The journal of the Lander brothers provides a narrative of one of the most important missions of exploration in the history of West Africa. The editor's introduction contains much new material on the Landers and their journey drawn from hitherto unpublished sources, while an epilogue describes Richard Lander's last expedition to the Niger in 1832-4 and his death at Fernando Po. Originally published in 1965.

A trip across the Pacific turns into a life or death scenario when the crew of the HMS Bounty stages a revolt against their commander. The Bounty Mutiny tells the controversial story of the mutineers and the acting lieutenant who sparked a movement. Commanding Lieutenant William Bligh was instructed to use the HMS Bounty to transport breadfruit plants to the West Indies. He worked alongside skilled colleague Fletcher Christian, who was selected to be acting lieutenant. During their time at sea, the crew experienced many challenges with complaints of abuse and tyranny at the hands of Bligh. This eventually leads to a mutiny, in which Christian and the crew take control of the vessel. This harrowing tale is one of the most adapted events of all-time. Over the past century, it has been interpretated across multiple mediums including five feature films starring George Cross, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Marlon Brando and Anthony Hopkins. It's an enduring story that continues to fascinate and provoke the masses. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Bounty Mutiny is both modern and readable.

Depicted by the man himself, The Journals of James Cook is an intimate first-hand account, providing an uncensored and reliable narrative of adventures spanning across the globe. The Journals of James Cook depict three of Captain James Cook's most glorious expeditions, starting in 1768 and leading to Cook's tragic death in 1779. Having ventured all over the Pacific, Cook encountered lands not yet charted by the British. Though his discoveries and maps inadvertently led to British colonization, Cook held a deep respect for the native people he encountered. He recorded their practices and wrote of them fondly. Cook even befriended some of the native people he encountered, including a Tahitian man who, after hearing of Cook's homeland, wanted to visit it as well. Per the man's request, Cook sailed him to Britain, where the man stayed until he and Cook sailed back to Tahiti three years later. After charting Australia, and the whole coast of New Zealand, Cook was involved in a plot to kidnap a Hawaiian monarch and ransom them in order to recover stolen property. He was killed during this expedition, leaving behind a legacy of a detailed description of the Pacific Ocean and its coasts. James Cook's expeditions around the world and his detailed and innovative work as a cartographer inspired advancements in scientific, medical, historical and geological fields. His influence has also reached the literary world, inspiring novel series and characters, including the infamous Captain Hook. Exuding ambition, courage, and confidence, The Journals of James Cook provide a privileged peak into the travels and accomplishments of an adventurous, and invaluable man. Packed with wonder but free of imperialistic arrogance, The Journals of James Cook serve as a valuable an intriguing primary source of a time when places in the world were yet to be mapped. Now presented in an easy-to-read font and redesigned with a stunning new cover, James Cook' The Journals of James Cook is accommodating to contemporary readers, providing a fresh version of the esteemed literary work while preserving its wonders and adventures.

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.

Poems (1920) is a collection of poems and plays by W.B. Yeats. Containing many of the poet's early important works, Poems illuminates Yeats' influence on the Celtic Twilight, a late-nineteenth century movement to revive the myths and traditions of Ancient Ireland. The collection opens with Yeats' verse drama The Countess Cathleen, which he dedicated to the actress and revolutionary Maud Gonne. Set during a period of famine in Ireland, The Countess Cathleen tells the story of a wealthy landowning Countess who sells her soul to the devil in order to save her starving tenants. The Land of Heart's Desire, Yeats' first professionally performed play, follows a young fairy child who disrupts the lives of two newlyweds and shakes a simple village to its core. The Rose contains some of the writer's most beloved early poems, including "To the Rose Upon the Rood of Time"-a symbolist lyric alluding to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn-and "Fergus and the Druid," a dialogue in verse. In "Who Goes With Fergus," a poem blending ancient legend with modern Irish nationalism, Yeats asks the youth of his country to "brood on hopes and fears no more," to follow Fergus who "rules the shadows of the wood, / And the white breast of the dim sea / And all disheveled wandering stars." Yeats' writing, mysterious and rich with symbolism, demonstrates not just a mastery of the English language, but an abiding faith in the cause and principles of Irish independence. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of W.B. Yeats's Poems is a classic of Irish literature reimagined for modern readers.

