An account of the actual events surrounding the legendary conflict aboard the HMS Bounty focuses on the court-martial of its ten mutineers, citing the breakdown and exile of Master's Mate Fletcher Christian and Lieutenant Bligh's navigation talents. 250,000 first printing. First serial, The New Yorker. Read more

This book details the exploits of the highly skilled Naval Aviators charged with achieving air supremacy over New Guinea in their A6M2/3 Zero-sens. The combat record of the Zero-sen in New Guinea has mostly been overstated, with little due being given to the constraining conditions under which the fighter operated. The air combats fought over New Guinea in 1942 between Imperial Japanese Naval Air Force (IJNAF) pilots and their Allied counterparts in P-39 Airacobras and P-40 Warhawks were often ‘trial and error’ affairs, with both belligerents being caught out by weather. This study covers the key role played by governing factors including geography and climatic conditions, and examines the modified tactics employed by IJNAF Zero-sen pilots to help them cope in-theatre through the comprehensive analysis of RAAF, USAAF and Japanese operational after action reports. Using first-hand accounts from both famous aviators and previously unknown RAAF and Japanese pilots, and specially commissioned artwork, leading South Pacific historian and author Michael John Claringbould sheds new light on the air war fought over the wilds of New Guinea during the course of 1942. Read more

The Voyages of Captain James Cook  is now available in a highly produced paperback edition specially to coincide with the 250th anniversary of Cook's first voyage. Captain James Cook's eighteenth century adventures circumnavigating the globe culminated in England's mapping of the known world. Now available in a handsome paperback edition,The Voyages of Captain James Cook tells the epic tale of expert cartographer and navigator Cook and his crew who set out from London on a quest of scientific discovery and exploration. Over the course of three voyages, they sailed the South Pacific, South America, Antarctica, New Zealand, the Pacific Northwest, the Arctic Circle, and much more. From Cook's travels came a wealth of knowledge: documentation of flora and fauna, indigenous peoples, and, best of all, maps of the world - all of which were recorded for posterity in Cook's journals and in the work of many crew members. By the time Cook died in 1779, he had created charts so accurate that some were used into the 1990s. The Voyages of Captain James Cook is a handsome illustrated volume that's rich with excerpts from Cook's journals, illustrations, photos, and more that together create a fascinating account of his voyages. Read more

Winner of the 2020 Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for nonfiction and the 2019 NSW Premier's History Awards for general history‘Wonderfully researched and beautifully written’ Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan‘Succeeds in conjuring a lost world’ Dava Sobel, author of LongitudeFor more than a millennium, Polynesians have occupied the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean, a vast triangle stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island. Until the arrival of European explorers they were the only people to have ever lived there. Both the most closely related and the most widely dispersed people in the world before the era of mass migration, Polynesians can trace their roots to a group of epic voyagers who ventured out into the unknown in one of the greatest adventures in human history.How did the earliest Polynesians find and colonise these far-flung islands? How did a people without writing or metal tools conquer the largest ocean in the world? This conundrum, which came to be known as the Problem of Polynesian Origins, emerged in the eighteenth century as one of the great geographical mysteries of mankind.For Christina Thompson, this mystery is personal: her Maori husband and their sons descend directly from these ancient navigators. In Sea People, Thompson explores the fascinating story of these ancestors, as well as those of the many sailors, linguists, archaeologists, folklorists, biologists and geographers who have puzzled over this history for three hundred years. A masterful mix of history, geography, anthropology, and the science of navigation, Sea People is a vivid tour of one of the most captivating regions in the world. Read more

