Joseph Beete Jukes (1811-1869) was a geologist who studied at Cambridge under the famous Adam Sedgwick (1785-1873) and eventually became a prominent member of the Geological Survey of Great Britain. In 1839, after many field expeditions in England, he was appointed to a survey of Newfoundland, a place about which he had until then been in 'utter ignorance'. The explorers failed to find the hoped-for mineral wealth they had been sent to prospect for, and returned to Britain. In 1841 Jukes joined the H.M.S. Fly as a naturalist for an upcoming expedition to chart the coasts of Australia and New Guinea. The Fly set sail for the Pacific in 1842, the year in which this two-volume account of Jukes' Newfoundland experiences was published. Volume 2 focuses mainly on Jukes' scientific observations, and includes descriptions of the island's natural history, geography and geology.

Originally published in 1897, this two-volume work chronicles the polar expedition of Norwegian scientist Fridtjof Nansen (1861 1930), who came closer than any previous explorer to the North Pole. Beginning on board his boat, the Fram, which was deliberately driven into pack-ice off Siberia in order to drift north, Nansen and his companions later resorted to sleds and kayaks. Running to over six hundred pages, Volume 1 includes descriptions of the expedition's preparation and equipment, the farewell to Norway and voyage through the Kara Sea, ending with the party's second autumn on the ice. The Fram served as an oceanographic-meteorological-biological laboratory during its time in the Arctic and Nansen eventually published six volumes of scientific observations. He later became Norwegian delegate to the League of Nations, directing humanitarian projects, and is famous for receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922 as well as for his polar achievements.

Originally published in 1897, this two-volume work chronicles the polar expedition of Norwegian scientist Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930), who came closer than any previous explorer to the North Pole. Beginning on board his boat, the Fram, which was deliberately driven into pack-ice off Siberia in order to drift north, Nansen and his companions later resorted to sleds and kayaks. Volume 2 describes the journey over the ice - setting out with 28 dogs, 3 sledges and 2 kayaks - and ends with an account of the return journey. (It also includes Captain Otto Sverdrup's report of the expedition.) The Fram served as a laboratory during its time in the Arctic, and Nansen eventually published six volumes of scientific observations. He later became Norwegian delegate to the League of Nations, directing humanitarian projects, and is famous for receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922 as well as for his polar achievements.

In May 1824, the British explorer William Edward Parry (1790-1855) took to the seas on his third attempt to discover the North-West Passage, the legendary route to the Pacific along the northern coast of North America. It was a perilous voyage that he abandoned after the wreck of his ship, the Fury; however, during it he made some pioneering discoveries about the route's climate, meteorology, wildlife and nautical conditions, which influenced his successors and remain of interest to scientists and seafarers today. In these fascinating memoirs, first published in 1826, Parry documents his journey, revealing the difficulties he encountered and the phenomena he observed. Through extensive illustrations and vivid descriptions, he recalls the tumultuous weather and treacherous terrain that characterised - and finally defeated - the expedition, and expresses his gratitude to his fellow voyagers, for their bravery and determination in adversity, and their united efforts to save the doomed vessel.

Joseph Beete Jukes (1811-1869) was a geologist who studied at St John's College, Cambridge under Adam Sedgwick (1785-1873) and, after many field expeditions in England, was appointed to a survey of Newfoundland in 1839. In 1841 he joined the H.M.S. Fly as a naturalist for an upcoming expedition to chart the coasts of Australia and New Guinea. He also made some inland investigations on Java before returning to England in 1846. The following year he published this two-volume account of his journey. Blackwood's Magazine described Jukes' work as 'scientific without being abstruse, and picturesque without being extravagant, [Jukes] has made his volumes a striking and graceful addition to our knowledge of countries highly interesting in themselves'. Volume 2 focuses mainly on Java, where Jukes visited sugar and coffee plantations and industrial sites. The appendixes contain vocabulary lists for several indigenous languages, and notes on marine life and snakes.