First published to acclaim in 2003 'Everest' has been out of print since shortly after the author's death in 2005. This revised edition, published in response to interest from France and the USA includes a new foreword by Eric Vola, French alpinist and UK Alpine Club member. This is the first comprehensive monograph to tell the Everest story as it has evolved over the centuries. Central to this history was the First Ascent in 1953. Michael Ward, a London surgeon and mountaineer, was directly involved in the pivotal events that led to success. In late 1950, while serving as a Medical Officer to the Brigade of Guards, the author searched the neglected and uncatalogued archives of the Royal Geographical Society and discovered the forgotten Milne-Hinks maps, as well as a series of hitherto unknown photos taken on covert flights over Everest in the late 1940s. Together these provided clear evidence of a feasible route from the south. From early 1951 onwards, scientists from the Royal Society and Medical Research Council initiated and conducted definitive research into the problems of extreme altitude which provided the key to the successful first ascent. Everest has now been climbed thousands of times by many different routes but it was only in 1978, 25 years after the first ascent, that the mountain was first climbed without the use of supplementary oxygen. The book includes a number of maps specially produced at the Royal Geographical Society to illustrate exploratory journeys in the Everest region from the Middle Ages to the present. It sheds new light on a complex story, leading to the 1953 breakthrough which accelerated the exploration and ascent of the world's highest peaks. The First Ascent also led to the emergence of a thriving medical speciality, High Altitude Medicine and Physiology, which helps the 150 million people who live at altitude. In human terms, this is the main legacy of Everest.

Today the doors of China are opening to foreign investment and trade as never before, but the history of contact between China and the West goes back many centuries. Goods from China were being traded in Rome long before the birth of Christ, transported over the famous silk road that crossed Mongolia and Russia. But not until the mid-fifteenth century, when Marco Polo published his account of his travels, did China really capture the European imagination. Subsequent centuries saw missionary trips to China by Franciscans and Jesuits, a European craze for Chinese silk and porcelain, European visits to Tibet, the infamous Opium War between Britain and China, and further instances of contact, commerce, and conflict. China has shown amazing economic growth since 1949, and today it has set ambitious goals for growth in trade and technology. This book traces the history of Western exploration in and trade with China. It follows the events outlined above and touches on many other highlights, including exploration by the Russian Nikolay Przhevalsky, who traveled deep into China and today is largely remembered for the horse he discovered and identified there; the travels of nineteenth-century women explorers in China; American Roy Chapmans discovery of the first fossilized dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert; and the competition between two American explorers to be the first to capture a live panda. Also included are a chronology of Chinese history and a pronunciation guide.

Most of us are fascinated by the conventional storybook account of Christopher Columbus' heroic discovery of America in 1492. Yet, should the credit for discovering America go to a man who insisted it was but a few islands off the shores of China?

In "Terra Cognita," Eviatar Zerubavel argues that physical encounters are only one part of the complex, multifaceted process of discovery. Such encounters must be complemented by an understanding of the true identity of what is being discovered. The small group of islands claimed by Columbus to have been discovered off the shores of Asia was a far cry from what we now call America. The discovery of the New World was not achieved in a single day but was a slow process--mental as well as physical--that lasted almost three hundred years. By celebrating 1492 as a year of discovery, we inevitably distort the reality of history.

In vividly documenting how a slowly emerging New World gradually forced itself into Europe's consciousness, Zerubavel shows that Columbus did not discover America on October 12, 1492. Supplemented by fascinating old maps and a new preface written for this paperback edition, "Terra Cognita" will be of interest to historians, geographers, cognitive scientists, sociologists, and students of culture.

In 1616, an English adventurer, Nathaniel Courthope, stepped ashore on a remote island in the East Indies on a secret mission - to persuade the islanders of Run to grant a monopoly to England over their nutmeg, a fabulously valuable spice in Europe. This infuriated the Dutch, who were determined to control the world's nutmeg supply. For five years Courthope and his band of thirty men were besieged by a force one hundred times greater - and his heroism set in motion the events that led to the founding of the greatest city on earth. A beautifully told adventure story and a fascinating depiction of exploration in the seventeenth century, NATHANIEL'S NUTMEG sheds a remarkable light on history.