Orcas are the most profitable and controversial display animal in history, and since the release of the documentary Blackfish in 2013, millions around the world have focused on their plight. Yet no historical account has explored how we came to care about killer whales in the first place. In Orca, Jason Colby tells the exhilarating and often heartbreaking story of how people came to love the ocean's greatest predator. Historically reviled as dangerous pests, killer whales were dying by the hundreds, even thousands, by the 1950s--the victims of whalers, fishermen, and even the US military. In the Pacific Northwest, fishermen shot them, scientists harpooned them, and the Canadian government mounted a machine gun to eliminate them. But that all changed in 1965, when a Seattle entrepreneur named Ted Griffin became the first person to swim and perform with a captive killer whale. The show was a hit, and he began capturing and selling others, including Sea World's first "Shamu."Over the following decade, live display transformed popular and scientific views of Orcinus orca. The public embraced killer whales as charismatic and friendly while scientists enjoyed their first access to live orcas. In the Pacific Northwest, these captive encounters reshaped regional values and helped drive environmental activism, including Greenpeace's anti-whaling campaigns. Yet even as Northwesterners taught the world to love whales, they came to oppose their captivity. So when Sea World attempted to catch its own killer whales, Northwesterners would fight for the freedom of a marine predator that had become a regional icon. With access to previously unavailable documents and interviews, Colby offers the definitive history of how the feared and despised "killer" became the beloved "orca" and what that means for our relationship with the ocean and its creatures. Read more

Six centuries ago Polynesian explorers, who inhabited a cosmos in which islands sailed across the sea and stars across the sky, arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand where they rapidly adapted to new plants, animals, landscapes and climatic conditions. Four centuries later, European explorers arrived with maps and clocks, grids and fences, and they too adapted to a new island home. In this remote, beautiful archipelago, settlers from Polynesia and Europe (and elsewhere) have clashed and forged alliances, they have fiercely debated what is real and what is common sense, what is good and what is right. In this, her most ambitious book to date, Dame Anne Salmond looks at New Zealand as a site of cosmo-diversity, a place where multiple worlds engage and collide. Beginning with a fine-grained inquiry into the early period of encounters between Maori and Europeans in New Zealand (1769-1840), Salmond then investigates such clashes and exchanges in key areas of contemporary life -waterways, land, the sea and people. We live in a world of gridded maps, Outlook calendars and balance sheets - making it seem that this is the nature of reality itself. But in New Zealand, concepts of whakapapa and hau, complex networks and reciprocal exchange, may point to new ways of understanding interactions between peoples, and between people and the natural world. Like our ancestors, Anne Salmond suggests, we too may have a chance to experiment across worlds. Read more

Tahiti: a Paradise Lost Read more

For over two centuries, what exactly happened when Fletcher Christian decided to mutiny against Lt. Bligh on the Bounty has been open to much debate and speculation. Books have been written and films have been made about this obscure happening in a remote part of the globe. The tale of the most famous mutiny in history continues to intrigue and enthrall with all the raw appeal of legend. And although the tale of the Bounty may have been elevated into the rare realms of myth, events on Pitcairn Island really did happen.As an inhabitant of that island and a descendant of John Adams, one of the original mutineers, Rosalind Young was in a unique position to write her account of the Bounty and the island she called home. In a very personal account, Young writes a vivid and lively recollection of the Bounty and the events that led to the mutiny. The incident was still in the living memory of many on Pitcairn Island at the time of Young’s writing, and her prose contains specific details about the people involved and contributing incidents that one will not find elsewhere. Read more

The island of Betio in the Tarawa Atoll was defended by the elite troops of the Special Naval Landing Force, whose commander, Admiral Shibasaki, boasted that "the Americans could not take Tarawa with a million men in a hundred years". In a pioneering amphibious invasion, the Marines of the 2nd Division set out to prove him wrong, overcoming serious planning errors to fight a 76-hour battle of unprecedented savagery. The cost would be more than 3000 Marine casualties at the hands of a garrison of some 3700. The lessons learned would dispel forever any illusions that Americans had about the fighting quality of the Japanese. Read more

