Relive all the thrills and adventure of Alan Moorehead's classic bestseller The White Nile -- the daring exploration of the Nile River in the second half of the nineteenth century, which was at that time the most mysterious and impenetrable region on earth. Capturing in breathtaking prose the larger-than-life personalities of such notable figures as Stanley, Livingstone, Burton and many others, The White Nile remains a seminal work in tales of discovery and escapade, filled with incredible historical detail and compelling stories of heroism and drama.

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.

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.

In 1999, Conrad Anker found the body of George Mallory on Mount Everest, casting an entirely new light on the mystery of the lost explorer. On 8 June 1924, George Leigh Mallory and Andrew 'Sandy' Irvine were last seen climbing towards the summit of Everest. The clouds closed around them and they were lost to history, leaving the world to wonder whether or not they actually reached the summit - some 29 years before Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay. On 1 May 1999, Conrad Anker, one of the world's foremost mountaineers, made the momentous discovery - Mallory's body, lying frozen into the scree at 27,000 feet on Everest's north face. Recounting this day, the authors go on to assess the clues provided by the body, its position, and the possibility that Mallory had successfully climbed the Second Step, a 90-foot sheer cliff that is the single hardest obstacle on the north face. This is a remarkable story of a charming and immensely able man, told by an equally talented modern climber.

A wondrous story of scientific endeavor-probing the great ice sheets of Antarctica From the moment explorers set foot on the ice of Antarctica in the early nineteenth century, they desired to learn what lay beneath. David J. Drewry provides an insider's account of the ambitious and often hazardous radar mapping expeditions that he and fellow glaciologists undertook during the height of the Cold War, when concerns about global climate change were first emerging and scientists were finally able to peer into the Antarctic ice and take its measure. In this panoramic book, Drewry charts the history and breakthrough science of radio-echo sounding, a revolutionary technique that has enabled researchers to measure the thickness and properties of ice continuously from the air-transforming our understanding of the world's great ice sheets. To those involved in this epic fieldwork, it was evident that our planet is rapidly changing, and its future depends on the stability and behavior of these colossal ice masses. Drewry describes how bad weather, downed aircraft, and human frailty disrupt the most meticulously laid plans, and how success, built on remarkable international cooperation, can spawn institutional rivalries. The Land Beneath the Ice captures the excitement and innovative spirit of a pioneering era in Antarctic geophysical exploration, recounting its perils and scientific challenges, and showing how its discoveries are helping us to tackle environmental challenges of global significance.

The remarkable eighty-five-day journey of the first two women to canoe the 2,000-mile route from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay Unrelenting winds, carnivorous polar bears, snake nests, sweltering heat, and constant hunger. Paddling from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay, following the 2,000-mile route made famous by Eric Sevareid in his 1935 classic Canoeing with the Cree, Natalie Warren and Ann Raiho faced unexpected trials, some harrowing, some simply odd. But for the two friends-the first women to make this expedition-there was one timeless challenge: the occasional pitfalls that test character and friendship. Warren's spellbinding account retraces the women's journey from inspiration to Arctic waters, giving readers an insider view from the practicalities of planning a three-month canoe expedition to the successful accomplishment of the adventure of a lifetime. Along the route we meet the people who live and work on the waterways, including denizens of a resort who supply much-needed sustenance; a solitary resident in the wilderness who helps plug a leak; and the people of the Cree First Nation at Norway House, where the canoeists acquire a furry companion. Describing the tensions that erupt between the women (who at one point communicate with each other only by note) and the natural and human-made phenomena they encounter-from islands of trash to waterfalls and a wolf pack-Warren brings us into her experience, and we join these modern women (and their dog) as they recreate this historic trip, including the pleasures and perils, the sexism, the social and environmental implications, and the enduring wonder of the wilderness.

You seriously mean to tell me that the ship is doomed?" asked Frank Worsley, commander of the Endurance, stuck impassably in Antarctic ice packs. "What the ice gets," replied Sir Ernest Shackleton, the expedition's unflappable leader, "the ice keeps." It did not, however, get the ship's twenty-five crew members, all of whom survived an eight-hundred-mile voyage across sea, land, and ice to South Georgia, the nearest inhabited island. First published in 1931, Endurance tells the full story of that doomed 1914-16 expedition and incredible rescue, as well as relating Worsley's further adventures fighting U-boats in the Great War, sailing the equally treacherous waters of the Arctic, and making one final (and successful) assault on the South Pole with Shackleton. It is a tale of unrelenting high adventure and a tribute to one of the most inspiring and courageous leaders of men in the history of exploration.

