman led the first American expedition to the archipelago as part of a polar expedition in 1898-1899. His second-in-command, Evelyn Briggs Baldwin, kept a journal documenting their trip. This previously unpublished journal reveals much about one of the last great periods of exploration - including the violence, chicanery, and racism that characterized much of American exploration and expansion. Baldwin's journal, reproduced here, paints a more realistic picture of the expedition than did Wellman's communiques sent home for mass consumption. Correspondence between Baldwin and Wellman is included, and expedition notes list the supplies carried, descriptions of geographic features observed in the course of the trip, and the doctor's notes on treatments, remedies and supplies. Editor P.J. Capelotti provides an extended introduction, and the text is illustrated with maps, depictions of dramatic events occurring on the trip, and several photographs.

First published in 2008. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2005. In the South Seas is the story of Louis's travels through the Pacificon the Casco and later on the schooner Equator. It is a beautifully observed account of island peoples and their life, but above all it is the story of the beginning of Louis's love affair with the Pacific.

First published in 2008. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Weighing the World is a revealing behind-the-scenes look at the scientific events leading to modern map making written by one of the world's master surveyors. Edwin Danson, using a similar approach to his earlier best seller, "Drawing the Line: How Mason and Dixon Surveyed the Most Important Border in America" (Wiley, 2000) takes us on a journey telling the story of this experiment that has not been written about in over two hundred years. National jealousies, commercial and political rivalry were the underlying causes for many of the eighteenth century's wars but war also provided the stimulus for much commercial effort and scientific innovation. Armies equipped with the latest weaponry marched about the countryside, led by generals with only the vaguest of maps at their disposal. At the start of the century there were no maps, anywhere in the world. While there were plenty of atlases and sketch maps of countries, regions and districts, with few exceptions they were imperfect renditions in nature. No one knew, with any certainty the shape of the earth or what lay beneath its surface. Was it hollow or was it solid? Were the Andes the highest mountain on the Earth or was it the peak of Tenerife? Was the Earth a perfect sphere or was it slightly squashed as Sir Isaac Newton prophesized? Just how did you accurately measure the planet? The answers to these and other questions about the nature of the Earth, answers we now take for granted, were complete mysteries. Danson presents the stories of the scientists and scholars that had to scale the Andes, cut through tropical forests and how they handled the hardships they faced in the attempt to revolutionize our understanding of the planet.

These essays trace the history of the British search for the Northwest Passage - the Arctic sea route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans - from the early modern era to the start of the nineteenth century.

Focusing on nineteenth-century attempts to locate the northwest passage, the essays in this volume present this quest as a central element of British culture.

Footsteps in the Snow recounts a life shaped and dominated by Antarctica, a multi-facetted account of a life dedicated to Antarctic science, policy and governance. It is also the story of growth from callow youth to Antarctic professional in the most challenging of environments. Joining the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) straight from university in 1966 meant two years as a scientist at an isolated British research station with all the challenges of wintering in the hostile environment half a century ago. After just two years he became one of the youngest men to be made a base commander, and as Sir Vivian Fuchs (then Director of BAS) recounts 'proved himself one of the best we ever had under the most testing conditions'. The story recounts the many challenges of those testing conditions, while developing scientific ideas and accomplishing engineering feats with his team and on occasion looking death in the face and surviving. There were new developments in building research stations on the ice shelf, and the discovery of the ozone hole that gripped the world. Then followed the transition from research scientist to policy maker and diplomat when he became Deputy Director of BAS and advisor to the British delegation at the Antarctic Treaty. Tragedy struck at a base resulting in the author leading the first ever British midwinter flight into Antarctica. Since retiral, the author has become a polar historian "of repute", and his efforts have been directed to writing and being a guide for Antarctic tourism. This book allows the reader to feel the wonder, awe, excitement and passion for Antarctica which drove John Dudeney throughout his career, and which is as fresh today as it was on first encounter half a century ago.

Features a collection of essays that focus on British travel narratives from the seventeenth through to the nineteenth centuries. This work investigates how the early explorers' sense of self was destabilised by encounters with the Other.