The Portuguese appear to have been the first European visitors to encounter East Africa, with the arrival of a lone traveller, Pero da Covilham, in c.1491. Covilham left no account of his experiences, so Vasco da Gama had little idea of what to expect when he led his first voyage to the region in 1497. The account of this expedition paints a vivid portrait of the first contacts between Portugal and the coastal peoples of East Africa. This account, together with a wealth of carefully selected documents comprise this volume of writings which detail Portugal's relationship with East Africa from the late fifteenth century through to the seventeenth century. As these documents demonstrate, the best Portuguese writers had a deep interest in the African peoples and carefully observed the way their societies worked. The Portuguese in East Africa lived alongside their African subjects and the independent chiefs and to a large extent adopted their life style, technology, business practices, and even their beliefs and customs. This collection of contemporary writings from the period brings to life this extraordinary relationship.

The contributions to this volume have been selected from the papers delivered at the 34th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies at Birmingham, in April 2000. Travellers to and in the Byzantine world have long been a subject of interest but travel and communications in the medieval period have more recently attracted scholarly attention. This book is the first to bring together these two lines of enquiry. Four aspects of travel in the Byzantine world, from the sixth to the fifteenth century, are examined here: technicalities of travel on land and sea, purposes of travel, foreign visitors' perceptions of Constantinople, and the representation of the travel experience in images and in written accounts. Sources used to illuminate these four aspects include descriptions of journeys, pilot books, bilingual word lists, shipwrecks, monastic documents, but as the opening paper shows the range of such sources can be far wider than generally supposed. The contributors highlight road and travel conditions for horses and humans, types of ships and speed of sea journeys, the nature of trade in the Mediterranean, the continuity of pilgrimage to the Holy Land, attitudes toward travel. Patterns of communication in the Mediterranean are revealed through distribution of ceramic finds, letter collections, and the spread of the plague. Together, these papers make a notable contribution to our understanding both of the evidence for travel, and of the realities and perceptions of communications in the Byzantine world. Travel in the Byzantine World is volume 10 in the series published by Ashgate/Variorum on behalf of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies.

The Age of Discovery explores one of the most dramatic features of the late medieval and early modern period: when voyagers from Western Europe led by Spain and Portugal set out across the world and established links with Africa, Asia and the Americas. This book examines the main motivations behind the voyages and discusses the developments in navigation expertise and technology that made them possible.
This second edition brings the scholarship up to date and includes two new chapters on the important topics of the idea of "discovery" and on biological and environmental factors which favoured or limited European expansion.

In 1912, six months after Robert Falcon Scott and four of his men came to grief in Antarctica, a thirty-two-year-old Russian navigator named Valerian Albanov embarked on an expedition that would prove even more disastrous. In search of new Arctic hunting grounds, Albanov's ship, the Saint Anna, was frozen fast in the pack ice of the treacherous Kara Sea-a misfortune grievously compounded by an incompetent commander, the absence of crucial nautical charts, insufficient fuel, and inadequate provisions that left the crew weak and debilitated by scurvy.

For nearly a year and a half, the twenty-five men and one woman aboard the Saint Anna endured terrible hardships and danger as the icebound ship drifted helplessly north. Convinced that the Saint Anna would never free herself from the ice, Albanov and thirteen crewmen left the ship in January 1914, hauling makeshift sledges and kayaks behind them across the frozen sea, hoping to reach the distant coast of Franz Josef Land. With only a shockingly inaccurate map to guide him, Albanov led his men on a 235-mile journey of continuous peril, enduring blizzards, disintegrating ice floes, attacks by polar bears and walrus, starvation, sickness, snowblindness, and mutiny. That any of the team survived is a wonder. That Albanov kept a diary of his ninety-day ordeal-a story that Jon Krakauer calls an "astounding, utterly compelling book," and David Roberts calls "as lean and taut as a good thriller"-is nearly miraculous.