Writer and Antarctic explorer Neider tells of his third trip to the frozen continent, describing the international stations there and the goals they are working toward. Neider also tours the Antarctic landscape, observing the geography and wildlife and evoking it in detail. Devoting scrutiny to the international treaties that protect the continent politically and environmentally, Neider reveals how important those treaties are. Also included in this work are interviews with Antarctic pioneers Sir Charles Wright, Sir Vivian Fuchs, and Laurence Gould.

Ranulph Fiennes has entered the public imagination as the intrepid explorer par excellance. Taunted by his wife over the challenge of the never-before attempted circumpolar navigation of the globe, he set off in 1979 on a gruelling 52,000 mile adventure. Together with fellow members of 21 SAS regiment, Fiennes left from Greenwich, travelling over land, passing through both ends of the polar axis. Completed over three years later, it was the first circumpolar navigation of the globe, and justifiably entered Fiennes into the record books. TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH is the record of that journey. It captures the natural beauty of the landscapes they passed through, and the cameraderie that necessarily grows between men who had served in the British forces' elite regiment and were now throwing themselves into danger of a different sort. Time and again, the expedition found themselves in life-threatening situations, weaving through the pack ice of the Arctic Ocean or sharing a single sleeping bag to ward off the -40 degrees celsius Arctic night. The calm and measured approach which made Fiennes such a great expedition leader shines through TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH, deftly recreating the last unexplored regions on earth. It is also a book which lays the foundations for what was to come for Fiennes, confirming a need to exist outside the comfortable norms the rest of us inhabit. As the expedition progresses, there is also a mounting sense of tension as attainment of the final goal also spells the end of the adventure. TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH is a compelling account of one journey and Fiennes' drive to push himself to ever further extremes.

Portuguese Encounters with Sri Lanka and the Maldives: Translated Texts from the Age of the Discoveries is designed to provide access to translations of 16th- and 17th-century documents which illustrate various aspects of this encounter, combining texts from indigenous sources with those from the Portuguese histories and archives. These documents contribute to the growing understanding that different groups of European colonizers - missionaries, traders and soldiers - had conflicting motivations and objectives. Scholars have also begun to emphasize that the colonized were not mere victims but had their own agendas and that they occasionally successfully manipulated colonial powers. The texts in this volume help to substantiate these assertions while also illustrating the changing nature of the interactions. The present volume contains chapters covering the Portuguese arrival in Sri Lanka and their first encounters with the island and its peoples, their subsequent relations with Kandy and Jaffna, and a final chapter on Portuguese relations with the Maldive Islands. A historical introduction provides the context in which the documents can be read and a select bibliography indicates the most recent and authoritative secondary works on the subject

'Based on meticulous research in original sources ... Goodman illustrates vividly how adept [Banks] was ... Shining a light on individuals whose achievements are relatively uncelebrated' Jenny Uglow, New York Review of Books A bold new history of how botany and global plant collecting - centred at Kew Gardens and driven by Joseph Banks - transformed the earth. Botany was the darling and the powerhouse of the eighteenth century. As European ships ventured across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans, discovery bloomed. Bounties of new plants were brought back, and their arrival meant much more than improved flowerbeds - it offered a new scientific frontier that would transform Europe's industry, medicine, eating and drinking habits, and even fashion. Joseph Banks was the dynamo for this momentous change. As botanist for James Cook's great voyage to the South Pacific on the Endeavour, Banks collected plants on a vast scale, armed with the vision - as a child of the Enlightenment - that to travel physically was to advance intellectually. His thinking was as intrepid as Cook's seafaring: he commissioned radically influential and physically daring expeditions such as those of Francis Masson to the Cape Colony, George Staunton to China, George Caley to Australia, William Bligh to Tahiti and Jamaica, among many others. Jordan Goodman's epic history follows these high seas adventurers and their influence in Europe, as well as taking us back to the early years of Kew Gardens, which Banks developed devotedly across the course of his life, transforming it into one of the world's largest and most diverse botanical gardens. In a rip-roaring global expedition, based on original sources in many languages, Goodman gives a momentous history of how the discoveries made by Banks and his collectors advanced scientific understanding around the world.

