In April 1852 Emile Frederic de Bray sailed down the Thames on board the Resolute, part of Sie Edward Belcher's Arctic Squadron in search of Sir John Franklin and his men, missing since the summer of 1845. De Bray's diaries of his years with Resolute have not been published before, in any language, and only one other account of this particular Franklin search expedition exists.

Enseigne-de-vaisseau de Bray, seconded at his own request from the French navy, was something of a rarity among those who made up the search parties: he was not British. (One of his shipmates hopes for the best: 'The Frenchman does not seem an Englishman, ' he observed, 'but I suppose he will improve on acquaintance.')

Cape de Bray on the northwest coast of Melville Island commemorates the efforts of this intrepid French officer, who gained the respect of his fellows, was made an officer of the Legion d'Honneur by Napolean III, and was awarded the Arctic Medal by Queen Victoria.

William Barr provides an introduction, postscript, and extensive notes, placing de Bray and the expedition in context. This volume tells us much about the life the Europeans led in the unexplored and frozen northern waters.

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.

'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.

Could an Irish monk in the sixth century really have sailed all the way across the Atlantic in a small open boat, thus beating Columbus to the New World by almost a thousand years? Relying on the medieval text of St. Brendan, award-winning adventure writer Tim Severin painstakingly researched and built a boat identical to the leather curragh that carried Brendan on his epic voyage. He found a centuries-old, family-run tannery to prepare the ox hides in the medieval way; he undertook an exhaustive search for skilled harness makers (the only people who would know how to stitch the three-quarter-inch-thick hides together); he located one of the last pieces of Irish-grown timber tall enough to make the mainmast. But his courage and resourcefulness were truly tested on the open seas, including one heart-pounding episode when he and his crew repaired a dangerous tear in the leather hull by hanging over the side--their heads sometimes submerged under the freezing waves--to restitch the leather. A modern classic in the tradition of Kon-Tiki, The Brendan Voyage seamlessly blends high adventure and historical relevance. It has been translated into twenty-seven languages since its original publication in 1978.

With a new Introduction by Malachy McCourt, author of A Monk Swimming

In Africa Dances Gorer takes the reader on an odyssey across West Africa, in the company of Feral Benga, one of the great black ballet stars of 1930s Paris. It is a devastating critique of colonial rule, which is shown to be destroying African society just as effectively as Christian missionaries undermine indigenous morality. Africa Dances captures the rich physical and psychological detail of African village life from food and architecture to dance and magic. Gorer witnesses men diving for three-quarters of an hour without coming up for breath, witch-doctors conjuring thunderstorms out of clear blue skies, and chameleon fetishists whose skin changes from a dirty white to almost black. This is a place where if you believe, you can.

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.

'This is the story of how, on 29 May, 1953, two men, both endowed with outstanding stamina and skill, reached the top of Everest and came back unscathed to rejoin their comrades. 'Yet this will not be the whole story, for the ascent of Everest was not the work of one day, nor even of those few anxious, unforgettable weeks in which we prepared and climbed this summer. It is, in fact, a tale of sustained and tenacious endeavour by many, over a long period of time... We of the 1953 Everest Expedition are proud to share the glory with our predecessors.' Sir John Hunt

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.

'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.

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.

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.

Laos, 1900 - a frontier land caught in a power struggle between Eastern kingdoms and Western colonial powers, a fertile place teetering between an ancient pastoral existence and the modern machine age. Alfred Raquez's Laotian Pages vividly describes his exploration of the diverse kingdoms of Laos at the turn of the last century with the same Parisian verve and ironic turn of mind that he brought to his first travel book, In the Land of Pagodas. Raquez's keen eye and sensitivity to the exotic in both nature and human culture, combined with a mastery of the genre and his hallmark conversational style, transport the reader to the largely unexplored frontier of fin-de-siecle Indochina. Long known only to specialists on the history and ethnography of the region, this new work presents a scholarly translation into English together with Raquez's original photographs that will finally allow a wide audience to experience the joys and hardships of travel in a land that is both timeless and forever changing. In addition, a wide-ranging introduction and extensive footnotes provide historical context and `then-and-now' perspectives on the cultures and landscape that have undergone massive change in the past century. In the Land of Pagodas, a scholarly translation by William L. Gibson and Paul Bruthiaux of Alfred Raquez's book of travels through China in 1899, was published in 2017 by NIAS Press.