First published in Russia in 1917, Albanov's narrative is here translated into English for the first time. Haunting, suspenseful, and told with gripping detail, In the Land of White Death can now rightfully take its place among the classic writings of Nansen, Scott, Cherry-Garrard, and Shackleton.

This book, first published in 1875 and reissued in 1973, analyses the limited evidence from the works of early Chinese historians that explorers from China had discovered a country they called Fusang - possibly western America, and in all probability Mexico. The original document on which Chinese historians based their accounts of Fusang was the report of a Buddhist monk called Hoei-shin, who, in the year 499 AD, returned from a long journey to the east.

The true story about a shipwreck discovery, exciting explorations, broken alliances, and returning a lost piece of Alaskan history. Since its sinking in 1860 while transporting a valuable cargo of ice, the Kad’yak ship had remained submerged underwater and faded in Alaska’s memory, covered by the legend of an experienced but perhaps rusty sailor and a broken promise to a saint. At the time the ship had been under command of the well-recognized Captain Illarion Arkhimandritov, who had sailed in Alaskan waters for years. It seemed a simple task when he was asked to placate superstitions and honor the late Father Herman, or Saint Herman, on his next visit to Kodiak Island. But Arkhimandritov failed to keep his promise, and shortly thereafter the Kad’yak met its demise in the very waters the captain should have been most familiar with—leaving just the mast above the water in the shape of the cross, right in front of the saint’s grave. Presumed gone or else destroyed, it wasn’t until 143 years later that the Kad’yak was found. In this riveting memoir, scientist Bradley Stevens tells all about the incredible discovery and recovery of the ship—deciphering the sea captain’s muddled journal, digging through libraries and other scientists’ notes, boating over and around the wreck site in circles. Through careful documentation, interviews, underwater photography, and historical research, Stevens recounts the process of finding the Kad’yak, as well as the tumultuous aftermath of bringing the legendary ship’s story to the public—from the formed collaborations to torn partnerships to the legal battles. An important part of Alaska’s history told from Stevens’s modern-day sea expedition, The Ship, the Saint, and the Sailor reveals one of the oldest known shipwreck sites in Alaska discovered and its continuing story today.

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 last of three, deals more specifically with the contribution the settlers made to the development of colonial South Africa.

Pedro Menendez de Aviles (1519-1574) founded St. Augustine in 1565. His expedition was documented by his brother-in-law, Gonzalo Solis de Meras, who left a detailed and passionate account of the events leading to the establishment of America's oldest city. Until recently, the only extant version of Solis de Meras's record was one single manuscript which Eugenio Ruidiaz y Caravia transcribed in 1893, and subsequent editions and translations have always followed Ruidiaz's text. In 2012 David Arbesu discovered a more complete record: a manuscript including folios lost for centuries and, more important, excluding portions of the 1893 publication based on retellings rather than the original document. In the resulting volume, Pedro Menendez de Aviles and the Conquest of Florida, Arbesu sheds light on principal events missing from the story of St. Augustine's founding. By consulting the original chronicle, Arbesu provides readers with the definitive bilingual edition of this seminal text.

The last of the major African lakes to be visited by European travelers in the late nineteenth century, Lake Rudolf lies in the eastern arm of the great Rift Valley in present-day northern Kenya, near the Ethiopian border. Also known as Lake Turkana, Lake Rudolf is a large saltwater body two hundred miles long and forty miles wide. Fed by the Omo River that flows south from the Ethiopian highlands, it is surrounded by an inhospitable landscape of extinct volcanoes, wind-driven semidesert, and old lava flows. Because of the greenish hue of its waters, it has long been called the Jade Sea."Quest for the Jade Sea" examines the fascinating story of colonial competition around this remote lake. Pascal James Imperato's account yields important insights into European colonial policies in East Africa in the late nineteenth century and how these policies came into conflict with a powerful indigenous and independent African state, Ethiopia, which itself was engaged in imperial expansion.Although the chief competitors for the lake included the British, Italians, the French, Russians, and Ethiopians, its colonial fate was decided by Great Britain and Ethiopia. The role of Ethiopia as a late nineteenth-century colonial power unfolds as Imperato provides unique insights and analyses of Ethiopian colonial policy and its effects on the peoples who inhabited the region of the lake.As well as examining the political and diplomatic aspects of colonial competition for Lake Rudolf, "Quest for the Jade Sea" focuses on the expeditions that traveled there. Many of these were the field expressions of colonial policy; others were undertaken in the interest of scientific and geographical discovery. Whatever theimpetus, their success required courage and much suffering on the part of those who led them. Whether as willing agents of larger colonial designs, soldiers intent on promoting their military careers, or explorers who wished to advance scientific knowledge, expedition leaders left behind not only fascinating chronicles of their experiences and discoveries but also parts of the larger story of colonial competition around an East African lake.

