Explorers' sketchbooks - Huw Lewis-Jones

Despite dramatic advances in technology and equipment over the centuries, there is one
vital piece of kit in most explorers' pockets that hasn't changed much at all - the journal.
The sketchbooks and journals presented here allow us the opportunity to share, through
their own eyes and thoughts, the on-the-spot reactions of around 70 intrepid individuals
as they journeyed into frozen wastes, high mountains, barren deserts and rich rainforests.
Some are well known, such as Captain Scott, Charles Darwin, Thor Heyerdahl and Abel
Tasman; others are unfamiliar, including Adela Breton, who braved the jungles of Mexico
to make an unparalleled record of Maya monuments, and Alexandrine Tinne, who died
in her attempt to be the first woman to cross the Sahara. Here are pioneering explorers
and map-makers, botanists and artists, ecologists and anthropologists, eccentrics and
visionaries, men and women. A handful of living explorers, including Wade Davis, provide
their thoughts on the art of exploration.

Often battered and neglected, stored away and perhaps long forgotten, many of these
sketchbooks have themselves awaited rediscovery. Now is the chance to open them again... Includes a foreword by Robert Macfarlane and essays by several living explorers, among them Ghillean Prance, Alan Bean and Wade Davis. Includes a foreword by Robert Macfarlane and essays by several living explorers, among them Ghillean Prance, Alan Bean and Wade Davis.