Elisha Kent Kane, scion of a wealthy and influential Philadelphia family, became a legend of 19th-century America. Before he was 30, he had descended into a volcano in the Philippines, infiltrated a company of slave traders in West Africa and narrowly survived hand-to-hand combat in the Sierra Madre while carrying a secret message from the president of the United States. Yet Kane would achieve his greatest fame by exploring the High Arctic, an adventure that began when he sailed in search of the lost expedition of Sir John Franklin and the open water of an alleged “polar sea” around the North Pole. In the mid-1850s, Kane pushed farther north than any other voyager, then spent two years trapped in the ice before leading a desperate but heroic retreat that only added to his legend. Kane also enjoyed a secret love affair with a young Canadian-born spiritualist named Maggie Fox, a celebrated “spirit rapper” deemed unsuitable by his family. How this relationship combined with Kane’s tragic early death to deny him his rightful place in history is one of the most dramatic aspects of the book. Race to the Polar Sea tells the story of a romantic adventurer driven by dreams of glory. It is a tale of heroism, courage and conspiracy that evokes an age when the Arctic seemed a white, booming emptiness, beautiful and unknowable.

Race To The Polar Sea: The Heroic Voyage Of Elisha Kent Kane

History

McGoogan, Ken

World

Phyllis Bruce Books

LONG EXILE

McGrath, Melanie

Americas

Harper-perennial

Weaving together the discovery stories of explorers such as Cook, Shackleton, Scott, and Amundsen, with the ecological stories of whaling and sealing, fishing and climate change, man's impact on this magnificent continent is revealed. For such an austere, frozen, and inhospitable environment, Antarctica is in fact a surprisingly fragile Eden.

Antarctica: Exploring a Fragile Eden

Science & Math

Scott, Jonathan

Scott, Angela

Biological Sciences

HarperCollins, UK

The Last of the Gentlemen Adventurers

Maurice, Edward Beauclerk

HarperPress

Ice Balloon

Wilkinson, Alec

Fourth Estate

FRAGILE EARTH VIEWS OF A CHANGING WORLD

Collins.

Antarctica Exploring a Fragile Eden

Scott, Jonathan & Angela

Recounts early expeditions into the Pacific, and discusses how their adventures changed the face of international commerce and led to a surge in colonization

The Fatal Impact: The Invasion of the South Pacific, 1767-1840

Moorehead, Alan.

Australia & Oceania

Harpercollins

As mysterious as its beautiful, as forbidding as it is populated with warm-hearted people, Syberia is a land few Westerners know, and even fewer will ever visit. Traveling alone, by train, boat, car, and on foot, Colin Thubron traversed this vast territory, talking to everyone he encountered about the state of the beauty, whose natural resources have been savagely exploited for decades; a terrain tainted by nuclear waste but filled with citizens who both welcomed him and fed him—despite their own tragic poverty. From Mongoloia to the Artic Circle, from Rasputin's village in the west through tundra, taiga, mountains, lakes, rivers, and finally to a derelict Jewish community in the country's far eastern reaches, Colin Thubron penetrates a little-understood part of the world in a way that no writer ever has.

In Siberia

THUBRON, Colin.

Russia

On March 8, 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen set sail from China to "proceed all the way to the ends of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas." When the fleet returned home in October 1423, the emperor had fallen, leaving China in political and economic chaos. The great ships were left to rot at their moorings and the records of their journeys were destroyed. Lost in the long, self-imposed isolation that followed was the knowledge that Chinese ships had reached America seventy years before Columbus and had circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan. And they colonized America before the Europeans, transplanting the principal economic crops that have since fed and clothed the world.

1421: The Year China Discovered America

MENZIES, GAVIN

William Morrow Paperbacks

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