Stephen R Bown
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Examines the power of trading companies between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, describing the lives and legacies of men such as Peter Stuyvesant of the Dutch West India Company, Cecil Rhodes of the De Beers company, and George Simpson of the Hudson's Bay Company, and discussing how each man impacted politics, society, and culture.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
From 1792 to 1795, George Vancouver sailed the Pacific as the captain of his own expedition - and as an agent of imperial ambition. To map a place is to control it, and Britain had its eyes on America's Pacific coast. And map it Vancouver did. His voyage was one of history's greatest feats of maritime daring, discovery, and diplomacy, and his marine survey of Hawaii and the Pacific coast was at its time the most comprehensive ever undertaken. But...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Among the explorers made famous for revealing hitherto impenetrable cultures-T. E. Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger in the Middle East, Richard Burton in Africa-Knud Rasmussen stands out not only for his physical bravery but also for the beauty of his writing. Part Danish, part Inuit, Rasmussen made a courageous three-year journey by dog sled from Greenland to Alaska to reveal the common origins of all circumpolar peoples. Lovers of Arctic adventure,...
Author
Language
English
Description
When Columbus triumphantly returned from America to Spain in 1493, his discoveries inflamed an already-smoldering conflict between Spain's renowned monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, and Portugal's João II. Which nation was to control the world's oceans? To quell the argument, Pope Alexander VI issued a proclamation laying the foundation for the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, an edict that created an imaginary line in the Atlantic Ocean dividing the...
Author
Language
English
Description
The story of the world's largest, longest, and best financed scientific expedition of all time, triumphantly successful, gruesomely tragic, and never before fully told. The immense eighteenth-century scientific journey, variously known as the Second Kamchatka Expedition or the Great Northern Expedition, from St. Petersburg across Siberia to the coast of North America, involved over 3,000 people and cost Peter the Great over one-sixth of his empire's...