First published in English in 1890, this book by Norwegian explorer and scientist Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930) recounts the first crossing of the Greenland interior in 1888, an expedition that took two months. Learning from previous failed attempts, Nansen suggested crossing from the uninhabited east to the inhabited west of Greenland, an innovation that proved successful. Nansen's account was translated by Hubert Majendie Gepp and includes an introduction written by the secretary of the Royal Geographical Society. Volume 1 describes the initial stages of the journey, including detailed accounts of the equipment, the methods used for crossing the ice and the arrival of the party on the east coast of Greenland. The volume ends with a description of previous attempts to cross the 'inland ice'. Nansen, who later served as delegate to the League of Nations, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922 for his humanitarian endeavours.

John Elphinstone Erskine (1805-87) was a naval officer who served as a naval commander during the Crimean War, as well as patrolling the West Indies and the Mediterranean. He also wrote several well-received accounts of voyages around the Pacific. As a Liberal MP later in life, he was an outspoken campaigner for the rights of Pacific islanders. This 1853 book is a genial narration of his visits to islands such as Fiji and Samoa. Written in a lyrical and affectionate style, the account covers the culture, religion and health of the native populations. Subjects discussed include local religion, cannibalism, gender relations and tribal wars. Rich with descriptive detail and paying special attention to the welfare of the local people and their varied encounters with white explorers, the text also includes the moving and detailed journal of an Englishman, John Jackson, who was stranded on Fiji for two years.

Reproduction of 48 maps from Lincolnshire's past sheds new light on the county's history. The low-lying parts of Lincolnshire are covered by an array of maps of intermediate scope, covering a greater area than a single parish but less than the whole county. Typically produced in connection with drainage or water transport, and considerably predating the Ordnance Survey, to which many are comparable, they go back as far as the medieval period, with the remarkable Kirkstead Psalter Map of the West and Wildmore Fens [c.1232-39], and continue to the late nineteenth century. . This volume covers the Witham Valley, with the East, West and Wildmore Fens north of Boston, but extending as far as Grantham and Skegness, reproducing the most important of the maps and listing the less useful ones. The history of the drainage of the area is unusually dramatic. By 1750 the Witham was a failed river: the winter floods were worse than they had been for centuries and navigation from Boston to Lincoln had ceased. Over the following sixty years, local interests, aided by some able engineers, brought both navigation and drainage to a state of perfection that made Lincolnshire prosperous and fed the industrial north. These maps, reproduced here to a very high quality and in both colour and black and white, are an essential tool for understanding this history, and the volume thus illuminates certain episodes that have previously been opaque. They are accompanied by a cartobibliography and introduction.

This book offered the first comprehensive study of the enclosure mapping of England and Wales. Enclosure maps are fundamental sources of evidence in many types of historical inquiries. Although modern historians tend to view these large-scale maps essentially as sources of data on past economies and societies, this book argues that enclosure maps had a much more active role at the time they were compiled. Seen from this perspective of their contemporary society, enclosure maps are not simply antiquarian curiosities, cultural artefacts, or useful sources for historians but instruments of land reorganisation and control which both reflected and consolidated the power of those who commissioned them. The book is accompanied by a fully searchable, descriptive and analytical web catalogue of all parliamentary and non-parliamentary enclosure maps extant in public archives and libraries and offers an essential research tool for economic, social and local historians and for geographers, lawyers and planners.

The tithe surveys of mid-nineteenth-century England and Wales marked a new departure in government-sponsored, cadastral surveying of the nation's land. The 11,800 large-scale, detailed maps which they comprise are recognised as one of the most important sets of manuscript historical sources used by historical geographers and economic, social and local historians as well as lawyers representing clients in property and rights of way disputes and county and local planning offices. Despite this much acknowledged value, historians are not well served with indexes, descriptive catalogues or indications of tithe map coverage. A first object of this book is to provide a standard work of reference which will be an essential research tool for users of tithe maps. The database has also been analysed to reveal the general cartographic characteristics of this internationally important government survey.

