This is a true ` Boys` Own` adventure story of how three English schoolboys spent the summer of 1863 trekking through the Swiss & Italian Alps before conquering Mont Blanc. It is an utterly unique journal written by one of that party who would go on the become one of the great mountain & travel writers of the Victorian era & make a huge contribution to the Royal Geographic Society & the Alpine Club. His name was Douglas William Freshfield. Douglas William Freshfield was born on Sunday, 27 April 1845 in London, the only son of Henry Ray Freshfield & Jane Quinton Crawford. After being educated at Eton College & University College, Oxford, he followed his father into the legal profession & was called to the bar in 1870. One of the features of his privileged childhood was the opportunity to travel with his parents & enjoy long summer holidays abroad. At the age of eight he had his first experience of the Swiss Alps undertaking a journey from Basel to Chamonix. Eventually, in 1863, he was ready to undertake an Alpine adventure of his own planning. This volume, which he arranged to have printed privately in 1865 was his first work of mountain literature & also his rarest. It is his journal of that trek made from the southern shores of Lake Geneva, in the company of two schoolfriends, through the Swiss Alps & into northern Italy during the summer of 1863. Freshfield was only 18 when he made the trip, & in the narrative of the journal can be found the beginnings of the style & observational genius that was to serve him well over the course of his writing career. The reader is engaged at once with the three young men as they begin their adventure & is bowled along as an unseen travelling companion through the high routes & passes, the valleys & gorges until making the summit with them on Mont Blanc. It is an engaging & informative journal of how privileged young Englishmen once spent their leisure time & reveals a lifestyle long gone now but still worthy of reminiscence. ...

The island of Crete was home to Europe`s earliest civilization. Since the time of the Minoans, 4000 years ago, it has served as a crossroads where the Eastern & Western worlds have met & exchanged skills & ideas, materials & artefacts. At Knossos, with its gigantic palace complex where the legendary Minos was king & where Theseus slew the Minotaur, we find one of the world`s wondrous historical sites. From successive waves of rulers
- the Greeks, Romans, Arabs & the Empires of Byzantium, Venice & Ottomans
- Crete has aquired layered strata of history unlike any other l&. It is this heritage
- as well as the astonishing natural beauty of the place
- that has drawn visitors from around the world. Their writings are collected in this illustrated book, which is the first of three works together spanning the great island from east to west.



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Kusang never thought she would leave Tibet. Growing up in a remote mountain village, she married a monk & gave birth to two children. But then the Chinese army invaded, & their peaceful lives were destroyed forever. Thousands were tortured, prison camps were set up & Kusang`s monastery was destroyed. The family were forced to flee across the Himalayas in the depths of winter, battling cold, fear, starvation & exhaustion. It took a month to reach India, where they were then passed from one refugee camp to another, all the while fighting hunger & disease. Kusang`s husband & her younger child died, but somehow Kusang & her daughter Sonam survived. In ” Across Many Mountains” Sonam`s daughter, Yangzom, born in safety in Switzerl&, has written the story of her inspirational mother & grandmother`s fight for survival, & their lives in exile. It is an extraordinary story of determination, love & endurance. ...

On 21 February 1968, Wally Herbert & his team of three companions & forty huskies set out from Point Barrow, Alaska, embarking on a journey that no one had ever attempted. Sixteen hard months later they finally set foot once more on solid l&, having attained the North Pole & crossed the frozen Arctic Ocean for the first time via its longest axis. It stands today as one of the greatest expeditions of all time. Illustrated with unpublished photographs & other personal materials from the Herbert archive, this exceptional photography book is a first-hand record of an astonishing journey one that with rising temperatures & Arctic ice melt will probably never be repeated. An impressive team of explorers & polar experts, including Wally Herberts daughter Kari, also provide their reflections & tributes to the expedition & to Wally Herbert, contributing to a remarkable visual & personal testimony of this historic event. ...

The route from Port Augusta in South Australia, along the coast of the Great Australian Bight including the Eyre Peninsula & the Nullabor National Park, to Esperance in Western Australia, described by Moon Adventure Publication in a spiral-bound guide slightly larger than A5, illustrated with numerous maps. An introductory section to the area, covering its history & fauna/flora, is followed by advice on planning & preparation. The route is described in sections, each accompanied by a map of the area showing the road network with symbols indicating local facilities. Descriptions of places along the route include useful website addresses and/or contact details for 4WD tours, fishing & camping stores, recreational sites/providers, accommodation in remote places, etc. The guide also provides GPS coordinates for important road junctions & various other locations. Also included is a chapter on the Trans-Australian railway line from Pimba & Woomera to Kalgoorlie. ...