This eye-opening perspective on Stanley's expedition reveals new details about the Victorian explorer and his African crew on the brink of the colonial Scramble for Africa. In 1871, Welsh American journalist Henry M. Stanley traveled to Zanzibar in search of the "missing" Scottish explorer and missionary David Livingstone. A year later, Stanley emerged to announce that he had "found" and met with Livingstone on Lake Tanganyika. His alleged utterance there, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume," was one of the most famous phrases of the nineteenth century, and Stanley's book, How I Found Livingstone, became an international bestseller. In this fascinating volume Mathilde Leduc-Grimaldi and James L. Newman transcribe and annotate the entirety of Stanley's documentation, making available for the first time in print a broader narrative of Stanley's journey that includes never-before-seen primary source documents--worker contracts, vernacular plant names, maps, ruminations on life, lines of poetry, bills of lading--all scribbled in his field notebooks. Finding Dr. Livingstone is a crucial resource for those interested in exploration and colonization in the Victorian era, the scientific knowledge of the time, and the peoples and conditions of Tanzania prior to its colonization by Germany.

Five hundred years before Columbus, a Viking woman named Gudrid sailed off the edge of the known world. She landed in the New World and lived there for three years, giving birth to a baby before sailing home. Or so the Icelandic sagas say. Even after archaeologists found a Viking longhouse in Newfoundland, no one believed that the details of Gudrid's story were true. Then, in 2001, a team of scientists discovered what may have been this pioneering woman's last house, buried under a hay field in Iceland, just where the sagas suggested it could be. Joining scientists experimenting with cutting-edge technology and the latest archaeological techniques, and tracing Gudrid's steps on land and in the sagas, Nancy Marie Brown reconstructs a life that spanned--and expanded--the bounds of the then-known world. She also sheds new light on the society that gave rise to a woman even more extraordinary than legend has painted her and illuminates the reasons for its collapse.

"The Ice is a compilation of more about ice than you knew you wanted to know, yet sheer compelling significance holds attention page by page. . . . Pyne conveys a view of Antarctica that interweaves physical science with humanistic inquiry and perception. His audacity as well as his presentation warrant admiration, for the implications of The Ice are vast."-New York Times Book Review

'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.

The journals of Prince Maximilian of Wied rank among the most important firsthand sources documenting the early-nineteenth-century American West. Published in their entirety as an annotated three-volume set, the journals present a complete narrative of Maximilian's expedition across the United States, from Boston almost to the headwaters of the Missouri in the Rocky Mountains, and back. This new concise edition, the only modern condensed version of Maximilian's full account, highlights the expedition's most significant encounters and dramatic events. The German prince and his party arrived in Boston on July 4, 1832. He intended to explore ""the natural face of North America,"" observing and recording firsthand the flora, fauna, and especially the Native peoples of the interior. Accompanying him was the young Swiss artist Karl Bodmer, who would document the journey with sketches and watercolors. Together, the group traveled across the eastern United States and up the Missouri River into present-day Montana, spending the winter of 1833-34 at Fort Clark, an important fur-trading post near the Mandan and Hidatsa villages in what is now North Dakota. The expedition returned downriver to St. Louis the following spring, having spent more than a year in the Upper Missouri frontier wilderness. The two explorers experienced the American frontier just before its transformation by settlers, miners, and industry. Featuring nearly fifty color and black-and-white illustrations - including several of Karl Bodmer's best landscapes and portraits - this succinct record of their expedition invites new audiences to experience an enthralling journey across the early American West.

Reveals the transformation that occurred in Indian communities during the Spanish conquest of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico from 1492 to 1550 In Surviving Spanish Conquest: Indian Fight, Flight, and Cultural Transformation in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, Karen F. Anderson-CÓrdova draws on archaeological, historical, and ethnohistorical sources to elucidate the impacts of sixteenth-century Spanish conquest and colonization on indigenous peoples in the Greater Antilles. Moving beyond the conventional narratives of the quick demise of the native populations because of forced labor and the spread of Old World diseases, this book shows the complexity of the initial exchange between the Old and New Worlds and examines the myriad ways the indigenous peoples responded to Spanish colonization.   Focusing on Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, the first Caribbean islands to be conquered and colonized by the Spanish, Anderson-CÓrdova explains Indian sociocultural transformation within the context of two specific processes, out-migration and in-migration, highlighting how population shifts contributed to the diversification of peoples. For example, as the growing presence of “foreign� Indians from other areas of the Caribbean complicated the variety of responses by Indian groups, her investigation reveals that Indians who were subjected to slavery, or the “encomienda system,� accommodated and absorbed many Spanish customs, yet resumed their own rituals when allowed to return to their villages. Other Indians fled in response to the arrival of the Spanish.   The culmination of years of research, Surviving Spanish Conquest deftly incorporates archaeological investigations at contact sites copious use of archival materials, and anthropological assessments of the contact period in the Caribbean. Ultimately, understanding the processes of Indian-Spanish interaction in the Caribbean enhances comprehension of colonization in many other parts of the world. Anderson-CÓrdova concludes with a discussion regarding the resurgence of interest in the Ta�no people and their culture, especially of individuals who self-identify as Ta�no. This volume provides a wealth of insight to historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and those interested in early cultures in contact.