The Romantic Period saw the advance of the massive British imperial expansion that was to make it dominant for most of the 19th century. There was a corresponding expansion in travel writings, which, highly popular in their own time, seemed to bring exotic realms within the grasp of the reading public and were a source for ethnographic and cultural information about other societies.

In 1498 a young captain named Vasco da Gama sailed from Portugal, circumnavigated Africa, crossed the Indian Ocean, and discovered the sea route to the Indies and, with it, access to the fabled wealth of the East. It was the longest voyage ever undertaken at that time. With blood-red Crusader crosses emblazoned on their sails, the explorers arrived in the heart of the Muslim East in an era when the old hostilities between Christianity and Islam had risen to a new level of intensity. In two voyages that spanned six years, da Gama would fight a running sea battle that would ultimately change the fate of three continents.

The Last Crusade is an epic tale of spies, intrigue, and treachery--of bravado, brinkmanship, and confused, often comical collisions between cultures--offering a surprising new interpretation of the broad sweep of history.

The life of English explorer William Cotton Oswell (1818-93) was marked by adventures and discoveries. At nineteen, he left Essex for Madras, where he worked for the East India Company and became a renowned elephant catcher. Due to poor health, he was sent to South Africa, the 'empire of wild sport', where he specialised in hunting and exploration. He discovered the River Zouga and Lake Ngami during an expedition across the Kalahari desert, and travelled to the Zambezi River with Scottish missionary David Livingstone. Originally published in 1900, this two-volume biography was written by Oswell's eldest son. Since Oswell kept no diary, his life is here reconstructed through the many letters he sent to his family and friends. Volume 2 opens with Oswell's return to England in 1852, and includes an account of his journey to the Crimean front, where he worked in hospitals between 1854 and 1855.

The Romantic Period saw the advance of the massive British imperial expansion that was to make it dominant for most of the 19th century. There was a corresponding expansion in travel writings, which, highly popular in their own time, seemed to bring exotic realms within the grasp of the reading public and were a source for ethnographic and cultural information about other societies.

Portuguese Asia, otherwise known as the Estado da A ndia Oriental, has been far less studied than the Spanish empire in America, its counterpart in the Western hemisphere. It differed from that vast entity in that it was essentially a maritime trading operation held together by strategic territories, such as Goa, Ceylon, or Macau. For more than a century these afforded it control of much of the Indian Ocean. As Professor Winius shows, it was certainly the most peculiar and colourful operation that existed in the history of European expansion, even giving rise to a second, 'shadow' empire created by escapees and renegades from its royal administration. Some of these essays reflect on Portuguese involvement in other areas, notably the Atlantic, and the impact this had in the East, but their focus is on the Portuguese in South and Southeast Asia. They describe its nature and its rise and fall, from the first voyage of Vasco da Gama to its dismemberment by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, and include studies on the jewel trade and on the Renaissance in Goa.

On May 15, 2010, after 210 days at sea and more than 22,000 nautical miles, 16-year-old Jessica Watson sailed her 33-foot boat triumphantly back to land. She had done it. She was the youngest person to sail solo, unassisted, and nonstop around the world.
Jessica spent years preparing for this moment, years focused on achieving her dream. Yet only eight months before, she collided with a 63,000-ton freighter. It seemed to many that she'd failed before she'd even begun, but Jessica brushed herself off, held her head high, and kept going.
Told in Jessica's own words, "True Spirit "is the story of her epic voyage. It tells how a young girl, once afraid of everything, decided to test herself on an extraordinary adventure that included gale-force winds, mountainous waves, hazardous icebergs, and extreme loneliness on a vast sea, with no land in sight and no help close at hand. "True Spirit "is an inspiring story of risk, guts, determination, and achievement that ultimately proves we all have the power to live our dreams--no matter how big or small.

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.

The transformation of the medieval European image of the world in the period following the Great Discoveries of the 15th and 16th centuries is the subject of this volume. The first studies deal specifically with the emergence of the concept of the terraqueous globe. In the following pieces Dr Randles looks at the advances in Portuguese navigation and cartography that helped sailors overcome the obstacles to the circumnavigation of Africa and the crossing of the Atlantic, and at the impact of the Discoveries on European culture and science. Other articles are concerned with Portuguese naval artillery, and with attempts to classify the indigenous societies of the newly-discovered lands and to map the interior of Africa.

