A brand new collection of photographs from one of Ireland's most renowned photographers. Based in Tralee, Co. Kerry, Michael Diggin has an international reputation as a photographer of the Irish countryside and of its landscapes. This book concentrates on the beauties of Ireland rather than on the built environment. Page after page brings a succession of beautiful landscapes: rolling countryside, steep cliffs, off-shore islands, the lush countryside of the Golden Vale and of the wonderful mountain ranges around the coast. The book covers the entire island of Ireland: there are photographs fro... View More...
On September 1, 1909, the world received word that Dr Frederick A. Cook had discovered the North Pole on April 21, 1908. Four days later Commander Robert E. Peary announced that he had arrived at the North Pole on April 6, 1909. The accounts of Cook and Peary's expeditions are presented here. View More...
Solo sailors are widely known to be a breed apart, and here's an unforgettable book that shows just how wide a berth they give themselves from the crowds. Several years ago, Miles Hordern, a schoolteacher by training---though he had run away to sea a few times before---set sail on a twenty-eight-foot boat from New Zealand to South America, the largest uninterrupted stretch of water on earth, and into the dominion of icebergs, cyclones, and swells of monumental proportions. The trip would take him through the fjords of Patagonia, one of the last uncharted areas in the world, then north on the P... View More...
In the summer of 1871, 32 whaling ships, carrying 12-year-old William Fish Williams, a whaling captain & 1218 other men, women & children, were destroyed in an Arctic storm. In a rescue operation of unparalleled daring & heroism, not a single life was lost, but the impact on America's first oil industry was fateful & catastrophic. View More...
On January 17, 1913, alone and near starvation, Douglas Mawson, leader of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, was hauling a sledge to get back to base camp. The dogs were gone. Now Mawson himself plunged through a snow bridge, dangling over an abyss by the sledge harness. A line of poetry gave him the will to haul himself back to the surface.Mawson was sometimes reduced to crawling, and one night he discovered that the soles of his feet had completely detached from the flesh beneath. On February 8, when he staggered back to base, his features unrecognizably skeletal, the first teammate to r... View More...
Joshua Slocum's epic solo voyage around the world in 1895 in the 37 foot sloop Spray stands as one of the greatest sea adventures of all time. It remains one of the major feats of singlehanded voyaging, and has since been the inspiration for the many who have gone to sea in small boats. Starting from Boston in 1895, by the time he dropped anchor in Newport, Rhode Island over three years after his journey began, he had cruised some 46,000 miles entirely by sail and entirely alone. Slocum's account of his epic voyage is a classic of sailing literature, acclaimed as an unequalled masterpiece of v... View More...
For fans of The Lost City of Z, The River of Doubt, and Lost in Shangri-La--a real-life Indiana Jones story, set in the mysterious jungles of Honduras.I began to daydream about the jungle....On April 6, 1940, explorer and future World War II spy Theodore Morde (who would one day attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler), anxious about the perilous journey that lay ahead of him.Deep inside "the little Amazon," the jungles of Honduras's Mosquito Coast--one of the largest, wildest, and most impenetrable stretches of tropical land in the world--lies the fabled city of Ciudad Blanca: the White City. For... View More...