In this engaging tale of movement from one hemisphere to another, we see doctors at work attending to their often odious and demanding duties at sea, in quarantine, and after arrival. The book shows, in graphic detail, just why a few notorious voyages suffered tragic loss of life in the absence of competent supervision. Its emphasis, however, is on demonstrating the extent to which the professionalism of the majority of surgeon superintendents, even on ships where childhood epidemics raged, led to the extraordinary saving of life on the Australian route in the Victorian era.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the rise of the "Home Tour," with travelers drawn to Scotland, the less explored regions of England and North Wales, and, increasingly, to Ireland. Although an integral part of the United Kingdom from 1800, Ireland represented for many travellers a worryingly unknown entity, politically intractable and unstable, devoutly Catholic, and economically deprived. This book examines British responses to the "Sister Isle" throughout a period of significant cultural and historical change, and examines the varied means through which Ireland was represented for a predominantly British audience.

Alexander von Humboldt, sometimes called 'the last man who knew everything', was an extraordinary polymath of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In 1798 he received unprecedented permission from the Spanish Crown to explore its American and Caribbean colonies, which he did from 1799-1804. This is the journal of those explorations, in which he extensively covers the region's topography, geology, fauna and flora, anthropology and comparative linguistics. Volume III sees him recording more information on Venezuela, visiting Cuba where he also writes about local politics and speaks out fervently against the slave trade; he then sails for Colombia. The volume ends with a comprehensive geognostic description of the northern part of South America.

"God bless the United States and God bless New York City" proclaimed a sign as the bus rolled through a small Indiana town. In October 2001, author Bill Markley was traveling by public bus from Pierre, South Dakota, to Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, for a Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity celebration. The day Markley left South Dakota began simply enough, but soon tragedy unfolded when a deranged man of Croatian descent slit the throat of a Greyhound bus driver causing an accident and throwing the nation's bus system into disarray. "American Pilgrim" is an honest account of life on the bus, the characters on the bus, bus culture, and the mood of the American people-reflective, patriotic, and upbeat.In those challenging days after the attacks on 9/11, everyone struggled to make sense of the world; as Markley worked on this story; it grew beyond the story of a simple 3,000-mile bus trip. He recalls many of his life's detours, recounting past events at locations the bus traveled through and people associated with those locations-a rambling personal history of people, places, and things. The trip took on new meaning and became a spiritual journey into the country's past and Markley's past.

'Bracingly original' Kathryn Hughes, Guardian From Romney Marsh to the Danube Delta, North Carolina to the Bay of Bengal, Tom Blass explores swamps, marshes and wetlands - and the people who have made these twilit worlds their homes. Oozing with bad airs, boggarts and other spirits, the world's marshes and swamps are often seen as sinister, permanently twilit - and only partly of this earth. For centuries, they - and their inhabitants - have been the object of our distrust. We have tried to drain away their demons and tame them, destroying their fragile beauty, botany and birdlife, along with the carefully calibrated lives of those who have come to understand and thrive in them. In Swamp Songs, Tom Blass journeys through a series of such watery landscapes, from Romney Marsh to North Carolina, from Lapland to the Danube Delta and on to the Bay of Bengal, encountering those whose very existence has been shaped by wetlands, their myths and hidden histories. Here are tales of shepherds, smugglers and salt-gatherers; of mangroves and machismo, frogs and fishermen. And of carp soup, tiger gods, flamingos and floods. A dazzling exploration of lives lived on the fringes of civilisation, Swamp Songs is a vital reappraisal and vibrant celebration of people and environments closely intertwined.

The seventh in Cv's series of Barnaby's Relocation Guides explores the county of Cumbria. Taking a side road from Lancaster the journey begins at Slaidburn in the Lancashire Forest, progressing into Cumbria via Kendal, Windermere, and Keswick; then towards the coast from Maryport and Whitehaven to Barrow-In-Furness and Ulverston, visiting Cleator Moor. The beautiful environment of tarns and fells opens many varied experiences for the traveller. The guide includes information and histories contributed by local specialists..Hill climbs and fell walks are undertaken, recording the rugged and spectacular landscape. Moving north of Penrith and Carlisle the guide documents the extensive and sparsely populated area of the Kershope Forest, in what was Westmoreland, up to the Scottish border. The guide is fully illustrated with colour photographs and route maps.

