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Murmurs from the Deep
A scientific expedition into unknown parts of the Caribbean to study the tectonic plates of the region answers the intriguing question: Is there a language of fish? Gilles Fonteneau, a longtime colleague of the legendary Jacques Cousteaus Calypso team, fulfilled a lifelong dream when in 2001 he launched his own exploration, aboard the 45-foot catamaran Prince de Vende, into the silent world of the sea. Little did he know when he set out that his efforts to better understand the dynamics of the tectonic plates of the region would have such worldwide significance, as shown by the tsunami disaster of southeast Asia in December 2004. His second goal, sponsored by NASA and the Bacardi Family Foundation, to make acoustic recordings of the regions fish, produced startling results, which will go a long way toward understanding and protecting threatened species. As fascinating as it is scientifically revealing, Murmurs FROM THE DEEP sheds new light on the ever-mysterious underwater world.
Velocipedomania
When blacksmith Pierre Michaux affixed pedals to the front axle of a two-wheeled scooter with a seat, he helped kick off a craze known as velocipedomania, which swept France in the late 1860s. The immediate forerunner of the bicycle, the velocipede similarly reflected changing cultural attitudes and challenged gender norms. Velocipedomania is the first in-depth study of the velocipede fad and the popular culture it inspired. It explores how the device was hailed as a symbol of France’s cutting-edge technological advancements, yet also marketed as an invention with a noble pedigree, born from the nation’s cultural and literary heritage. Giving readers a window into the material culture an...
Japanese Travellers in Sixteenth-Century Europe
In 1582 Alessandro Valignano, the Visitor to the Jesuit mission in the East Indies, sent four Japanese boys to Europe. Until the arrival of the embassy in Europe, the Euro-Japanese encounter had been almost exclusively one way: Europeans going to Japan. This book is an account of their travels, their long journeys out and back, and the 20 months in Europe being received by popes and kings. It was published in Macao in 1590 with the title De Missione Legatorvm Iaponensium ad Romanum curiam. The present edition is the first complete version of this rich, complex and impressive work to appear in English, and is accompanied with maps and illustrations of the mission, and an introduction discussing its context and the subsequent reception of the book.
The Struggle for the South Atlantic: The Armada of the Strait, 1581-84
This book contains the annotated translation of an account of Spain’s Armada of the Strait, which traveled to Brazil and the Strait of Magellan under Don Diego Flores de Valdés in 1581–84. Pedro de Rada, the official scribe of the armada, kept a detailed, neutral chronicle of the venture which remained in private hands until 1999 but is now held in the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, California. It is published here for the first time. The voyage came at a crucial juncture in global politics, when Philip II of Spain had claimed the throne of Portugal and its empire, and Francis Drake’s daring peacetime raids had challenged the dominance of Spain and Portugal in the Americas.
Wildest Alaska
Twenty-five years ago Philip L. Fradkin read a book about a remote bay on the Gulf of Alaska coast. The noted environmental historian was attracted by the threads of violence woven through the natural and human histories of Lituya Bay. Could these histories be related, and if so, how? The attempt to define the power of this wild place was a tantalizing and, as it turned out, dangerous quest. This compelling and eerie memoir tells of Fradkin's odyssey through recorded human history and eventually to the bay itself, as he explores the dark and unyielding side of nature. Natural forces have always dominated Lituya Bay. Immense storms, powerful earthquakes, huge landslides, and giant waves highe...
Sea of Silk
The story of silk is an old and familiar one, a tale involving mercantile travel and commercial exchange along the broad land mass that connects ancient China to the west and extending eventually to sites on the eastern Mediterranean and along sea routes to India. But if we shift our focus from economic histories that chart the exchange of silk along Asian and Mediterranean trade routes to medieval literary depictions of silk, a strikingly different picture comes into view. In Old French literary texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, emphasis falls on production rather than trade and on female protagonists who make, decorate, and handle silk. Sea of Silk maps a textile geography o...
Britannia’s Palette
Britannia's Palette looks at the lives of British artists who witnessed the naval war against the French Republic and Empire between 1793 and 1815. This band of brothers, through their artistic and entrepreneurial efforts, established the images of the war at sea that were central to the understanding their contemporaries had of events - images that endure to this day. In this unprecedented book, Nicholas Tracy reveals the importance of the self-employed artist to the study of a nation at war. He includes lively accounts of serving officers, retired sailors, and academy-trained artists who, often under the threat of debtor's prison, struggled to balance the standards of art with the public desire for heroic, reassuring images. Containing over eighty illustrations, Britannia's Palette explores a varied and exciting collection of paintings that reveal the poignancy of the human experience of war.
The Indies Enterprise
The Columbus brothers worked relentlessly for eight years to prepare the voyage Christopher dreamed of: the search for the passage to the Indies, Cipango and the Empire of the Great Khan. Bartolomeo tells the story from the very outset; he is his brother's accomplice and the main witness to the events leading to the Indies Enterprise.
Paris Primitive
In 1990 Jacques Chirac, the future president of France and a passionate fan of non-European art, met Jacques Kerchache, a maverick art collector with the lifelong ambition of displaying African sculpture in the holy temple of French culture, the Louvre. Together they began laying plans, and ten years later African fetishes were on view under the same roof as the Mona Lisa. Then, in 2006, amidst a maelstrom of controversy and hype, Chirac presided over the opening of a new museum dedicated to primitive art in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower: the Musée du Quai Branly. Paris Primitive recounts the massive reconfiguration of Paris’s museum world that resulted from Chirac’s dream, set against...
Sir Walter Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana
Sir Walter Ralegh's account of his 1595 expedition in search of the fabled empire of El Dorado was an immediate publishing success and is one of the most important pieces of Elizabethan travel literature. This edition presents the annotated texts of an unpublished copy of Ralegh's draft of The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtifvl Empyre of Gviana and the subsequent printed versions. It demonstrates how the manuscript was altered for publication, to focus its appeal to investors in gold mines for which Ralegh had very little evidence.
