An illustrated history of the wonderful and curious things of nature existing before and since the deluge being a natural history of the sea illustrated by stirring adventures with whales also a natural history of land-creatures.

Questions about the cultural exchange of both knowledge and material goods are just as topical today as in years gone by. These questions have gained increasing attention from scholars since the 1980s when the term 'transfers cultures' by historians arose. However, this book provides a completely new approach in this context by interdisciplinary investigation of cultural exchanges based on chosen objects from shipwrecks and land, significant written documents and verifiable transfer of knowledge. The publication combines studies from humanities and natural sciences. Thus, historians, archaeologists, and pharmacists have investigated the way of transfer by means of material and immaterial goods, such as ship lists, medicine, metal ware, exotic animals and Asian objects as well as ship constructions. They set out, the continuity and discontinuity of cultural exchange based on moving objects depending on different conditions such as region, time, demand and availability. The innovative contributions of the publication aim to improve the understanding of cultural exchange by sea, as well as its reflection on land in the Early Modern Time and are the results of a workshop, which took place in the German Maritime Museum Bremerhaven, a Research Institute of the Leibniz Association, in 2015. The results show good promise for forthcoming investigations at the interface between History and Maritime Archaeology. The book targets graduate and post-graduate interdisciplinary researchers of archaeological, human, and natural sciences as well as everybody interested in both post-medieval and maritime history.

Set in a small coastal town in North Carolina during the waning years of the American Revolution, this incandescent debut novel follows three generations of family—fathers and daughters, mother and son, master and slave, characters who yearn for redemption amidst a heady brew of war, kidnapping, slavery, and love. Drawn to the ocean, ten-year-old Tabitha wanders the marshes of her small coastal village and listens to her father’s stories about his pirate voyages and the mother she never knew. Since the loss of his wife Helen, John has remained land-bound for their daughter, but when Tab contracts yellow fever, he turns to the sea once more. Desperate to save his daughter, he takes her aboard a sloop bound for Bermuda, hoping the salt air will heal her. Years before, Helen herself was raised by a widowed father. Asa, the devout owner of a small plantation, gives his daughter a young slave named Moll for her tenth birthday. Left largely on their own, Helen and Moll develop a close but uneasy companionship. Helen gradually takes over the running of the plantation as the girls grow up, but when she meets John, the pirate turned Continental soldier, she flouts convention and her father’s wishes by falling in love. Moll, meanwhile, is forced into marriage with a stranger. Her only solace is her son, Davy, whom she will protect with a passion that defies the bounds of slavery. In this elegant, evocative, and haunting debut, Katy Simpson Smith captures the singular love between parent and child, the devastation of love lost, and the lonely paths we travel in the name of renewal.

European traders and soldiers established a foothold on Timor in the course of the seventeenth century, motivated by the quest for the commercially vital sandalwood and the intense competition between the Dutch and the Portuguese. Lords of the Land, Lords of the Sea focuses on two centuries of contacts between the indigenous polities on Timor and the early colonials, and covers the period 1600-1800. In contrast with most previous studies, the book treats Timor as a historical region in its own right, using a wide array of Dutch, Portuguese and other original sources, which are compared with the comprehensive corpus of oral tradition recorded on the island. From this rich material, a lively picture emerges of life and death in early Timorese society, the forms of trade, slavery, warfare, alliances, social life, and so forth. The investigation demonstrates that the European groups, although having a role as ordering political forces, were only part of the political landscape of Timor. They relied on alliances where the distinction between ally and vassal was moot, and led to frequent conflicts and uprisings. During a slow and complicated process, the often turbulent political conditions involving Europeans, Eurasians, and Timorese polities, paved the way for the later division of Timor into two spheres of roughly equal size.

Un diario de viaje sobre las marismas del sur: Doñana y el Odiel. Entre Mar y Tierra es un proyecto artístico sobre Doñana realizado a lo largo de los años 2008 y 2009. Durante cuatro estancias en el interior de la Reserva Biólogica de Doñana, el Parque Natural y las Marismas del Odiel, en periodos invernales y primaverales, el autor, biólogo y pintor, ha realizado más de 60 acuarelas, dibujos y otras obras tomadas del natural o realizadas en estudio a partir de apuntes del natural.Las obras reflejan los distintos ambientes de los ecosistemas litorales, desde las playas, hasta las zonas más boscosas de tierra firme, representando una amplia diversidad de especias animales y paisajes. Editado con motivo de la exposición de los dibujos del libro en la Casa de la Ciencia, Sevilla, del 27 Abril al 20 Junio de 2010.

From the critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Sharon Kay Penman comes the story of the reign of King Baldwin IV and the Kingdom of Jerusalem's defense against Saladin's famous army. The Kingdom of Jerusalem, also known as Outremer, is the land far beyond the sea. Baptized in blood when the men of the First Crusade captured Jerusalem from the Saracens in the early twelfth century, the kingdom defined an utterly new world, a land of blazing heat and a medley of cultures, a place where enemies were neighbors and neighbors became enemies. At the helm of this growing kingdom sits young Baldwin IV, an intelligent and courageous boy committed to the welfare and protection of his people. But despite Baldwin's dedication to his land, he is afflicted with leprosy at an early age and the threats against his power and his health nearly outweigh the risk of battle. As political deception scours the halls of the royal court, the Muslim army--led by the first sultan of Egypt and Syria, Saladin--is never far from the kingdom's doorstep, and there are only a handful Baldwin can trust, including the archbishop William of Tyre and Lord Balian d'Ibelin, a charismatic leader who has been one of the few able to maintain the peace. Filled with drama and battle, tragedy and romance, Sharon Kay Penman's latest novel brings a definitive period of history vividly alive with a tale of power and glory that will resonate with readers today.