'When an accident occurs, something may emerge of lasting value, for the human spirit may rise to its greatest heights. This happened on Haramosh.' The Last Blue Mountain is the heart-rending true story of the 1957 expedition to Mount Haramosh in the Karakoram range in Pakistan. With the summit beyond reach, four young climbers are about to return to camp. Their brief pause to enjoy the view and take photographs is interrupted by an avalanche which sweeps Bernard Jillott and John Emery hundreds of feet down the mountain into a snow basin. Miraculously, they both survive the fall. Rae Culbert and Tony Streather risk their own lives to rescue their friends, only to become stranded alongside them. The group's efforts to return to safety are increasingly desperate, hampered by injury, exhaustion and the loss of vital climbing gear. Against the odds, Jillott and Emery manage to climb out of the snow basin and head for camp, hoping to reach food, water and assistance in time to save themselves and their companions from an icy grave. But another cruel twist of fate awaits them. An acclaimed mountaineering classic in the same genre as Joe Simpson's Touching the Void, Ralph Barker's The Last Blue Mountain is an epic tale of friendship and fortitude in the face of tragedy.

From prominent outdoorsman and nature writer Mark Kenyon comes an engrossing reflection on the past and future battles over our most revered landscapes-America's public lands. Every American is a public-land owner, inheritor to the largest public-land trust in the world. These vast expanses provide a home to wildlife populations, a vital source of clean air and water, and a haven for recreation. Since its inception, however, America's public land system has been embroiled in controversy-caught in the push and pull between the desire to develop the valuable resources the land holds or conserve them. Alarmed by rising tensions over the use of these lands, hunter, angler, and outdoor enthusiast Mark Kenyon set out to explore the spaces involved in this heated debate, and learn firsthand how they came to be and what their future might hold. Part travelogue and part historical examination, That Wild Country invites readers on an intimate tour of the wondrous wild and public places that are a uniquely profound and endangered part of the American landscape.

An accessible and groundbreaking text that takes a fresh view of contemporary geographical issues by looking at the geographies we have lost. Geography means writing about the world. Alternative ways of writing about the world are introduced and critically evaluated. The book discusses medieval cosmologies, Renaissance magic, feng shui, and the knowledge systems of indigenous people. Alternative Geographies provides an alternative way of looking, describing and understanding the world

The literature of medieval knighthood is shown to have influenced exploration narratives from Marco Polo to Captain John Smith. Explorers from Marco Polo to Captain John Smith viewed their travels and discoveries in the light of attitudes they absorbed from the literature of medieval knighthood. Their own accounts, and contemporary narratives [reinforced by the interest of early printers], reveal this interplay, but historians of exploration on the one hand, and of chivalry on the other, have largely ignored this cultural connection. Jennifer Goodman convincingly develops the ideaof the chivalric romance as an imaginative literature of travel; she traces the publication of medieval chivalric texts alongside exploration narratives throughout the later middle ages and renaissance, and reveals parallel themesand preoccupations. She illustrates this with the histories of a sequence of explorers and their links with chivalry, from Marco Polo to Captain John Smith, and including Gadifer de la Salle and his expedition to the Canary Islands, Prince Henry the Navigator, Cortes, Hakluyt, and Sir Walter Raleigh. JENNIFER GOODMAN teaches at Texas A & M University.

European Approaches to North America, 1450-1640 by David Quinn provides a series of insights into the early cartography and exploration of the North Atlantic and North America, and what was believed and written about this by Europeans. Its focus is the two hundred years from the mid-15th century. The work demonstrates how detailed studies can throw much light on more general developments, and enable them to be seen close up. It is primarily concerned with English developments, but looks also at Champlain and Henri IV and the origins of French settlement in Canada, while the final paper - one of four not previously published - presents a broader, comparative perspective on European settlement patterns.

In Dreams of El Dorado, H. W. Brands tells the thrilling, panoramic story of the settling of the American West, from Lewis and Clark's expedition in the early 19th century to the closing of the frontier by the early 20th. He introduces us to explorers, mountain men, cowboys, missionaries and soldiers, taking us from John Jacob Astor's fur trading campaign in Oregon to the Texas Revolution, from the California gold rush to the Oklahoma land rush. Throughout, Brands explores the contradictions of the West and explodes its longstanding myths. The West has been celebrated as the proving ground of American individualism; in reality, the West depended on collective action and federal largesse more than any other region. The West brought out the finest and the basest in those who ventured there, evoking both selfless heroism and unspeakable violence. Visons of great wealth drew generations of Americans westward, but El Dorado was never more elusive than in the West. Balanced, authoritative, and masterfully told, Dreams of El Dorado sets a new standard for histories of the American West.

The static cone penetrometer (CPT) and the piezocone (CPTU) represents the most versatile tools currently available for in-situ soil exploration. Over the last 30 years there has been significant growth and development in the use of CPT and this is reflected in the impressive growth of the theoretical and experimental knowledge on the cone penetrometer and piezocone as well as in the several applications of the test to highly specialised measurements, e.g. seismic, environmental and electrical resistivity measurements.
The purpose of this book is to provide guidance on the specification, performance, use and interpretation of the Electric Cone Penetration Test (CPU), and in particular the Cone Penetration Test with pore pressure measurement (CPTU) commonly referred to as the "piezocone test". Recommendation guidelines interpret a full range of geotechnical parameters from cone penetration data and relevant examples and case histories are given throughout the text.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203477995