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One of New Zealand's finest observers of the natural world takes us on a journey from Otago to the subantarctic and follows the life and migration of a sea lion. With the taut and accurate prose of a scientist, and the lyrical sense of an artist, Neville Peat's compelling style lures us into gaining an immense amount of information. In a work that is deeply intimate and wonderfully expansive, Peat takes us well beyond the physical. He delves into the emotional origins of myth, and reveals an impassioned respect and understanding of the close relationship between humans and animals. \While exploring changing coastal habitat - blending ancient beliefs, local history, legend, and the natural sciences - Peat encounters a number of remarkable individuals along the way; sea dogs, old salts, and a mysterious drifter who follows the winds and tides. Here we gain the naturalist's sense of wonder, and the philosopher's contemplation of the mysterious presence we call nature. In Coasting, the second title in ‘the Lark’ series, we gain the naturalist's sense of wonder, and the philosopher's contemplation of the mysterious presence we call nature. 'He combines poetic and descriptive skills with a lightness of touch and a profound understanding of how the natural world interweaves. A captivating work.'
Three terrific books in one from one of New Zealand's leading natural-history and adventure writers. A quirky character called The Lark is threaded through three of Neville Peat's most highly acclaimed books: The Falcon and the Lark; Coasting: The Sea- Lion and the Lark, and High Country Lark. Whether they are set in Strath Taieri in Otago, along the Otago coastline or in the high country around the head of Lake Wakatipu, these three books demonstrate Peat's wry humour, keen observational skills, and knowledge of and love for our wilder places and the creatures and people who inhabit them. They are at once affecting ruminations and deft natural-history writing. With Peat, the reader is in masterful hands.
A delightful A-to-Z menagerie of the sea—whimsically illustrated, authoritative, and thought-provoking. For millennia, we have taken to the waves. And yet, for humans, the ocean remains our planet’s most inaccessible region, the place about which we know the least. From A to Z, abalone to zooplankton, and through both text and original illustrations, Ocean Bestiary is a celebration of our ongoing quest to know the sea and its creatures. Focusing on individual species or groups of animals, Richard J. King embarks upon a global tour of ocean wildlife, including beluga whales, flying fish, green turtles, mako sharks, noddies, right whales, sea cows (as well as sea lions, sea otters, and sea pickles), skipjack tuna, swordfish, tropicbirds, walrus, and yellow-bellied sea snakes. But more than this, King connects the natural history of ocean animals to the experiences of people out at sea and along the world’s coastlines. From firsthand accounts passed down by the earliest Polynesian navigators to observations from Wampanoag clamshell artists, African-American whalemen, Korean female divers (or haenyeo), and today’s pilots of deep-sea submersibles—and even to imaginary sea expeditions launched through poems, novels, and paintings—Ocean Bestiary weaves together a diverse array of human voices underrepresented in environmental history to tell the larger story of our relationship with the sea. Sometimes funny, sometimes alarming, but always compelling, King’s vignettes reveal both how our perceptions of the sea have changed for the better and how far we still have to go on our voyage.
An award-wining writer travels through the New Zealand high country. An unusual summons from an old, itinerant acquaintance — known as the Lark — piques author Neville Peat’s curiosity. The invitation to meet in the mountains around Glenorchy is timely: he’s keen to head into the high country to investigate recent reports of sightings of the near-extinct kokako. The South Island high country has an allure all its own. New Zealand’s equivalent of the Wild West, it’s a rustic, spectacularly beautiful frontier, combining wild alpine beauty, beech forest and mirror-still lakes. The Head of Lake Wakatipu has attracted Maori for the dazzling local pounamu; its sublime beauty has seduced European tourists, artists, writers and farm-holders since the nineteenth century. Author Neville Peat sets off on a fascinating trail that takes him deep into the hills to explore local history, legend and land politics. He skilfully blends the characters and stories of the past — those of Arawata Bill and Joseph Fenn among them — with a powerful sense of place and concerns for the future. In prose as fine as snow-caps reflected in lake water, Peat brings us an extraordinary region – from the laconic humour of the locals, to the last chance we might have to halt the demise of several threatened native species. High Country Lark is the third in Peat’s acclaimed ‘Lark’ series.
Volume I of The Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean provides a wide-ranging survey of Pacific history to 1800. It focuses on varied concepts of the Pacific environment and its impact on human history, as well as tracing the early exploration and colonization of the Pacific, the evolution of Indigenous maritime cultures after colonization, and the disruptive arrival of Europeans. Bringing together a diversity of subjects and viewpoints, this volume introduces a broad variety of topics, engaging fully with emerging environmental and political conflicts over Pacific Ocean spaces. These essays emphasize the impact of the deep history of interactions on and across the Pacific to the present day.
A vivid account of Ernest Shackleton's 1907 Antarctic Expedition, and the cases of Mackinlay's single malt whisky that he left behind. The incredible tale of Antarctica, malt whisky and an epic journey. Sir Ernest Shackleton's world fame is founded on the Endurance expedition of 1914-17, an attempt to cross the Antarctic continent that was foiled by the crushing of his ship in pack ice. The heroics that followed ensured that Shackleton and his men would forever have a place in the annals of polar history and world exploration. But Shackleton had come south seven years prior, leading the 1907 British Antarctic Expedition and targeting the South Pole from the opposite side of Antarctica. Rarely did Shackleton consume strong drink, and on his expeditions he tolerated only a ‘mild spree’ at times of celebration. But in 1907 25 cases – 300 bottles – of Rare Old Highland Malt Whisky whisky, three cases of which would ultimately lie forgotten beneath his hut at Cape Royds in the McMurdo Sound region for over 100 years, were loaded aboard his ship the Nimrod. The discovery of the whisky in 2007, and its subsequent reblending by the Mackinlay distillery, inspired Neville Peat to rexamine and explore Shackleton's first Antarctic expedition, the 'heroic' era of Antarctic exploration, and the craft and lore behind Scotland's finest dram.
Explorer Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d'Urville (1790–1842) is sometimes called France's Captain Cook. Born less than a year after the beginning of the French Revolution, he lived through turbulent times. He was an erudite polymath: a maritime explorer fascinated by botany, entomology, ethnography and the diverse languages of the world. As a young ensign he was decorated for his pivotal part in France's acquisition of the famous Vénus de Milo. D'Urville's voyages and writings meshed with an emergent French colonial impulse in the Pacific. In this magnificent biography Edward Duyker reveals that D'Urville had secret orders to search for the site for a potential French penal colony in Australia. He also effectively helped to precipitate pre-emptive British settlement on several parts of the Australian coast. D'Urville visited New Zealand in 1824, 1827 and 1840. This wide-ranging survey examines his scientific contribution, including the plants and animals he collected, and his conceptualisation of the peoples of the Pacific: it was he who first coined the terms Melanesia and Micronesia. D'Urville helped to confirm the fate of the missing French explorer Lapérouse, took Charles X into exile after the Revolution of 1830, and crowned his navigational achievements with two pioneering Antarctic descents. Edward Duyker has used primary documents that have long been overlooked by other historians. He dispels many myths and errors about this daring explorer of the age of sail and offers his readers grand adventure and surprising drama and pathos.