Across the Empty Quarter charts Thesiger's amazing journey across the inhospitable, vitually untouched Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia. Restless & gripped by an overwhelming wish to make a name for himself in a world ever more hemmed in by progress & 'civilization', Thesiger (1910-2003) embarked on his amazing journeys across the Empty Quarter to test himself & to show what could still be done. The result was a monument both to his resilience & to the Bedu who guided him & who emerge as the book's real heroes. This extract is taken from Thesiger's Arabian Sands About this series: Penguin's Great Journeys series presents extracts from some of the most important classic travelogues in a compact paperback format. The series allows readers to travel both around the planet & back through the centuries
- but also back into ideas & worlds frightening, ruthless & cruel in different ways from our own. Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things: Great civilisations, walls of ice, violent & implacable jungles, deserts & mountains, multitudes of birds & flowers new to science. Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends & stories were treated as facts & in which so much was still to be discovered.
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Turkey lies at the crossroads of history. Since the beginning of civilisation, Anatolia has been crossed & re-crossed by waves of ancient people: the Hittites, the ancient Persian Empire & the mighty Ottoman Empire that spread as far as Budapest, Baghdad, Cairo & Arabia, have created a country as varied as it is possible to find in the world. With a climate & landscape as diverse as its past, Turkey has provided an alluring & yet sometimes challenging destination for westerners throughout the ages. This, & the hospitality of its people has ensured that countless visitors, from classical times to the present, have fallen under the spell of Turkey. ” Across the Hellespont” describes in lively detail the remarkable literature which Turkey has inspired for two millennia. At a time when Turkey`s position on the fringe may be set to change to a deeper involvement in Europe, the need for Europeans to understand the country is even more compelling. The range of travel writing represented in this book shows how, while political circumstances may change, the lure of Turkey remains constant. ...

For just over a hundred years there was a regular passenger liner service across the Pacific connecting Australia & New Zealand with North America, the main terminal ports being San Francisco & Vancouver. This book describes the rather chaotic development of these services into a reliable & successful trade that flourished into the 1970s before the advent of the jumbo-jet led to a rather rapid decline & eventual termination of the trans-Pacific passenger liner. With his usual meticulous research, Peter Plowman describes the liners that traversed the Pacific & companies that owned & managed them. The main North American ports were San Francisco, Los Angeles & Vancouver. The Pacific Mail Steamship Company was the first to instigate regular operations, the route was then taken over by the Oceanic Steamship Company. This in turn became the Matson Line with its famous liners the Mariposa & the Monterey. The Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand used the Tahiti & Maunganui. Details of the liners are given, their voyages, changes of name & ownership & their eventual fate. The various company mergers & associations are covered (such as that of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company & the Union Steamship Company of New Zealand). Some of the liners were requisitioned during World War I & II. The Aorangi for example, survived the war. Her sister ship, the Niagara was victim to a mine. ...

An introduction to the nautical history of the North Atlantic. For centuries the Atlantic hemmed Europe behind its storms & mysterious breadth. This was the ocean sea that extended to nowhere, or to the end of the world. Although there were legends of crossings by Celtic saints & Norse ocean farers, it took the vision of an Italian & the finance of a Spanish queen to shatter the shackles of superstition. Columbus was the catalyst who opened the door to the modern world. ” Across the Pond” tells of the changing use of this ocean, from a barrier to a route to riches & a highway for trade. There are episodes of exploration & exploitation, there are fighting ships & fisheries, treasure & timber, & always the danger of the sea. There also slipped the slavers with their cargo of shame. This is an ocean that bred some of the world`s hardiest mariners, famous men such as Cabot & Hudson & Vespucci, but also the nameless thousands who manned ships, the hard-used mariners from the Chesapeake, the Solway & Seville. Here was bred the down east Yankee, the Nova Scotian bluenose & the Scouser from Liverpool. ...

Americans have long been fascinated with the oddness of the British but we, says literary critic Terry Eagleton, find our transatlantic neighbours just as strange. Only an alien race would admiringly refer to a colleague as ”aggressive”, use superlatives to describe everything from one`s pet dog to one`s record collection or speak frequently of being ”empowered”. & why must they remain so irritatingly optimistic, even when all signs point to failure? On his quirky journey through the language, geography & national character of the United States, Eagleton proves to be an informal & utterly idiosyncratic guide. He answers the questions we (being British) dare not ask, like why Americans willingly rise at the crack of dawn, even on Sundays or why they publicly chastise cigarette smokers as if they`re all spokespeople for the surgeon general. In this pithy, warm-hearted & very funny book, Eagleton melds a good old-fashioned roast with genuine admiration for his neighbours ”across the pond”. ...