December HistoryCAT: Adventure, Exploration and Discovery

One of humanity’s most characteristic traits is curiosity: the desire to know what is on the other side of the river, the forest, the mountains, the ocean. Without curiosity, we might never have left Africa.

Unfortunately, most of these travels, adventures and discoveries are unknown to us because no written reports have reached us. A few have come down from antiquity and from other regions of the globe, but mostly we still associate the Age of Discovery with the days when Europeans turned their eyes to the Atlantic and embarked on ships to find new routes to the East and its many marvellous goods. In its wake came intellectual curiosity: finding new and improved ways of navigating, of measuring time, of explaining nature and the many strange plants, beasts and peoples encountered across the ocean.

Possible themes this month are:
Seafarers and merchant adventurers discovering territories that were new to them – or how the peoples who lived there tried to defend themselves against invaders...
Scientific expeditions exploring different environments in the arctic, the tropics, the jungles, the deserts of this world...
Researchers spending time in their labs trying to find a cure for a disease or to know the origin of life...
Archaeologists digging up the splendours of the past in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Peru, or Yucatán...

Of course, the narrative as it was presented until a very recent past has come under heavy criticism. If you want to look at the issues thrown up by postcolonialist studies and literature, Wikipedia offers an overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonial_literature and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonialism.

For those of you who want a more lighthearted read, we have Adventure! This usually involves someone embarking on a journey and meeting with unforeseen events, strange people, digressions, obstacles, enemies or friends. You could:
Run away to sea, join a ship, be a pirate or fight them, get shipwrecked...
Go on an expedition into the depth of the earth or the deepest jungle to find lost civilisations, get lost and fight your way back.
Join a team of dwarves and a wizard and find a magical ring. The Road goes ever on…

Some randomly chosen titles to inspire your choice:
Fiction
The heart of jade by Salvador Madariaga (conquest of Mexico)
Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini (pirates)
Longitude by Dava Sobel
The terrors of ice and darkness by Christoph Ransmayr (arctic exploration)
The journeyer by Gary Jennings (about Marco Polo) Warning: this may be gruesome, with lots of graphic sex scenes
The collector of worlds by Ilija Trojanow (about Francis F. Burton)
The poisonwood bible by Barbara Kingsolver (Decolonisation of Belgian Congo)

Non-fiction
The lost city of Z by David Grann
1493 by Charles C. Mann
Columbus : The Four Voyages by Laurence Bergreen
King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild
The White Nile and The Blue Nile by Alan Moorehead
Sea of Glory by Nathaniel Philbrick
The voyage of the frigate Pallada by I. A. Goncharov
The history of the conquest of Mexico by William H. Prescott
The last blank spaces : exploring Africa and Australia by Dane Kennedy
The great explorers by Robin Hanbury-Tenison
Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl
Farthest North by Fridtjof Nansen
The silk road by Sven Hedin
The invention of nature by Andrea Wulff
Pathfinders : a global history of exploration by Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Open veins of Latin America by Eudardo Galeano
Biographies of Columbus, Cortés, Pizarro, da Vinci, Newton, Galilei, Captain Cook, Bougainville, Abel Tasman, Radisson, Marco Polo, Zheng He, Livingston and Stanley, Schliemann, Woolley, etc.

Let us know where you want to go and please remember the wiki: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/2021_HistoryCAT#December:_-_Theme:_Adven...

I am planning on reading the non-fiction book, Island of the Lost by Joan Druett, a story of shipwreck and survival.

I've had Trader Horn: A Young Man's Astounding Adventures in 19th Century for sometime---and I think this is the time!

Interesting topic this month. I'm going to have to browse the shelves and see what fits...

I've read a couple of books in the last few years that would fit. I really enjoyed She-merchants, buccaneers and gentlewomen : the lives and times of British women in India 1600-1900 and there's plenty of adventure in the early chapters.
I found The Year 1000 less engaging, but it would fit here and I suspect that was me being fussy and getting irritated at the book's tone, in places.

