The gripping story of a dramatic eighteenth-century voyage of discovery from Naomi J. Williams In her wildly inventive debut novel, Naomi J. Williams reimagines the historical La Pérouse expedition, a voyage of exploration that left Brest in 1785 with two frigates, two hundred men, and overblown Enlightenment ideals and expectations, in a brave attempt to circumnavigate the globe for science and the glory of France. Deeply grounded in historical fact but refracted through a powerful imagination, Landfalls follows the exploits and heartbreaks not only of the men on the ships but also of the people affected by the voyage-natives and other Europeans the explorers encountered, loved ones left waiting at home, and those who survived and remembered the expedition later. Each chapter is told from a different point of view and is set in a different part of the world-ranging from London to Tenerife, Alaska to remote South Pacific islands and Siberia, and eventually back to France. The result is a beautifully written and absorbing tale of the high seas, scientific exploration, human tragedy, and the world on the cusp of the modern era. By turns elegiac, profound, and comic, Landfalls reinvents the maritime adventure novel for the twenty-first century.

For Ibn Batuttah of Tangier, being medieval didn't mean sitting at home waiting for renaissances, enlightenments and easyJet. It meant travelling the known world to its limits. Seven centuries on, Tim Mackintosh-Smith's passionate pursuit of the fourteenth-century traveller takes him to landfalls in remote tropical islands, torrid Indian Ocean ports and dusty towns on the shores of the Saharan sand-sea. His zigzag itinerary across time and space leads from Zanzibar to the Alhambra (via the Maldives, Sri Lanka, China, Mauritania and Guinea) and to a climactic conclusion to his quest for the man he calls 'IB' - a man who out-travelled Marco Polo by a factor of three, who spent his days with saints and sultans and his nights with an intercontinental string of slave-concubines. Tim's journey is a search for survivals from IB's world - material, human, spiritual, edible - however, when your fellow traveller has a 700-year head start, familiar notions don't always work.

'This cruising guide for ocean voyagers provides invaluable passage-planning information for tried and tested routes around the world. Climates and weather patterns, currents, seasons and timings are key to selecting routes, but just as important is knowing something about the countries that you will arrive in. Details of the expected formalities and regulations are followed by essential information on key landfalls, accompanied by the first-hand observations of well-known world sailors and authors Rod Heikell and Andy O’Grady. Text and plans have been updated for this third edition which is illustrated with a number of new photographs to inspire both dreamers and passagemakers. “I have recently been planning a voyage from Trinidad to New Zealand using Ocean Passages and Landfalls by Rod Heikell and Andy O'Grady. The book has been an exceptional resource. The mass of information on a wealth of subjects is excellent. The layout is beautifully put together and very accessible. The pilotage and chartlets will be invaluable. The book will certainly be travelling with me and I cannot recommend it highly enough to anybody who is planning ocean voyaging.” Theresa Kewell, S/Y Mr Blue ‘This is a ‘blue planet’ book. Its scope is awe-inspiring as it takes an overview of the globe as the yachtsman’s potential cruising ground… It is of course possible to glean all the macro information from scientific geophysical sources, but the personality and experience of the authors adds an indispensable ingredient.’ Yachting Monthly

This is a handbook for world cruisers, this provides invaluable passage-planning information for crossing the oceans, with discussions on climates, seasons, oceanography and the merits of different world cruising routes. Fully illustrated with over 300 charts and plans in full color.

This book surveys the past, present, and potential future variability of hurricanes and typhoons on a variety of timescales using newly developed approaches based on geological and archival records, in addition to more traditional approaches based on the analysis of the historical record of tropical cyclone tracks. A unique aspect of the book is that it provides an overview of the developing field of paleotempestology, which uses geological, biological, and documentary evidence to reconstruct prehistoric changes in hurricane landfall. The book also presents a particularly wide sampling of ongoing efforts to extend the best track data sets using historical material from many sources, including Chinese archives, British naval logbooks, Spanish colonial records, and early diaries from South Carolina. The book will be of particular interest to tropical meteorologists, geologists, and climatologists as well as to the catastrophe reinsurance industry, graduate students in meteorology, and public employees active in planning and emergency management.

Selected and introduced by Jenni Calder. Ill health drove Robert Louis Stevenson from Scotland; the urge for new and adventurous places drew him to the Pacific. There were those at home who would have been happier to see him purely as a spinner of the picturesque, but Stevenson could not close his eyes to the impact of colonialism, the ‘stir-about of epochs and races, barbarisms and civilizations, virtues and crimes’. This collection sets three of his imaginative works —The Bottle Imp, The Isle of Voices, and The Beach of Falesa — within the social and political contexts of Stevenson’s letters and essays from the South Seas. Island ambience, the clash of cultures, moral ambiguities, all are there, and so too is Stevenson’s swift narrative control, giving a true modernity to his prose.