Tim Jeal Livres

DIV An extensively revised edition of Tim Jeal's classic biography published to mark the bicentenary of the great explorer /div

Between 1856 and 1876, five explorers, all British, took on the seemingly impossible task of discovering the source of the White Nile. Showing exceptional courage and extraordinary resilience, Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, Samuel Baker, David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley risked their lives and their reputations in the name of this quest. They journeyed through East and Central Africa into unmapped territory, discovered the great lakes Tanganyika and Victoria, navigated the upper Nile and the Congo, and suffered the ravages of flesh-eating ulcers, malaria and deep spear wounds. Using new research, Tim Jeal tells the story of these great expeditions, while also examining the tragic consequences which the Nile search has had on Uganda and Sudan to this day. Explorers of the Nile is a gripping adventure story with an arresting analysis of Britain's imperial past and the Scramble for Africa.

Perceptive, intelligent, stubborn and wilful, Clara is the only daughter of a Midlands manufacturer, still bereaved by the death of her mother, and jilted by a local aristocrat. When she meets a visiting missionary, Richard Haslam, she falls in love. Haslam is an innately good man: unlike many of his Christian brethren. After much wrangling with her father, Clara marries Robert and agrees to join him in Africa. Her journey is both terrible and awe-inspiring, and once she arrives at the village where Robert lives, she finds an enclave of huts, dust and flies. Slowly, Clara finds out more about Robert, that he has been married before, and more disturbingly, that the Church must come first. When tribal warfare overspills into the camp, Clara is rescued by the Cavalry, and finds herself embarking on a painful and heart-wrenching discovery.

Written over a seven-year period to Charles V of Spain, Hernan Cortes' letters provide a narrative account of the conquest of Mexico from the founding of the coastal town of Veracruz until Cortes's journey to Honduras in 1525.

Two sisters in Victorian England describe the summer they had no governess and thus were able to "entomologise" as much as they liked.