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

The adventure-filled story of the legendary Hudson’s Bay Company is inextricably linked to the formation of a Canadian nation stretching from sea to sea to sea. In an absorbing and lively new book on The Bay, James Raffan explores the forces that moulded a man, a company and a country.
The histories of Sir George Simpson and the HBC in the golden years of the 19th century are in many ways one history, for Simpson’s professional acumen and personal ambitions propelled a failing business to a position of great wealth and political power. At its height, the HBC trading territory covered an astonishing one-twelfth of the world’s surface. Raffan captures the many contradictions of the larger-than-life man at its centre: a brilliant manager who kept an iron grip on his fur forts from east to west, ensuring British power across the land; a pompous dandy who was most at home in a voyageur-paddled canoe; a man ashamed of his illegitimate birth but who went on to sire 13 children with eight different women, only one of whom was his wife; a master businessman who laid the foundations for the single greatest business enterprise of its day. Emperor of the North is the vibrant tale of a man who shaped much more than a fur-trading company―he launched an empire of ideas that led to the creation of a country. Meticulously researched, highly readable and wonderfully illuminated by maps and archival photographs, Emperor of the North is a delight for history buffs, armchair adventurers and biography fans alike.

Emperor Of The North

Biographies & Memoirs

Raffan, James

Historical

Part coming-of-age autobiography and part nature guide, Gerald Durrell’s dazzling sequel to My Family and Other Animals is based on his boyhood on Corfu, from 1933 to 1939. Originally published in 1969 but long out of print, Birds, Beasts, and Relatives is filled with charming observations, amusing anecdotes, boyhood memories, and childlike wonder.

Birds, beasts and relatives

Science & Math

DURRELL,GERALD

Biological Sciences

Viking Press

1 OVERSIZE HARDCOVER BOOK WITH DUST COVER

Desert, marsh, and mountain: The world of a nomad

Travel

THESIGER, Wilfred

Travel Writing

William Collins Sons

Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer

Sir Francis Younghusband was the last of the great imperialists and a dashing adventurer. In 1903 he single-handedly turned a small diplomatic mission into a full-scale military invasion of the last unexplored country on earth, Tibet. Yet he subsequently became an outlandish mystical philosopher and an Indian nationalist. Admired by Bertrand Russell, Lord Curzon, H. G. Wells and John Buchan, Younghusband held the world record for the 300-yard dash, was The Times correspondent during the siege of Chitral, became the first European since Marco Polo to find a new overland route from China to India, and organized the early assaults on Mount Everest. In a life that provides a rare glimpse into the spirit of his times, Younghusband embraced and personified, without apparent contradiction, the two cultures of late British imperialism. He spent much of his early life as a leading player in the Great Game - the battle of wits for control over the uncharted territory of High Asia - and his presumed death as a spy in the Pamirs almost sparked off a war between British India and Tsarist Russia. But despite being a classic Edwardian, full of pomposity and repression, in the post-First World War era he led the way in religious, philosophical and sexual free-thinking.

FRENCH, Patrick

Harpercollins

The life of my choice

Collins

Love Among the Butterflies: The Travels and Adventures of a Victorian Lady

Love Among the Butterflies: The Travels and Adventures of a Victorian Lady

Literature & Fiction

Fountaine, Margaret

Essays & Correspondence

HARPER/COLLINS

This text presents a romantic and adventurous look at the remarkably diverse cultures of the hidden paradise islands surrounding Papua New Guinea. The islands of the Coral, Solomon and Bismarck Seas were the last inhabited places on earth to be explored by Europeans and remain largely unspoilt, despite the former presence of German, British and Australian colonial rulers. Michael Moran describes eccentric residents past and present such as "Queen Emma" of New Britain, born of an American father and a Samoan mother, who built up a large empire of copra plantations, traded in the fabled obsidian (black volcanic glass) and entertained on a lavish scale with imported food and French champagne. Superstition, magic rites and the occult are explored as well as the historic anthropological work of Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands; and the author encounters a host of adventurers, mercenaries, explorers, missionaries and prospectors on his wide-ranging travels

Beyond the Coral Sea

Michael Moran

Community & Culture

HarperCollins, Publishers

When Bill Mason set off alone into the wilderness in his red canoe, many people went with him, if only in their imaginations. Now, James Raffan leads us into the heart of the vast landscape that was Bill Mason's own brilliant imagination, on a biographical journey that is entertaining, enriching and inspiring. Bill Mason was a filmmaker who gave us classics such as Cry of the Wild and Paddle to the Sea; he was author of the canoeist's bible, Path of the Paddle; he was the consummate outdoorsman. But few Canadians know that his gentleness and rugged self-sufficiency masked a life of great physical struggles. James Raffan reveals the private, sometimes anguished, man behind the legend.

Fire in the Bones: Bill Mason and the Canadian Canoeing Tradition

Arts & Literature

Sindh Revisited is the remarkable story of the author's fascination with the early life of Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890). It is the story of an incredible journey, too - deep into the heart of British India, and the India and Sindh of today. Christopher Ondaatje's Sindh Revisited is the extraordinarily sensitive account of the author's quest to uncover the secrets of the seven years Richard Burton spent in India in the army of the East India Company from 1842 to 1849. "If I wanted to fill the gap in my understanding of Richard Burton, I would have to do something that had never been done before: follow in his footsteps in India...." The journey covered thousands of miles - trekking across deserts where ancient tribes meet modern civilization in the valley of the mighty Indus River. What was it that Burton discovered in India? What was it that changed him from a rebellious, wayward youth into a man of courage, imagination, wisdom and personal power? Through this unique book and the journey it describes, we come nearer than ever before to understanding the mystery of Richard Burton and the devils that drove him.

Sindh Revisited: A Journey in the Footsteps of Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton 1842-1849 : The India Years

ONDAATJE, Christopher

Harpercollins Canada

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