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\"Written by Museum botanist Dr Sandra Knapp, this compact little book explores Wallace's Amazonian expedition. He spent four years from 1848 - 1852 exploring the Upper Amazon Basin, a vast area of rainforest where few Europeans had ever been before, collecting thousands of specimens. The book describes Wallace's arduous journey, looks at his development as a naturalist and explains how the loss of most of his specimens during his journey home affected his future\"-- from publisher's web site.

Both the Christian Bible and Aristotle's works suggest that water should entirely flood the earth. Though many ancient, medieval, and early modern Europeans relied on these works to understand and explore the relationships between water and earth, particularly sixteenth-century Europeans were especially concerned with why dry land existed. This book investigates why sixteenth-century Europeans were so interested in water's failure to submerge the earth when their predecessors had not been. Analyzing biblical commentaries as well as natural philosophical, geographical, and cosmographical texts from these periods, Lindsay Starkey shows that European sea voyages to the Southern Hemisphere combined with the traditional methods of European scholarship and religious reformations led sixteenth-century Europeans to reinterpret water and earth's ontological and spatial relationships. The manner in which they did so also sheds light on how we can respond to our current water crisis before it is too late.

This first modern study to focus on James Cook's polar adventures, Captain Cook Rediscovered introduces an entirely new explorer who is more at home along the edge of the polar ice packs than the Pacific's sandy beaches.

Often viewed in isolation, the Jolliet and Marquette expedition in fact took place against a sprawling backdrop that encompassed everything from ancient Native American cities to French colonial machinations. Mark Walczynski draws on a wealth of original research to place the explorers and their journey within seventeenth-century North America. His account takes readers among the region's diverse Native American peoples and into a vanished natural world of treacherous waterways and native flora and fauna. Walczynski also charts the little-known exploits of the French-Canadian officials, explorers, traders, soldiers, and missionaries who created the political and religious environment that formed Jolliet and Marquette and shaped European colonization of the heartland. A multifaceted voyage into the past, Jolliet and Marquette expands and updates the oft-told story of a pivotal event in American history.

A critical reassessment of world-shaping Portuguese voyages of discovery that places these quests in historical context. The lasting impact of historic Portuguese voyages of discovery is unquestionable. The slave trade, the diaspora of the Sephardic Jews, and the intercontinental spread of plants and animals all make clear these voyages' long-term global significance. Navigations reexamines these Portuguese quests by placing them in their medieval and Renaissance settings. It shows how these voyages grew out of a crusading ethos, as well as long-distance trade with Asia and Africa and developments in map-making and ship design. Malyn Newitt also narrates these voyages of discovery in the framework of Portuguese politics, describing the role of the Portuguese ruling dynasty—including its female members—in the flowering of the Portuguese Renaissance, the creation of the Renaissance state with its distinctive ideology, and in the cultural changes that took place within a wider European context.

What if we saw indigenous people as the active agents of global exploration rather than as the passive objects of that exploration? What if, instead of conceiving of global exploration as an enterprise just of European men such as Columbus or Cook or Magellan, we thought of it as an enterprise of the people they \"discovered\"? What could such a new perspective reveal about geographical understanding and its place in struggles over power in the context of colonialism? The World and All the Things upon Itaddresses these questions by tracing how Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian people) explored the outside world and generated their own understandings of it in the century after James Cook's arrival in 1778. Writing with verve, David A. Chang draws on the compelling words of long-ignored Hawaiian-language sources-stories, songs, chants, and political prose-to demonstrate how Native Hawaiian people worked to influence their metaphorical \"place in the world.\" We meet, for example, Ka?iana, a Hawaiian chief who took an English captain as his lover and, while sailing throughout the Pacific, considered how Chinese, Filipinos, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans might shape relations with Westerners to their own advantage. Chang's book is unique in examining travel, sexuality, spirituality, print culture, gender, labor, education, and race to shed light on how constructions of global geography became a site through which Hawaiians, as well as their would-be colonizers, perceived and contested imperialism, colonialism, and nationalism. Rarely have historians asked how non-Western people imagined and even forged their own geographies of their colonizers and the broader world. This book takes up that task. It emphasizes, moreover, that there is no better way to understand the process and meaning of global exploration than by looking out from the shores of a place, such as Hawai?i, that was allegedly the object, and not the agent, of exploration.