Through interdisciplinary essays covering the wide geography of Spanish and Portuguese empires, Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization investigates the diverse networks and multiple centers of early modern globalization that emerged in conjunction with Iberian imperialism. Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization argues that Iberian empires cannot be viewed apart from early modern globalization. From research sites throughout the early modern Spanish and Portuguese territories and from distinct disciplinary approaches, the essays collected in this volume investigate the economic mechanisms, administrative hierarchies, and art forms that linked the early modern Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization demonstrates that early globalization was structured through diverse networks and their mutual and conflictive interactions within overarching imperial projects. To this end, the essays explore how specific products, texts, and people bridged ideas and institutions to produce multiple centers within Iberian imperial geographies. Taken as a whole, the authors also argue that despite attempts to reproduce European models, early Iberian globalization depended on indigenous agency and agency of African descent, which often undermined or changed these models. The volume thus relays a nuanced theory of early modern globalization: the essays outline the Iberian imperial models that provided templates for future global designs and simultaneously detail the negotiated and conflictive forms of local interactions that characterized that early globalization. The essays here offer essential insights into historical continuities in regions colonized by Spanish and Portuguese monarchies.

'Exquisite, powerful . . . I can think of no better way of commemorating British exploration's culminating triumph.' Simon Winchester? Coronation Everest offers a breathtakingly intimate evocation of the most famous of all mountaineering exploits - and of perhaps the last great old-fashioned Fleet Street scoop. 'It was Morris who broke the news that a British-led expedition had conquered Mount Everest the day before the Queen's coronation in 1953 . . . Allied to physical courage in getting down the mountain and a dogged resourcefulness in getting the news home, Morris scooped the world and was launched on one of the most remarkable literary careers in the second half of the twentieth century.' Guardian Jan Morris's collection of travel writing and reportage spans over five decades and includes such titles as Venice, Coronation Everest, Hong Kong, Spain, Manhattan '45, A Writer's World and the Pax Britannica Trilogy. Hav, her novel, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

In this sweeping adventure story, Stephen E. Ambrose, the bestselling author od D-Day, presents the definitive account of one of the most momentous journeys in American history. Ambrose follows the Lewis and Clark Expedition from Thomas Jefferson's hope of finding a waterway to the Pacific, through the heart-stopping moments of the actual trip, to Lewis's lonely demise on the Natchez Trace. Along the way, Ambrose shows us the American West as Lewis saw it -- wild, awsome, and pristinely beautiful. Undaunted Courage is a stunningly told action tale that will delight readers for generations.