"Islandology" is a fast-paced, fact-filled comparative essay in critical topography and cultural geography that cuts across different cultures and argues for a world of islands. The book explores the logical consequences of geographic place for the development of philosophy and the study of limits (Greece) and for the establishment of North Sea democracy (England and Iceland), explains the location of military hot-spots and great cities (Hormuz and Manhattan), and sheds new light on dozens of world-historical productions whose motivating islandic aspect has not heretofore been recognized (Shakespeare's "Hamlet" and Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelung"). Written by Shell in view of the melting of the world's great ice islands, "Islandology" shows not only new ways that we think about islands but also why and how we think by means of them.

'Nature's Government' is a daring attempt to juxtapose the histories of Britain, western science, and imperialism. It shows how colonial expansion, from the age of Alexander the Great to the twentieth century, led to complex kinds of knowledge. Science, and botany in particular, was fed by information culled from the exploration of the globe. At the same time science was useful to imperialism: it guided the exploitation of exotic environments and made conquest seem necessary, legitimate, and beneficial. Drayton traces the history of this idea of 'improvement' from its Christian agrarian origins in the sixteenth century to its inclusion in theories of enlightened despotism. It was as providers of legitimacy, as much as of universal knowledge, aesthetic perfection, and agricultural plenty, he argues, that botanic gardens became instruments of government, first in Continental Europe, and by the late eighteenth century, in Britain and the British Empire. At the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the rise of which throughout the nineteenth century is a central theme of this book, a pioneering scientific institution was added to a spectacular ornamental garden. At Kew, 'improving' the world became a potent argument for both the patronage of science at home and Britain's prerogatives abroad. 'Nature's Government' provides a portrait of how the ambitions of the Enlightenment shaped the great age of British power, and how empire changed the British experience and the modern world. Richard Drayton was born in the Caribbean and educated at Harvard, Oxford, and Yale. A former Fellow of St. Catharine's College, Cambridge, and Lincoln College, Oxford, he has also been Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia.

The story of how the fearsome Atlantic Ocean was explored by early sailors, including the Vikings, whose brilliant navigation matched their bravery. The early voyages into the deep waters of the Atlantic rank among the greatest feats of exploration. In tiny, fragile vessels the Irish monks searched for desolate places in the ocean in which to pursue their vocation; their successors, the Vikings, with their superb ship-building skills, created fast, sea-worthy craft which took them far out into the unknown, until they finally reached Greenland and America. G.J. Marcus looks at the history of theseexpeditions not only as a historian, but also as a practical sailor. Besides the problem of what these early explorers actually achieved, he poses the even more fascinating question of how they did it, without compass, quadrant, or astrolabe. From the opening descriptions of the launching of a curach on the Aran Islands, through the great pages of the Norse Sagas describing the first recorded sighting of America, the author brilliantly conveys theexcitement and danger of the conquest of the North Atlantic in a narrative that is based equally on scholarly research and sound seamanship. G.J. MARCUS's previous books include The Maiden Voyage, on the sinking of the Titanic.

An annual collection of studies on individuals who have made major contributions to the development of geography or geographical thought. Each paper describes the geographer's education, life, work and discusses their influence and spread of academic work.

This account was first published in 1829. After serving in the Royal Navy in Canada, Hugh Clapperton (1788-1827) participated in two expeditions to the interior of Africa. Richard Lander (1804-34), a young Cornishman who had travelled widely in the service of previous employers, applied to accompany him on the second expedition, during which Clapperton died. Lander published this edition of Clapperton's journal in 1829; an expanded version (also available in this series) appeared the following year. Clapperton's account of his experiences is informal, lively and vivid, describing hospitality and annoyances, discomforts and pleasures. Although its language and attitudes are typical of the early colonial period, it remains a valuable source for West African history. The book also contains a short biography of Clapperton, Lander's emotional account of his master's illness and death, and his journal of his lonely return journey. The appendix includes meteorological observations, notes on Arabic documents, and Yoruba vocabulary.

After James Cook's voyage in HMS Endeavour, Banks developed a network of scientists and explorers. Banks's correspondence is one of the great primary sources for studying the Pacific region during this important period of exploration and colonial expansion.