I'm thinking of reading Alan Moorehead's The Fatal Impact. I just read and liked his Cooper's Creek, which would also fit this challenge for anyone interested in the European exploration of Australia.

I've got three different versions of Il Milione on my shelves and hope to make time for those.

I'm not sure what my choice will be this month, but I loved Captain Blood, fun read, not what I'd expected at all. There's a lot of conversations but it was never boring.

>8 fuzzi: Yes, Sabatini knew how to spin a yarn. Can I squeeze one in, after my first choice?

>9 MissWatson: why not?

I think I'll attempt Northwest Passage, which has been sitting for a year on my shelves.

>10 fuzzi: I want to, but there are so many others begging to be read...

At least I have finished one of the books I planned to read: Kolumbus und der Tag von Guanahani. This looks at Columbus' arrival in the Caribbean and the consequences it had for the "discoverers" and the "discovered". A good overview of the subject.

ETC for touchstone

I just finished Four Lost Cities, which looks at the history and archeology of Catalhoyuk, Pompeii, Angkor, and Cahokia.

I have completed my read of Island of the Lost by Joan Druett which is about 2 ships that were wrecked off the coast of the Auckland Islands. A fascinating survival story.

I completed Camping with the Communists by Karen Gilden which told the story of her family's camping trip to eastern Europe and the USSR in 1977.

Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition / Owen Beattie, John Geiger
4 stars

This book first looks at the Franklin Expedition in the mid-1800s to find the Northwest Passage. Franklin and his entire crew of 129 people and two ships disappeared. In the years following, others set out to find them or some clue as to what had happened. In the early 1980s, Owen Beattie, a forensic anthropologist, and a team of others set out to the graves of three of the expedition members on Beatty Island to dig them up to do autopsies to see if that would tell them what had happened.

Surprisingly, I found the second half more interesting than the first. I guess all of it was potentially interesting to me, but I was surprised to be more engrossed in the parts as the modern-day scientists dug up the graves to find extremely well-preserved bodies and to read the details of their testing and what they found. Be warned that there are photos of the bodies that were dug up; of course, there are other interesting photos, as well.

I have finished Die Portugiesen in Asien which is about Portuguese trade in Asia from 1500 to 1620.

>11 MissWatson: I am swept away by Northwest Passage. As of midnight yesterday I'm about halfway through 600+ pages...what a story, storyteller, never boring!

>18 fuzzi: That is on my WL!

>19 Tess_W: woo! Hope you get it soon.

I just finished Beyond the Blue Horizon by Brian Fagan, all about early seafaring all around the world. It's interesting, albeit a bit dry (ironically enough) for my taste, since it's more about technology than the people using it.

I read Ghosts of Everest: the search for Mallory and Irvine by Jochen Hemmleb

All my life I've been fascinated by Everest and the early climbers who faced incredible challenges to get to the summit. In all my reading Mallory has featured widely, and I know his story well. This book details the 1999 Mallory & Irvine Research Expedition, an expedition made with the aim of finding signs of Mallory and Irvine's 1924 climb. Only an hour and a half into a search of a vast section of the North Face they found a body. The climbers stood or kneeled around the ancient body, speechless. Initially they thought it was Irvine and even after seeing the name inside the shirt collar, they wondered why Irvine was wearing Mallory's shirt. Further examination proved it was Mallory. The question was, did he fall on the way up or the way down. The body as well as contents of his pockets and a pouch were well preserved, handwritten notes still clear. A photo of his wife that he promised to leave on the summit was not among his possessions. The reverence with which the climbers treated the body was quite moving.

Well written, fantastic photos: it gave me goosebumps. I fully believe (and always have done) that Mallory reached the summit in 1924 (nearly 30 years before Hilary) although it is a worthless claim without making it down again.

>1 MissWatson: no HistoryCAT for 2022?? 😢