The bibliographer and editor Henry Benjamin Wheatley (1838 1917) produced a prodigious number of books and articles on a wide range of topics, literary, historical, bibliographical and artistic. He worked for many years for the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Arts, was a founder member of the Library Association, and produced an edition of Pepys' diary which was not superseded until the 1970s. London Past and Present was published in 1891, expanding and updating Peter Cunningham's Handbook of London of 1849. It is a three-volume topographical and historical dictionary of London places and landmarks, and the people who lived there. Based on historical, literary and architectural sources, it reveals many fascinating details as it traces the development of the metropolis from medieval times to the time of writing. Nineteenth-century London was experiencing rapid change, and this work preserves the memory of many buildings now lost.

The bibliographer and editor Henry Benjamin Wheatley (1838 1917) produced a prodigious number of books and articles on a wide range of topics, literary, historical, bibliographical and artistic. He worked for many years for the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Arts, was a founder member of the Library Association, and produced an edition of Pepys' diary which was not superseded until the 1970s. London Past and Present was published in 1891, expanding and updating Peter Cunningham's Handbook of London of 1849. It is a three-volume topographical and historical dictionary of London places and landmarks, and the people who lived there. Based on historical, literary and architectural sources, it reveals many fascinating details as it traces the development of the metropolis from medieval times to the time of writing. Nineteenth-century London was experiencing rapid change, and this work preserves the memory of many buildings now lost.

In the years before the publication of this book, there had been a marked interest in the methodology of historical geography as well as in its underlying philosophies and analytical techniques. Originally published in 1982, this volume of essays comprises the revised version of most of the papers read and discussed during the symposium held in Cambridge in 1979, and sponsored the International Geographical Union's Working Group on Historical Changes in Spatial Organization. Some of the essays review developments within particular schools of historical geography, whilst others consider the difficulties of identifying and interpreting geographical change. These essays attempt to promote discussion about the purpose and practice of historical geography, and they will be of interest not only to geographers, but also to historians, historical sociologists, anthropologists and demographers, and to all concerned with the methodology of historical enquiry.

Although many geographers have used historical approaches in the study of human activity, the historical approach as such is not often viewed as a fundamental mode of geographical understanding. Originally published in 1982, this work puts forward a case for historical geography conceived of both as a field in its own right and as the foundation of a revitalized traditional, empirical human geography. The crux of the case rests on the proposition that historical enquiry is an independent form of understanding not based upon or related to the approaches of the natural or social sciences. In recognising history as an independent form of knowledge one is able to look at historical geography from another perspective. The historical approach ultimately makes a contribution to an understanding of the present by elucidating the geographical ramifications of historical change.

Mungo Park was the original lone explorer of West Africa. The first European to reach the Niger, record its flow direction and return alive, he was considered a hero on his return. He died during his second exploration attempt inland along the Niger to discover the city of Timbuktu. Published posthumously in 1815 by the African Institution, which had sponsored his journey, a biography, personal letters and the account of the rescue team sent to discover his fate accompany Park's own journal of the expedition. The journals and letters are a fascinating description of the constant dangers and thrill of the age of exploration. Battling adverse weather, local hostility, tropical diseases and the death of nearly all his party including his brother-in-law, Park writes 'I would still persevere; and if I could not succeed in the object of my journey, I would at least die on the Niger.'

David Lambert explores the political and cultural articulation of white creole identity in the British Caribbean colony of Barbados during the age of abolitionism (c.1780-1833), the period in which the British antislavery movement emerged, first to attack the slave trade and then the institution of chattel slavery itself. Supporters of slavery in Barbados and beyond responded with their own campaigning, resulting in a series of debates and moments of controversy, both localised and transatlantic in significance. They exposed tensions between Britain and its West Indian colonies, and raised questions about whether white slaveholders could be classed as fully 'British' and if slavery was compatible with 'English' conceptions of liberty and morality. David Lambert considers what it meant to be a white colonial subject in a place viewed as a vital and loyal part of the empire but subject to increasing metropolitan attack because of the existence of slavery.