What types of holidays do Japanese people celebrate? What is the educational system like in Japan? What are Japanese festivals like? What are some of the customs and traditions of the Japanese people? Professor Todd Jay Leonard, writing from the perspective of living and working in Japan, provides in this fascinating book the answers to these and many other questions. Letters Home: Musings of an American Expatriate Living in Japan delivers a firsthand account of daily Japanese life through the eyes and personal experiences of Professor Leonard who has enjoyed an ongoing relationship with Japan and the Japanese people for nearly twenty-five years. This anecdotal book of essays, written in the style of personal letters, offers commentary on a wide range of topics and issues including culture, history, education, language, society, and religion of modern Japan from the point-of-view of an American expatriate who has made Japan his home. The author's friendly, down-to-earth, yet authoritative, style of writing will transport you to modern Japan, where you will learn about the customs and traditions of this most fascinating country. Japan and its people.

The sea life is embedded in Christian Lamb's DNA. In this delightful memoir she takes her readers on board with her, chronicling her adventures as she cruises the world, to every continent and across every sea, spanning a lifetime. As a passionate plantswoman, an inquisitive historian, and an insatiable traveller, Christian follows the routes of her heroes, the seafarers, botanists and explorers of old, and rediscovers their stories in person, setting them in the context of the modern world. And all along the way, from New York to Patagonia, New Zealand to Moscow, the shipboard characters accompanying the author round out this wry and witty narrative, a charming account of sailing the ocean and exploring the furthest corners of the earth in eighty years.

Shortly after his death in 1957, "The New York Times" obituary of Peter Freuchen noted that "except for Richard E. Byrd, and despite his foreign beginnings, Freuchen was perhaps better known to more people in the United States than any other explorer of our time." During his lifetime, Freuchen's remarkable adventures related in his books, magazine articles, and films, made him a legend. In 1910, Freuchen, along with his friend and business partner, Knud Rasmussen, the renowned polar explorer, founded Thule-a Greenland Inuit trading post and village only 800 miles from the North Pole.

Freuchen lived in Thule for fifteen years, adopting the ways of the natives. He married an Inuit woman, and together they had two children. Freuchen went on many expeditions, quite a few of which he barely survived, suffering frostbite, snow blindness, and starvation. Near the North Pole there is no such thing as an easy and safe outing.

In "Arctic Adventure" Freuchen writes of polar bear hunts, of meeting Eskimos who had resorted to cannibalism during a severe famine, and of the thrill of seeing the sun after three months of winter darkness. Trained as a journalist before he headed north, Freuchen is a fine writer and great storyteller (he won an Oscar for his feature film script of Eskimo). He writes about the Inuit with genuine respect and affection, describing their stoicism amidst hardship, their spiritual beliefs, their ingenious methods of surviving in a harsh environment, their humor and joy in the face of danger and difficulties, and the social politics behind such customs as "wife-trading." While his experiences make this book a page-turner, Freuchen's warmth, self-deprecating wit, writing skill and anthropological observations make this book a literary stand out.

Alexander von Humboldt, sometimes called 'the last man who knew everything', was an extraordinary polymath of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In 1798 he received unprecedented permission from the Spanish Crown to explore its American and Caribbean colonies, which he did from 1799-1804. This is the journal of those explorations, in which he extensively covers the region's topography, geology, fauna and flora, anthropology and comparative linguistics. Volume II covers the period in which he undertake a major exploration of the River Orinoco, as far as the borders of Brazil, finishing in Angostura, then the capital of Spanish Guiana.

In the summer of 2012, the author returned to his native Cuba to retrieve his birth certificate after an absence of 50 years, 24 of which he lived in the United States. This memoir of his journey of personal and political discovery illuminates how the two countries-90 miles apart yet opposites on the political spectrum-have both lost their way in the misguided pursuit of their divergent ideologies. The author presents a candid view of the revolution and U.S.-Cuban relations through conversations with everyday Havanans.

This book concerns the significance of the English Channel in British and French literature from the 1780s onwards: a timely subject given the intense debates in progress about the actual and desired relationships between Britain and mainland Europe. The book addresses contemporary authors who use the Channel as a focus for cultural comment, comparing their approaches to those of earlier writers, from Charlotte Smith and Chateaubriand through Hugo and Dickens to historians and travel writers of the 1950s and 1980s.