‘What joy to be at sea again, adrift on the vast Pacific, in the clutches of a gifted storyteller. Harrison Christian and the mutineers of Men Without Country held me happily captive to the very last page.’ – Dava Sobel, author of Longitude‘Men Without Country shows what a writer can produce when he has real skin in the game... Harrison Christian sets the record straight on the Bounty mutiny with forensic fervour, including the before, the during – and the after.’ – Adam Courtenay, author of The Ship that Never WasFull of misadventure and mystery, Men Without Country is a sweeping history of exploration and rebellion in the South Seas – told by a direct descendant of Fletcher Christian, the man who led the infamous mutiny on the BountyA mission to collect breadfruit from Tahiti becomes the most famous mutiny in history when the crew rise up against Captain William Bligh, with accusations of food restrictions and unfair punishments.Bligh’s remarkable journey back to safety is well documented, but the fates of the mutinous men remain shrouded in mystery. Some settled in Tahiti only to face capture and court martial, others sailed on to form a secret colony on Pitcairn Island, the most remote inhabited island on earth, avoiding detection for twenty years. When an American captain stumbled across the island in 1808, only one of the Bounty mutineers was left alive.Told by a direct descendant of Fletcher Christian, Men Without Country details the journey of the Bounty, and the lives of the men aboard. Lives dominated by a punishing regime of hard work and scarce rations, and deeply divided by the hierarchy of class. It is a tale of adventure and exploration punctuated by moments of extreme violence – towards each other and the people of the South Pacific.For the first time, Christian provides a comprehensive and compelling account of the whole story – from the history of trade and exploration in the South Seas to Pitcairn Island, which provided the mutineers’ salvation, and then became their grave. Read more

Ever since European explorers first set eyes on the Pacific Ocean, visitors to the region have been captivated by the beauty of its islands and the friendliness of its inhabitants. However, very much less is known about the rich tapestry of human history that has also taken place here, from the arrival of the Polynesians to the mutiny on the Bounty and the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.This collection of twelve short stories provides a comprehensive mix of local history and concise biographies of visitors who have left a particular legacy in the region. Each chapter introduces a unique episode from the South Pacific that avoids the need to read an entire book on the subject, while also offering sufficient background information to enhance and enrich any visit.Stories in this edition include the lives of Paul Gauguin and Robert Louis Stevenson, as well as the histories of Easter Island and the Pacific Theatre of WW2. Read more

Little has been written about when, how and why the British Government changed its mind about giving independance to the Pacific Islands. Using recently opened archives, Winding Up the British Empire in the Pacific Islands gives the first detailed account of this event. As Britain began to dissolve the Empire in Asia in the aftermath of the Second World War, it announced that there were some countries that were so small, remote, and lacking in resources that they could never become independent states. However, between 1970 and 1980 there was a rapid about-turn. Accelerated decolonization suddenly became the order of the day. Here was the death warrant of the Empire, and hastily-arranged independence ceremonies were performed for six new states - Tonga, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Kiribati, and Vanuatu. The rise of anti-imperialist pressures in the United Nations had a major role in this change in policy, as did the pioneering examples marked by the release of Western Samoa by New Zealand in 1962 and Nauru by Australia in 1968. The tenacity of Pacific Islanders in maintaining their cultures was in contrast to more strident Afro-Asia nationalisms. The closing of the Colonial Office, by merger with the Commonwealth Relations Office in 1966, followed by the joining of the Commonwealth and Foreign Offices in 1968, became a major turning point in Britain's relations with the Islands. In place of long-nurtured traditions of trusteeship for indigenous populations that had evolved in the Colonial Office, the new Foreign & Commonwealth Office concentrated on fostering British interests, which came to mean reducing distant commitments and focussing on the Atlantic world and Europe. Read more