Encountering China addresses the responses of early modern travelers to China who, awed by the wealth and sophistication of the society they encountered, attempted primarily to build bridges, to explore similarities, and to emulate the Chinese, though they were also critical of some local traditions and practices. Contributors engage critically with travelogues, treating them not just as occasional sources of historical information but as primary, literary texts deeply revelatory of the world they describe. Contributors reach back to the earliest European writings available on China in an effort to broaden and nuance our understanding of European contact with the Middle Kingdom in the early modern period. While the primary focus of these essays is the external gaze - European sources about China - contributors also tease out aspects of the Chinese world-view of the time, thus generating a conversation between Chinese literary and historical texts and European ones.

Born Adventurer tells the story of Frank Bickerton (1889-1954), the British engineer on Sir Douglas Mawson's Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911-14. The expedition gave birth to what Sir Ranulph Fiennes has called 'one of the greatest accounts of polar survival in history' and surveyed for the first time the 2,000-mile stretch of coast around Cape Denison, which later became Adelie Land. The MBE was, however, only one episode in a rich and colourful career. Bickerton accompanied the ill-fated Aeneas Mackintosh on a treasure island hunt to R.L. Stevenson's Treasure Island, was involved with the early stages of Sir Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, and tested 'wingless aeroplanes' in Norway. Born Adventurer follows him through his many experiences, from his flying career in the First World War to his time in California, mixing with the aristocracy of the Hollywood and sporting worlds, and from his safaris in Africa to his distinguished career as an editor and screenplay writer at Shepperton Studios. Stephen Haddelsey draws on unique access to family papers and Bickerton's journals and letters to give us a rich and full account of this incredible adventurer and colourful man.

This book features some of the greatest travellers in human history - people who undertook long journeys to places they knew little or nothing about. From Roman tourists, to the establishment of the Silk Road; an epic trek round China and India in the seventh century, to Marco Polo and through to the first speculations on space travel, Premodern Travel in World History provides an overview of long-distance travel in Afro-Eurasia from around 400BCE to 1500. This survey uses succinct accounts of the most epic journeys in the premodern world as lenses through which to examine the development of early travel, trade and cultural interchange between China, central Asia, India and southeast Asia, while also discussing themes such as the growth of empires and the spread of world religions. Complete with maps, this concise and interesting study analyzes how travel pushed and shaped the boundaries of political, geographical and cultural frontiers.

Originally published in 1868, this book follows the life of Prince Henry, including chapters on the Siege of Tangier, the capture of Ceuta and the death of Prince Henry.

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.

Now in paperback! A dual biography of two of the most compelling elements in the narrative of wild America, John Muir and Alaska. John Muir was a fascinating man who was many things: inventor, scientist, revolutionary, druid (a modern day Celtic priest), husband, son, father and friend, and a shining son of the Scottish Enlightenment -- both in temperament and intellect. Kim Heacox, author of The Only Kayak, bring us a story that evolves as Muir's life did, from one of outdoor adventure into one of ecological guardianship---Muir went from impassioned author to leading activist. The book is not just an engaging and dramatic profile of Muir, but an expose on glaciers, and their importance in the world today. Muir shows us how one person changed America, helped it embrace its wilderness, and in turn, gave us a better world. December 2014 marked the 100th anniversary of Muir's death. Muir died of a broken heart, some say, when Congress voted to approve the building of Hetch Hetchy Dam in Yosemite National Park. Perhaps in the greatest piece of environmental symbolism in the U.S. in a long time, on the California ballot last November was a measure to dismantle the Hetch Hetchy Dam. Muir's legacy is that he reordered our priorities and contributed to a new scientific revolution that was picked up a generation later by Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson, and is championed today by influential writers like E.O. Wilson and Jared Diamond. Heacox takes us into how Muir changed our world, advanced the science of glaciology and popularized geology. How he got people out there. How he gave America a new vision of Alaska, and of itself.