Among the Believers is V. S. Naipaul's classic account of his journeys through Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia; 'the believers' are the Muslims he met on those journeys, young men and women battling to regain the original purity of their faith in the hope of restoring order to a chaotic world. It is a uniquely valuable insight into modern Islam and the comforting simplifications of religious fanaticism. 'This book investigates the Islamic revolution and tries to understand the fundamentalist zeal that has gripped the young in Iran and other Muslim countries . . . He is a modern master.' - Sunday Times 'His level of perception is of the highest, and his prose has become the perfect instrument for realizing those perceptions on the page. His travel writing is perhaps the most important body of work of its kind in the second half of the century.' - Martin Amis, author of Time's Arrow.

Alexander von Humboldt, sometimes called 'the last man who knew everything', was an extraordinary polymath of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In 1798 he received unprecedented permission from the Spanish Crown to explore its American and Caribbean colonies, which he did from 1799-1804. This is the journal of those explorations, in which he extensively covers the region's topography, geology, fauna and flora, anthropology and comparative linguistics. Volume I covers his preparations, stop at Tenerife, landfall at Cuman and journeys inland in what is now Venezuela.

'A book worth reading' Andrew Marr, Sunday Times The Debatable Land was an independent territory which used to exist between Scotland and England. At the height of its notoriety, it was the bloodiest region in Great Britain, fought over by Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and James V. After the Union of the Crowns, most of its population was slaughtered or deported and it became the last part of the country to be brought under the control of the state. Today, its history has been forgotten or ignored. When Graham Robb moved to a lonely house on the very edge of England, he discovered that the river which almost surrounded his new home had once marked the Debatable Land's southern boundary. Under the powerful spell of curiosity, Robb began a journey - on foot, by bicycle and into the past - that would uncover lost towns and roads, reveal the truth about this maligned patch of land and result in more than one discovery of major historical significance. Rich in detail and epic in scope, The Debatable Land takes us from a time when neither England nor Scotland could be imagined to the present day, when contemporary nationalism and political turmoil threaten to unsettle the cross-border community once more. Writing with his customary charm, wit and literary grace, Graham Robb proves the Debatable Land to be a crucial, missing piece in the puzzle of British history. Includes a 16-page colour plate section.

English spas have a long and steamy history, from the thermal baths of Aquae Sulis in Bath to the stews of Southwark, the elegant pump rooms of Cheltenham and Buxton to the Victorian mania for hydrotherapy and Turkish hammams. 'The Secret History of English Spas' is an informative but light-hearted social and cultural history of our obsession with drinking and bathing in spa waters. It tells the stories of the rich, the famous, the poor and the sick, all of whom visited spas in hopes of curing everything from infertility to leprosy and gonorrhoea. It depicts the entrepreneurs who promoted these resorts - often on the basis of the most dubious scientific evidence - and the riotous and salacious social life enjoyed in spa towns, where moral health might suffer even as bodies were cleansed and purged. And yet English spas also offered an ideal of civility and politeness, providing a place where social classes and sexes could mingle and enjoy refined entertainments such as music and dance - all part of the fashionable pastime referred to as 'taking the waters'.

Mountaintops have long been seen as sacred places, home to gods and dreams. In one climbing year Peter Boardman visited three very different sacred mountains. He began in the New Year, on the South Face of the Carstensz Pyramid in New Guinea. This shark's fin of steep limestone walls and sweeping glaciers is the highest point between the Andes and the Himalaya, and one of the most inaccessible, rising above thick jungle inhabited by warring Stone Age tribes. During the spring Boardman was on more familiar, if hardly more reassuring, ground, making a four-man, oxygen-free attempt on the world's third highest peak, Kangchenjunga. Hurricane-force winds beat back their first two bids on the unclimbed North Ridge, but they eventually stood within feet of the summit - leaving the final few yards untrodden in deference to the inhabiting deity. In October, he was back in the Himalaya and climbing the mountain most sacred to the Sherpas: the twin-summited Gauri Sankar. Renowned for its technical difficulty and spectacular profile, it is aptly dubbed the Eiger of the Himalaya and Boardman's first ascent of the South Summit took a committing and gruelling twenty-three days. Three sacred mountains, three very different expeditions, all superbly captured by Boardman in Sacred Summits, his second book, first published shortly after his death in 1982. Combining the excitement of extreme climbing with acute observation of life in the mountains, this is an amusing, dramatic, poignant and thought-provoking book, amply fulfilling the promise of Boardman's first title, The Shining Mountain, for which he won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1979.

