The apotheosis of Captain Cook

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Anita Mason

"1519. Shipwrecked on the tropical coast of Mexico, Geronimo is taken ashore by the natives. His life as a Spanish gentleman in the colonies is over. To survive in the new world, he must abandon everything he knows and learn to love as they do." "After ten years working the land as a slave in a culture centered on blood sacrifice to fantastical gods, he receives an astonishing message along with a bag of treasure with which to buy his freedom. Hernan Cortes has fled Cuba and wants Geronimo to join his voyage of exploration: the ship waits nearby." "Geronimo has eight days to decide if he will return to a life of old world customs long forgotten and a new adventure with his Spanish brothers. What he doesn't know is that Cortes' vision goes far beyond exploration: together with his beautiful mistress and interpreter, Marina, he will stop at nothing to find the rumoured empire of gold." "Actions paced and evocative, The Right Hand of the Sun is a majestic tale of political manipulation, destruction and love, and an elegiac story of the end of one of the greatest empires on earth."--Jacket.

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Jean Malaurie

"Ultima Thule is the terrible yet fantastic story of European and American exploration in the Polar regions. Thirteen extraordinary men and expeditions preceded author Jean Malaurie to the North Pole. Based on excerpts from these explorers' logs counterbalanced by Inuit testimony, this book brings to life both sides of the clash between indigenous people and the white men who arrived in the Far North dreaming of Polar conquest, and believing they brought with them a superior civilization. Over the intervening 170 years, tensions have continually risen and fallen as new waves of Europeans encounter the native Inuit. Today, the outlook for the Inuit and for the Polar environment is bleak: both the people and their landscape are in danger of disappearing forever. But according to Malaurie, the situation is not without hope." "Using original travel accounts and a stunning array of period photographs, engravings, artifacts, maps, and drawings, Malaurie paints a richly detailed portrait of an intersection of cultures and fantasies. This beautifully produced book, an international success now available for the first time in an English translation, puts an entire museum of North Pole history in the reader's hands, illuminating a little-known world."--Jacket.

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Bruce Greenfield

In Narrating Discovery Bruce Greenfield chronicles the development of the antebellum Euro-American discovery narrative. These narratives depicted the Euro-American advance westward not as a violent intrusion into occupied territories but as an inevitable by-product of science and civilization. Despite the centrality of indigenous peoples in the frontier narratives, the landscape was nevertheless sketched in biblical terms as "a terrestrial paradise ... unpeopled and unexplored," as writers insisted upon seeing "emptiness as the essential quality of the land." Beginning with the British writers Hearne, Mackenzie, and Henry, Greenfield then traces the early American narratives of Lewis and Clark, Pike, and Fremont, demonstrating how these agents of the first New World nation-state brought a distinct imperial mentality to the frontier, viewing it both as foreign and as part of their home. But Romantic writers such as Cooper, Irving, Poe, and Thoreau felt ill at ease with the colonialist discourse they inherited, and Greenfield shows how to varying degrees each altered a discourse openly based on subjugation to one highlighting profoundly personal and aesthetic responses to the American landscape. The book concludes with an illuminating discussion of Thoreau, who transformed the discovery narrative from its origins in conflict and institutional authority into the "expression of personal identity with the continent as a symbol of American potential." Written with clarity and insight, Narrating Discovery brings a fresh perspective to current debates over who "discovered" America and recovers the complexity of frontier experience through a searching look at some of the vivid narrative accounts.

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Herman J. Viola and Carolyn Margolis

Details the processes of encounter and exchange between Europe and the cultures of the Americas and Africa since their discovery by Europeans five hundred years ago.