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John Harrison's Forgotten Footprints is the untold story of the sailors, sealers and eccentrics who discovered the last continent: Antarctica. A thrilling record of lost triumph and tragedy, a saga of adventure and ambition against all odds, and a compelling insight into extraordinary personalities and the times that shaped them, Forgotten Footprints captures the fascination of this most extreme, mysterious and beautiful of environments in John Harrison's characteristically vivid and affecting p...

"Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised. It is the only form of adventure in which you put on your clothes at Michaelmas and keep them on until Christmas, and, save for a layer of the natural grease of the body, find them as clean as though they were new. It is more lonely than London, more secluded than any monastery, and the post comes but once a year. As men will compare the hardships of France, Palestine, or Mesopotamia, so...

The world's subantarctic islands circle the lower part of the globe below New Zealand, Australia, Africa and South America in the 'Roaring Forties' and 'Furious Fifties' latitudes. They are filled with unique plants and wildlife, constantly buffeted by lashing rain and furious gales, and surrounded by a vast, powerful ocean. New Zealand and Australian subantarctic islands in particular have a rich and fascinating human history, from the early 19th-century explorers and sealers through to modern-...

This stunningly beautiful and informative book celebrates the Arctic, one of the last great wildernesses on the planet; a place where animals have survived for thousands of years protected only by fur and feathers. Humans also survive in the Arctic, but only those who have adjusted to the climate over millennia and who clad themselves in the skins of the animals they hunt. For the casual visitor, this is a place where survival for any extended period requires taking advantage of the best that mo...

Polar Winds traces a century of northern flight from balloonatics to bush pilots and beyond. "They were all gamblers and fortune seekers. They did things on their own - were independent people who wanted to be free to roam. They were good people, but, of course, some were loners or escapists. They all depended strictly on their wits." Joe McBryan, pilot and owner of Yellowknife-based Buffalo Airways, was talking about gold prospectors in the 1940s when he said this, but he could just as easil...

Written on his return to England, Scott's "The Voyage of the Discovery" provides a detailed and fascinating account of Antarctic exploration in the early twentieth century. Starting with a history of early discoveries in the region, he goes on to record the difficulties of organizing such an expedition and the challenges and dangers involved in the exploration of such a wild and untamed continent. Scott's account reflects the sense of wonder and amazement that he felt on discovering the strange...

Robert Falcon Scott's 1901-4 expedition to the Antarctic was a landmark event in the history of Antarctic exploration, creating a sensation comparable to the Arctic efforts of the American Robert E. Peary. Scott's initial expedition was also the first step toward the dramatic race to the South Pole in 1912, which resulted in the tragic deaths of Scott and his companions. Since then Scott's reputation has vacillated between two extremes: Was he a martyred hero, the beau ideal of a brave and selfl...

Did Alaska create the music of John Luther Adams, or did the music create his Alaska? For the past thirty years, the vastness of Alaska has swept through the distant reaches of the composer's imagination and every corner of his compositions. In this new book Adams proposes an ideal of musical ecology, the philosophical foundation on which his largest, most complex musical work is based. This installation, also called The Place Where You Go to Listen, is a sound and light environment that gives v...

Wilfred Grenfell was sent to Newfoundland in 1892 to improve the plight of coastal inhabitants and fishermen. The initial Grenfell text, Vikings of To-day, is intended to summarize three years among the residents of Labrador. These three years would lead to a lifetime spent in aid and passionate defense of the Labradorians. Beginning with descriptions of the environment, Grenfell sees the hardships and ingeniousness with which these people live off the land and maintain an indomitable spirit.

In 1909, two men laid rival claims to this crown jewel of exploration. A century later, the battle rages still. This book is about one of the most enduring and vitriolic feuds in the history of exploration. "What a consummate cur he is," said Robert Peary of Frederick Cook in 1911. Cook responded, "Peary has stooped to every crime from rape to murder." They had started out as friends and shipmates, with Cook, a doctor, accompanying Peary, a civil engineer, on an expedition to northern Greenland...

Four Years in the Ice - John RossDisgraced and dishonored for his report of an imaginary mountain range blocking the most likely access to the North West Passage, in 1829 Ross returned to Canada's frozen archipelago to vindicate his reputation. He rounded the north of Baffin Island and entered what he named the Gulf of Boothia. Here the Victory, his eccentric paddle-steamer, became frozen to the ice. Through three tantalizingly brief summers the expedition tried to find a way out and through fo...

Drawing on previously unpublished letters of journals of crew members, their descendants and, astonishingly, interviews with survivors, Jennifer Niven's book is a riveting account of one of the most ambitious - and disastrous - Arctic expeditions ever mounted. It is a story about unlikely heroes and unexpected villains - humans reduced to their primal needs by the infinite power and mystery of nature... 'For more than 30 years I have been reading polar survival stories, but none so gripping and...

According to Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the men who went to Antarctica with Captain Scott, 'Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time that has ever been devised.' Despite this there has never been a shortage of volunteers willing to endure the bad times in pursuit of the glory that polar exploration sometimes brings. Nick Rennison's compelling book tells the memorable stories of people who have risked their lives by entering the white wastelands of t...