Both the Christian Bible and Aristotle's works suggest that water should entirely flood the earth. Though many ancient, medieval, and early modern Europeans relied on these works to understand and explore the relationships between water and earth, sixteenth-century Europeans particularly were especially concerned with why dry land existed. This book investigates why they were so interested in water's failure to submerge the earth when their predecessors had not been. Analyzing biblical commentaries as well as natural philosophical, geographical, and cosmographical texts from these periods, Lindsay Starkey shows that European sea voyages to the southern hemisphere combined with the traditional methods of European scholarship and religious reformations led sixteenth-century Europeans to reinterpret water and earth's ontological and spatial relationships. The manner in which they did so also sheds light on how we can respond to our current water crisis before it is too late.

A \"highly enjoyable\" account of six men, and one woman, who journeyed into uncharted and treacherous African terrain to find the source of the White Nile ( The Washington Post). Nothing obsessed explorers of the mid-nineteenth century more than the quest to discover the source of the White Nile. It was the planet's most elusive secret, the prize coveted above all others. Between 1856 and 1876, six larger-than-life men and one extraordinary woman accepted the challenge. Showing extreme courage and resilience, Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, James Augustus Grant, Samuel Baker, Florence von Sass, David Livingstone, and Henry Morton Stanley risked their lives and reputations in the fierce competition. National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Tim Jeal deploys fascinating new research to provide a vivid tableau of the unmapped \"Dark Continent,\" its jungle deprivations, and the courage—as well as malicious tactics—of the explorers. On multiple forays launched into east and central Africa, the travelers passed through almost impenetrable terrain and suffered the ravages of flesh-eating ulcers, paralysis, malaria, deep spear wounds, and even death. They discovered Lakes Tanganyika and Victoria and became the first white people to encounter the kingdoms of Buganda and Bunyoro. Jeal weaves the story with authentic new detail—and examines the tragic unintended legacy of the Nile search that still casts a long shadow over the people of Uganda and Sudan. \"A fabulous story…old-fashioned epic adventure.\"— The Sunday Times \"Superb narrative…a must-read for anyone hoping to understand the internal dynamics of modern state-building in central Africa.\"— Booklist

The twenty-fifth of August 2018 marks the 250th anniversary of the departure of the Endeavour from Plymouth, England, and the first of three voyages by James Cook that would nearly complete the map of the world. Interweaving accounts of scientific discovery with the personal stories of the voyages’ key participants, William Frame and Laura Walker explore the charting of the Pacific and the natural world, the first encounters and exchange between Western and indigenous cultures, and the representation of the voyages in art. The illustrations, many of which have never before been published, include drawings by all the artists employed on the voyages, including Alexander Buchan, Sydney Parkinson, William Hodges, and John Webber. It also includes the only surviving paintings by Tupaia, a Polynesian high priest and navigator who joined the first voyage at Tahiti and sailed with Cook to New Zealand and Australia. A stunningly illustrated object-centred history, James Cook: The Voyages offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to discover the extensive Captain Cook collection of the British Library, including original maps, artworks, journals, and printed books.The twenty-fifth of August 2018 marks the 250th anniversary of the departure of the Endeavour from Plymouth, England, and the first of three voyages by James Cook that would nearly complete the map of the world. Interweaving accounts of scientific discovery with the personal stories of the voyages’ key participants, William Frame and Laura Walker explore the charting of the Pacific and the natural world, the first encounters and exchange between Western and indigenous cultures, and the representation of the voyages in art. The illustrations, many of which have never before been published, include drawings by all the artists employed on the voyages, including Alexander Buchan, Sydney Parkinson, William Hodges, and John Webber. It also includes the only surviving paintings by Tupaia, a Polynesian high priest and navigator who joined the first voyage at Tahiti and sailed with Cook to New Zealand and Australia. A stunningly illustrated object-centred history, James Cook: The Voyages offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to discover the extensive Captain Cook collection of the British Library, including original maps, artworks, journals, and printed books.

Richard Hakluyt the younger, a contemporary of William Shakespeare, advocated the creation of English colonies in the New World at a time when the advantages of this idea were far from self-evident. This book describes in detail the life and times of Hakluyt, a trained minister who became an editor of travel accounts.Hakluyt's Promisedemonstrates his prominent role in the establishment of English America as well as his interests in English opportunities in the East Indies. The volume presents nearly 50 illustrations-many unpublished since the sixteenth century-and offers a fresh view of Hakluyt's milieu and the central concerns of the Elizabethan age. Though he never traveled farther than Paris, young Hakluyt spent much of the 1580s recording information about the western hemisphere and became an international authority on overseas exploration. The book traces his rise to prominence as a source of information and inspiration for England's policy makers, including the queen, and his advocacy for colonies in Roanoke and Jamestown. Hakluyt's thought was shaped by debates that stretched across Europe, and his interests ranged just as widely, encompassing such topics as peaceful coexistence with Native Americans, the New World as a Protestant Holy Land, and in, his later life, trade with the Spice Islands.