A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879) is a work of travel literature by British explorer Isabella Bird. Adventurous from a young age, Bird gained a reputation as a writer and photographer interested in nature and the stories and cultures of people around the world. A bestselling author and the first woman inducted into the Royal Geographical Society, Bird is recognized today as a pioneering woman whose contributions to travel writing, exploration, and philanthropy are immeasurable. In 1872—after a year of sailing from Britain to Australia and Hawaii—Isabella Bird journeyed by boat to San Francisco before making her way over land through California and Wyoming to the Colorado Territory. There, she befriended an outdoorsman named Rocky Mountain Jim, who guided her throughout the vast wilderness of Colorado and accompanied her during a journey of over 800 miles. Traveling on foot and on horseback—Bird was an experienced and skillful rider—the two formed a curious but formidable pair, eventually reaching the 14,259 foot (4346 m) summit of Longs Peak, making Bird one of the first women to accomplish the feat. A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains, Bird’s most iconic work, was a bestseller upon publication, and has since inspired generations of readers. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Isabella Bird’s A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains is a classic of American literature and travel writing reimagined for modern readers.

Before he published his first novel in 1895, Joseph Conrad spent twenty years in the merchant navy, eventually obtaining his master's ticket and commanding the barque Otago, in which he sailed a notable passage from Sydney to Mauritius. This book traces his sea-career, and shows how Captain Jozef Konrad Korzeniowski, master mariner, became Joseph Conrad, master novelist. Conrad was injured on the Highland Forest, burned out of the Palestine, falsely censured for professional misconduct by the master of the Riversdale, survived a brief and dangerous posting as a river-boat captain on the Congo???and finally served as first officer on the famous Torrens, a passenger ship sailing between Adelaide and Great Britain.

A Negro Explorer at the North Pole (1912) is a memoir by Matthew Henson. Published a few years following an expedition to the planet’s northernmost point—which he claims to have reached first—A Negro Explorer at the North Pole reflects on Henson’s outsized role in ensuring the success of their mission. Although he was frequently overshadowed by Commander Robert Peary, Henson continues to be recognized as a pioneering African American who rose from poverty to become a true national hero. Seven times had Robert Peary and Matthew Henson attempted to reach the fabled North Pole. Seven times they failed. In 1908, following years of frustration, they gather a crew of Inuit guides and set sail from Greenland, hopeful that the eighth voyage will end in discovery. Throughout his life, Matthew Henson has grown accustomed to proving himself. Born the son of sharecroppers in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, he has endured racism and economic disparity his entire life. Since 1891, Henson and Peary—who he met while working at a Washington D.C. department store—have been attempting to reach the most remote location on planet earth, an icebound region devoid of sustenance and shelter, accessible only by boat, sled, and foot. As they near the North Pole, Henson prepares to make history. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Matthew Henson’s A Negro Explorer at the North Pole is a classic of African American literature reimagined for modern readers.

In 1820 John Bailie, a member of an Anglo-Irish landowning family and former lieutenant in the Royal Navy, led a large party of British immigrants to South Africa as part of a group later to be known as the 1820 Settlers. His party soon dissolved, but Bailie became extensively involved not only in the affairs of the Eastern Cape, but also those of the Transorange in the early stages of European settlement, and the colony of Natal.

This biography of John Bailie and his family, based on the extensive research of Mrs M.D. Nash, an authority on the British Settlers, tells the story of an adventurous life inextricably linked with the colonial history of South Africa during the first half of the nineteenth century. The present volume, the second of three, deals more specifically with the manner in which the settlers adjusted to their new environment.

Asian Travel in the Renaissance looks at travel in Asia for the purposes of trade, colonialism and religious conversion by a diverse array of Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and English protagonists in the Renaissance era. * Examines European travel in Asia from a variety of perspectives.* Presents new research by international scholars.* Establishes the importance of Asia as a place of aspiration in the early modern period.

This carefully compiled work marked an important contribution to the history of medieval travel. It will appeal to the scholar and to the general reader. It covers such areas as the conception of the world in the Middle Ages, Christian pilgrimages, the Vikings, Arab travellers, traveller's tales of the East and Prester John.