Tears in Paradise – Suffering and Struggles of Indians in Fiji 1879-2004 reveals the horrific treatment of Indian indentured workers (Girmitiyas) in Fiji by the British from 1879-1919. Indenture system (Girmit) under which they were recruited was slavery by another name. Working and living conditions were so atrocious that Fiji had the highest rate of suicide in the world and highest rate of infanticide among the colonies that deployed indentured labour. Author, Rajendra Prasad, a descendant of Girmitiya grandparents, graphically captures the suffering, struggles and sacrifices of the pioneer generation, “Overseer’s whip comes down upon her half-naked back and legs. The child is struck also. Both are crying…Barnicoat poured boiling water on Poligardu’s genitals…Blomfield bashed Naraini’s head on stones… her face covered in blood...” The British had recruited 60,965 Indians to work in the sugarcane plantations in Fiji. Deceit and deception was widely used in the recruitment process to trap the innocent, poor and ignorant peasants for countries they never knew or dreamt of going. It tore their hearts when they realized that it was separation from their motherland. In 1882 when ships Berar and Poonah I set sail for Fiji, fifteen recruits jumped overboard and drowned. In the ships, many fell sick and some died of homesickness. In the fields, they worked for long hours and ritually suffered whips, kicks and sticks of the white Overseers. Women in advanced stage of pregnancy were forced to work. Some gave birth in the fields and most were required to return to work within days of child birth. The rigors of plantation life changed their demeanour. Methodist missionary, Hannah Dudley, in her letter to the Indian leaders on November 4, 1912, asked for the abolition of the indenture system. She wrote, “I shall never forget the first time I saw ‘indentured’ women. They were returning from their day’s work. The look on those women’s faces haunts me…” The second part of the book captures the contemporary history of Fiji under the theme “An Uncertain Future”, echoing racial discrimination and marginalization of Indo-Fijians by successive Governments, as anxiety and insecurity about their future kept them on the edge. Tears in Paradise eloquently captures the gruesome events - suffering that will haunt, endurance that will challenge, violence that will confound and struggle that will inspire. One reader wrote, “…once in my hand, I could not put it down and cried at several places. It eloquently brought out the human element often missing in other historical publications on the subject.” Read more

In less than one day, the might of the Imperial Japanese Navy was destroyed and four of her great aircraft carriers sank burning into the dark depths of the Pacific. Utilizing the latest research and detailed combat maps, this book tells the dramatic story of the Japanese assault on Midway Island and the American ambush that changed the face of the Pacific war. With sections on commanders, opposing forces, and a blow-by-blow account of the action, this volume gives a complete understanding of the strategy, the tactics, and the human drama that made up the Midway campaign, and its place as the turning point in the Pacific war. Read more

‘Wonderfully researched and beautifully written’ Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan‘Succeeds in conjuring a lost world’ Dava Sobel, author of Longitude‘Fascinating and satisfying’ Simon Winchester, author of The Map that Changed the WorldFor more than a millennium, Polynesians have occupied the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean, a vast triangle stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island. Until the arrival of European explorers they were the only people to have ever lived there. Both the most closely related and the most widely dispersed people in the world before the era of mass migration, Polynesians can trace their roots to a group of epic voyagers who ventured out into the unknown in one of the greatest adventures in human history.How did the earliest Polynesians find and colonise these far-flung islands? How did a people without writing or metal tools conquer the largest ocean in the world? This conundrum, which came to be known as the Problem of Polynesian Origins, emerged in the eighteenth century as one of the great geographical mysteries of mankind.For Christina Thompson, this mystery is personal: her Maori husband and their sons descend directly from these ancient navigators. In Sea People, Thompson explores the fascinating story of these ancestors, as well as those of the many sailors, linguists, archaeologists, folklorists, biologists and geographers who have puzzled over this history for three hundred years. A masterful mix of history, geography, anthropology, and the science of navigation, Sea People is a vivid tour of one of the most captivating regions in the world. Read more

The book is brand new and will be dispatched from UK. Read more

A detailed look into the lifestyle of the Liawep tribe, who still live under Stone Age conditions, describes the author's adventures in seeking out the elusive New Guinea tribe and the emotional impact of modern civilization on the Liawep people Read more