From the author of Ninety Degrees North, a spellbinding account of how officers of the British Navy explored the world after the Napoleonic Wars.In 1816, John Barrow, second secretary to the British admiralty, launched the most ambitious program of exploration the world has ever seen. For the next thirty years, his handpicked teams of elite British naval officers scoured the globe from the Arctic to Antarctica, their mission: to fill the blanks that litter...

The author of Barrow's Boys offers a fascinating look at the exploration of the Arctic in the nineteenth century.Named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, the Seattle Times, Publishers Weekly, and TimeIn the nineteenth century, theories about the North Pole ran rampant. Was it an open sea? Was it a portal to new worlds within the globe? Or was it just a wilderness of ice? When Sir John Fr...

"[A] searing story of France's attempt to colonize the vast Sahara desert and of two unforgettable men who dedicated their lives to the effort." —Rob Mitchell, The Boston HeraldWhether writing of the Alps, the high seas, or the North Pole, Fergus Fleming has won acclaim as one of today's most vivid and engaging historians of adventure and exploration. The Sword and the Cross takes us to the Sahara at the end of the nineteenth cen...

A "dramatic and masterful" account of early alpine explorers and the challenges they faced to scale the summits (Anthony Brandt, National Geographic Adventure).In a riveting narrative of daredevils and eccentrics, Fergus Fleming gives us the breathtaking story of some of history's greatest explorers as they conquer the soaring peaks of the Alps. Fleming recounts the incredible exploits of the men whose centuries-old fear of the mountain range turned quickl...

Readers can explore James Bond creator Ian Fleming’s writing on the pleasures of drinking and mix themselves fifty delicious cocktails from recipes inspired by his books and developed by award-winning London bar, Swift.Both Bond and Fleming were partial to a stiff drink. In both fiction and real life, cocktails were an important and well-chosen accompaniment to adventure and daring and often relaxing. Fleming made the Martini famous with Bond’s ritual of always ordering it “shaken,...

As war clouds darkened over Europe in 1914, a party led by Shackleton set out to make the first crossing of the entire Antarctic continent via the Pole. But their initial optimism was short-lived as ice floes closed around their ship, gradually crushing it and marooning 28 men on the polar ice. Alone in the world's most unforgiving environment, Shackleton and his team began a brutal quest for survival. And as the story of their journey across treacherous seas and a wilderness of glaciers a...

On August 16, 1952, Ian Fleming wrote to his wife, Ann, "My love, This is only a tiny letter to try out my new typewriter and to see if it will write golden words since it is made of gold." He had bought the golden typewriter as a present to himself for finishing his first novel, Casino Royale. It marked in glamorous style the arrival of James Bond, agent 007, and the start of a career that saw Fleming become one the world's most celebrated thriller-writers. And he did write golde...

The golden moments of exploration and adventure - glorious, triumphant, perilous and dramatic.In the 18th century, exploration entered a new dimension - explorers were motivated by scientific inquiry rather than greed. To this end they were expected to make a full record of everything they encountered; and for the first time in history, that record was to include pictures as well as words. Combining gripping first-hand accounts with original images, THE EXPLORER'S ...

"The Worst Journey in the World" by Apsley Cherry-Garrard is the epic tale of the disastrous "Winter expedition" of the Author and his two companions- Henry Bowers and Dr Edward Wilson - all members of Scott's ill-fated Antarctic expedition to the South Pole, who attempted a scientific expedition in the midst of the Antarctic Winter - in the coldest temperatures found on Planet Earth.At the behest of the scientific establishment they went in search of some samples of fertilised but...

The modern image of the pirate is derived from Captain Charles Johnson's accounts of the cut-throats who sailed under the Jolly Roger. It was he who gave mythical status to the likes of Blackbeard and Captain Kidd. Using contemporary sources, Nigel Cawthorne now turns the spotlight on the reality of pirate life, revealing the truth behind the legends. It gives us an insight into the men - and women - their weapons, their ships, their unhappy victims and their hide-outs, including the capit...

**The legendary and harrowing tale of British explorer Ernest Shackelton’s 1914 shipwreck on Antarctic ice – and how his leadership rescued his crew“One of the greatest adventure stories of our time.” –New York Times Book Review**In August 1914, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton boarded the Endurance and set sail for Antarctica, where he planned to cross the last uncharted continent on foot. In January 1915, after battling its way through a thousand miles o...

The frozen continent of Antarctica has always captured the imagination of explorers and adventurers from around the World, most especially in the first few decades of the 20th Century, when the race was on to be the very first person to reach the South Pole.In this carefully selected Anthology we present the personal accounts of the greatest early explorers of Antarctica: Captain Robert Falcon Scott, Sir Ernest Shackleton, Roald Amundsen, Apsley Cherry-Garrard and Sir Douglas Mawson...