Sir Robert Hermann Schomburgk (1804 1865) was a German-born surveyor and traveller. In 1835 1839 he explored British Guiana for the Royal Geographical Society. In 1840 he was appointed to define its boundaries with Brazil, as Brazilian encroachments were wiping out native tribes. His report to the Colonial Office was published as A Description of British Guiana, Geographical and Statistical in 1840, and was the first detailed account of the colony. As well as surveying the land, and being the first European to reach the source of the Essequibo River, he discovered many new species of plants. His work on the boundaries led to the establishment of the 'Schomburgk Line' which was the basis for the definition of the borders with Brazil and Venezuela at the end of the century. He was knighted in 1845, and spent much of the rest of his life abroad as a British consul.

The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited (and sometimes translated) early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. The name of Anthony Jenkinson (1529 1610/11), the Elizabethan traveller and diplomat, is perhaps better known in Russia than in Britain. As agent for the Muscovy Company, he made four journeys to Russia to negotiate trade terms with Tsar Ivan IV ('Ivan the Terrible'), and travelled as far as Persia and the Caspian Sea. This two-volume work, published in 1886, contains an account of Jenkinson's journeys, and transcriptions of documents from the State Papers. The Victorian editors provided an introductory essay and explanatory notes.

Sir Andrew Halliday (1782 1839) served as a surgeon in the Peninsular War, and then as a royal physician. In 1832 he was appointed Inspector of Hospitals in the West Indies until ill-health forced his return to Scotland. During his time there he collected the information for this work, published in 1837. His study of the Windward and Leeward Islands in the West Indies is comprehensive. He covers the colonisation, administration, religious, social and economic history of the islands, flora and fauna, and the climate and diseases of the region. Trinidad he judged to be the most unhealthy of the islands, with malaria being a serious problem due to the terrain and vegetation. He kept meteorological records, and commented on seasonal patterns of illnesses. He also discusses the effects of the abolition of slavery, believing that the scare-mongering of the anti-abolitionists had been proved false.

The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited (and sometimes translated) early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. This volume, first published in 1866, is the first of two compilations edited by Colonel Henry Yule on contacts with China before the discovery of sea routes to the east. Yule's detailed introductory essay surveys the history of European contacts with the east, beginning with the Greek geographers and going up to the thirteenth century. He then presents the narratives of the Franciscan Odoric of Pordenone and other missionary friars in the fourteenth century.

The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. Shipwrecked on the Maldives in 1602-1607, Pyrard de Laval learnt the local language and studied the culture, flora and fauna of the islands. On his escape to Goa he continued his cultural investigations in Portuguese India, before returning to France by way of Saint Helena and Brazil in 1611. His book, which included practical advice for French traders travelling to Asia and a phrase book for visitors to the Maldives, was an immediate success. This three-volume translation of the 1619 edition appeared in 1887-1890.

The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. Shipwrecked on the Maldives in 1602-1607, Pyrard de Laval learnt the local language and studied the culture, flora and fauna of the islands. On his escape to Goa he continued his cultural investigations in Portuguese India, before returning to France by way of Saint Helena and Brazil in 1611. His book, which included practical advice for French traders travelling to Asia and a phrase book for visitors to the Maldives, was an immediate success. This three-volume translation of the 1619 edition appeared in 1887-1890.

The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. Shipwrecked on the Maldives in 1602-1607, Pyrard de Laval learnt the local language and studied the culture, flora and fauna of the islands. On his escape to Goa he continued his cultural investigations in Portuguese India, before returning to France by way of Saint Helena and Brazil in 1611. His book, which included practical advice for French traders travelling to Asia and a phrase book for visitors to the Maldives, was an immediate success. This three-volume translation of the 1619 edition appeared in 1887-1890.

Seashells have been the most coveted and collected of nature's creations for thousands of years. They were money before coins, jewellery before gems, art before canvas. In The Sound of the Sea, Cynthia Barnett blends cultural history and environmental science to trace our long love affair with seashells and the hidden lives of the mollusks that make them. From the mysterious glow of giant clams to the surprising origin of Shell Oil as a family business importing exotic shells, the book is filled with unforgettable stories. As it explores the perfect symmetry of a Chambered Nautilus, the pink-glossed lip of a Queen Conch or what we hear when we hold a shell to the ear, it makes a powerful argument for listening to shells-and acting on what they are telling us about the impacts of climate change on the seas, marine life and humanity.