"Looking East" explores early modern English attitudes toward the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century. To a nation just arriving on the international scene, the Ottoman Empire was at once the great enemy and scourge of Christendom, and at the same time the fabulously wealthy and magnificent court from which the sultan ruled over three continents with his great and powerful army. By taking the imaginative, literary and poetic writing about the Ottoman Turks and putting it alongside contemporary historical documents, the book shows that fascination with the Ottoman Empire shaped how the English thought about and represented their own place within the world as a nation with increasing imperial ambitions of its own.

THE LAND OF THE CAMEL Tents and Temples of Inner Mongolia By SCHUYLER CAMMANN THE RONALD PRESS COMPANY f NEW YORK Copyright, 1951, by THE RONALD PRESS COMPANY All Rights Reserved The text of this publication or any part thereof may not be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission in writing 1 from the publisher. PRINTED IN THE XJNITED STATES OF AMERICA To Marcia WHO WAITED FOREWORD This book describes western Inner Mongolia in 1945. For almost nine years this region had been cut off by hostilities with the Japa nese, which began there in 1936, and it will probably be a very long time before any American can get there again. Even before the war it was little known, as the distance from the China coast had prevented foreign contacts, except for a handful of missionaries. The war years had brought marked changes to Inner Mongolia, accelerating the exploitation, terrorization, and dispossession of the Mongols which the Chinese had begun some forty years before. Enough Mongols were still living there, however, to enable us to see and share their life in tents and temples, after the end of the war brought us leisure from other activities. It seemed important to write down what we saw of their strange customs and complex religion, as well as to describe the forces that were undermining their old traditions and their way of life. Thus this is primarily an account of the Mongols we met, and their opponents among the immigrant settlers and border officials. But it would not present a complete picture of the region if it did not also describe the semifeudal realm of the Belgian mission ary fathers, . which has now passed into history. Most of Chapter 10 has previously been published inthe Bulletin of the University Museum, Philadelphia, while some of the passages dealing with Mongolian chess have appeared in an article for Natural History. The writer is especially grateful to Walter Hill and to Dr. William LaSor for their kindness in allowing him to use their photographs. SCHUYLER CAMMANN University of Pennsylvania September, 1950 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE 1 First Impressions of Mongolia 3 2 Crossing the Ordos 9 3 The Great Plain IS 4 Camp Life and Recreation 21 5 Farmers of the Great Plain 28 6 The Victory in Shanpa 41 7 Our First Lamasery 48 8 The Mongols at Home 57 9 Meeting Dunguerbo 66 10 The Living Buddha of Shandagu 73 11 Chien-li Temple, Pride of the Oirats 85 12 More Lama Personalities 96 13 Mongol Festival 101 14 Down the Range to Dabatu Pass 106 1 5 Temple in the Gobi 1 14 16 Dunguerbo and His Family 121 17 The Journey to Ago-in Sume 130 18 Temple of the Antelope Cave 137 19 Last Days in Shanpa 143 20 Lo-pei Chao 152 21 South by Camel 163 22 Ninghsia Interlude 173 23 The Second Camel Trip 183 24 Leaving the Ordos 193 Index 199 vii ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Getting the truck aboard the Yellow River ferry 12 Ordos camels in summer, with sagging humps 12 Chinese immigrant farmer ploughing up old Mongol grazing land on Hou-tao Plain 13 Farmers harvesting soy beans on Hou-tao Plain 13 The camp well 24 A Chinese mother rides into Shanpa to market 24 A Provincial army caravan enters Shanpa 24 Typical Chinese tenant farmers homes on Hou-tao Plain 25 Tsong Kapa, founder of the Reformed Sect, with episodes from his life 52 Tara, the Green Goddess. Gilded bronze image from a Mongol lamasery 53 Mongol woman milking goats 64 Yurts in the wasteland, Beilighe Pass 64 Dunguerboturning a giant prayer wheel in a lamasery 65 Shandagu Miao at the base of the mountains. Author in foreground 80 Chortens at Shandagu Miao 80 Yamantaka and other demon-gods 80 The Golden Image at Shandagu Miao 81 Main pieces from two Mongolian chess sets 88 Playing Mongolian Chess 89 Peacock pawns and rabbit pawns from two Mongolian chess sets 89 The Abbot, Lopon Dorje, receives some guests 104 Two Oirat matrons in festival finery 105 A Mongol woman brings her child to the Festival 105 A Temple in the Gobi...