A lavish account of pioneering polar photography and modern portraiture, "Face to Face: Polar Portraits" brings together in a single volume both rare, unpublished treasures from the historic collections of the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI), University of Cambridge, 'face to face' with cutting-edge modern imagery from expedition photographer Martin Hartley.This unique book by Huw Lewis-Jones is the first to examine the history and role of polar exploration photography, and showcases the very first polar photographs of 1845 through to images from the present day. It features the first portraits of explorers, some of the earliest photographs of the Inuit, the first polar photographs to appear in a book, and rare images never before published from many of the Heroic-Age Antarctic expeditions. Almost all the historic imagery - daguerreotypes, magic lantern slides, glass plate negatives and images from private albums - that have been rediscovered during research for this book have never been before the public eye.Set within a 'gallery' of 100 double page-spreads are 50 of the world's finest historic polar portraits from the SPRI collection alternated with 50 modern-day images by Martin Hartley, who has captured men and women of many nations, exploring, working, and living in the Polar Regions today. Each gallery spread, dedicated to a single individual, gives a sense of the isolation and intense personal experience each 'face' has had in living or travelling through the polar wilderness, whether they be one of the world's greatest explorers, or a humble cook.In addition to this remarkable collection is a foreword written by Sir Ranulph Fiennes; a fascinating exploration into 'photography then' - the history of photography and its role in shaping our vision of the polar hero by historian and curator of art at SPRI, Dr Huw Lewis-Jones; a discussion between Dr Lewis-Jones and Martin Hartley about 'photography now', focusing on the essential role that photography plays in modern polar adventuring; and an afterword entitled 'The Boundaries of Light' by the best-selling author Hugh Brody.Does an explorer need to appear frostbitten and adventurous to be seen as heroic, and do we need faces like these to imagine their achievement?Sir John Franklin is the first. The sun is high. He adjusts his cocked hat, bound with black silk, and gathers up his telescope. He shifts uncomfortably in his chair, positioned on the deck of the stout ship Erebus, as she wallows at her moorings in the London docks. It is 1845. The photographer, Richard Beard, urges the explorer to stay still for just a moment longer. He removes the lens cap, he waits, another minute, and then swiftly slots it back in place. The first polar photographic portrait is secured.Other senior officers of the exploration ships Erebus and Terror had their photographs taken that day, optimistic and ever hopeful. They appear to us now as if frozen in time. So too they followed Sir John Franklin as he led them in search of a navigable northwest passage, into the maze of islands and straits which forms the Canadian Arctic.'Mr Beard, at Franklin's request, supplied the expedition with a complete photographic apparatus, which was safely stowed aboard the well-stocked ship alongside other technological marvels: portable barrel-organs, tinned meat and soups, scientific equipment, the twenty-horse-power engines loaned from the Greenwich railway, and a library of over twelve hundred volumes. The camera now formed part of the kit thought essential to travel to the limits of the known world. Weighed down with stores, yet buoyant with Victorian confidence, the expedition sailed from the Thames on 19 May. The ships were last seen in late July, making their way northward in Baffin Bay, before vanishing without a trace - Huw Lewis-Jones,from the essay 'Photography Then' in "Face to Face".This title is available in both hardback and soft-cover. It features placement: photography, exploration, travel. It contains 288 pages in full-colour, including images that have never before been published. The South Pole was an awful place to be on 18 January 1912. Captain Scott and his four companions - Wilson, Bowers, Oates, and Evans - had just found that the Norwegian explorer Amundsen had beaten them to the prize one month earlier. The photograph that the men took that day speaks volumes for their achievement, of course, but there could be no truer record of their total disappointment. The men look absolutely broken; a photograph on top of everything else seems like a punishment. They are utterly devastated. A life's ambition has been snatched from their grasp. Now 800 miles from their base, they dragged themselves northward into the mouth of a raging blizzard. Their photographs and letters home, recovered with their bodies some time later, tell the sad tale of their sacrifice - Sir Ranulph Fiennes.

Inspired partly by her own spirit of adventure, and partly by the stories of her native coastal ancestors, Irene Skyriver celebrated her fortieth year of life with a solo kayak voyage, paddling from Alaska to her home in Washington's San Juan Islands. Paddling with Spirits: A Solo Kayak Journey interweaves the true account of her journey with generational stories handed down and vividly re-imagined. Beginning with her great-grandmother's seduction of an Indian fighter turned trader, and following her ancestors on both sides through oil booms, orphanages, wartime romances, dance halls and cattle ranches, Paddling with Spirits dips like a paddle itself between the stories of those who inspired her, and Irene's own journey down a lonely coast. As she encounters harsh weather, wolves, bears, whales, and the wild beauty of the coastal waters, she reflects upon her own life and on the lives of the many people she meets along the way before her final, triumphant return home. Paddling with Spirits is a wild, brave, and thrillingly original adventure.