February New Geography books

• The Arctic Journal of Captain Henry Wemyss Feilden, R. A., The Naturalist in H. M. S. Alert, 1875-1876
  
  The Arctic Journal of Captain Henry Wemyss Feilden, R. A., The Naturalist in H. M. S. Alert, 1875-1876: G161 .H2 3rd ser. no.35
  Author(s): Trevor Levere
  Abingdon, Oxon ; Routledge for The Hakluyt Society 2019.
  
  The British Arctic Expedition of 1875–6 was the first major British naval expedition to the high Arctic where science was almost as important as geographical exploration. There were hopes that the expedition might find the hypothetical open polar sea and with it the longed-for Northwest Passage, and it did reach the highest northern latitude to date. The Royal Society compiled instructions for the expedition, and selected two full-time naturalists (an unusual naval concession to science), of whom one, Henry Wemyss Feilden, proved a worthy choice. Feilden was a soldier, who fought in most of the wars in his lifetime, including the American Civil War, on the Confederate side. On board HMS Alert, he kept a daily journal, a record important for its scientific content, but also as a view of the expedition as seen by a soldier, revealing admiration and appreciation for his naval colleagues; he performed whatever tasks were given to him, including the rescue of returning sledge parties stricken by scurvy. He also did a remarkably comprehensive job in mapping the geology of Smith Sound; some of his work, on the Cape Rawson Beds, was the most reliable until the 1950s. He was an all-round naturalist, and a particularly fine geologist and ornithologist. He was not just a collector; he pondered the significance of his findings within the context of the best modern science of his day: in zoology, Charles Darwin on evolution; in botany, Hooker on phytogeography, and in geology, Charles Lyell’s system. He illustrated his journal with his own sketches, and also enclosed the printed programmes of popular entertainments held on the ship, and verses for birthdays and sledging (there was a printing press onboard). The journal gives a vigorous impression of a ship’s company well occupied through the winter, then increasingly active in sledging and geographical discovery in spring, before the scurvy-induced decision to head home in the summer of 1876. After his return, Feilden had dealings with many scientists and their institutions, finding homes for and meaning in his collections.
  
  
• Cayman's 1794 Wreck of the Ten Sail: Peace, War, and Peril in the Caribbean
  
  Cayman's 1794 Wreck of the Ten Sail: Peace, War, and Peril in the Caribbean: G525 .L57 2020
  Author(s): Margaret E. Leshikar-Denton
  Tuscaloosa : The University of Alabama Press [2020]
  
  The greatest shipwreck disaster in the history of the Cayman Islands The story has been passed through generations for more than two centuries. Details vary depending on who is doing the telling, but all refer to this momentous maritime event as the Wreck of the Ten Sail. Sometimes misunderstood as the loss of a single ship, it was in fact the wreck of ten vessels at once, comprising one of the most dramatic maritime disasters in all of Caribbean naval history. Surviving historical documents and the remains of the wrecked ships in the sea confirm that the narrative is more than folklore. It is a legend based on a historical event in which HMS Convert, formerly L’Inconstante, a recent prize from the French, and 9 of her 58-ship merchant convoy sailing from Jamaica to Britain, wrecked on the jagged eastern reefs of Grand Cayman in 1794. The incident has historical significance far beyond the boundaries of the Cayman Islands. It is tied to British and French history during the French Revolution, when these and other European nations were competing for military and commercial dominance around the globe. The Wreck of the Ten Sail attests to the worldwide distribution of European war and trade at the close of the eighteenth century. In Cayman’s 1794 Wreck of the Ten Sail: Peace, War, and Peril in the Caribbean, Margaret E. Leshikar-Denton focuses on the ships, the people, and the wreck itself to define their place in Caymanian, Caribbean, and European history. This well-researched volume weaves together rich oral folklore accounts, invaluable supporting documents found in archives in the United Kingdom, Jamaica, and France, and tangible evidence of the disaster from archaeological sites on the reefs of the East End.
  
  
• The Three-Ray Megacontinent of the Earth: The Fundamental Discovery of a Century
  
  The Three-Ray Megacontinent of the Earth: The Fundamental Discovery of a Century: GB406 .Z557 2019
  Author(s): Anatoly Zhirnov, Yuri Bakulin
  Newcastle upon Tyne : Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2019.
  
  This book explores many mysterious features of the structure and evolution of the Earth's continents, still unknown to the scientific community and a wider audience. Science has now proved that the southern continents of South America, Africa and Australia represent the southern ends of a single three-beam megacontinent. It began to form 4.4 billion years ago in a huge three-beam cavity on the planet's surface and grew vertically up to its present state. Proof of the reality of a single three-beam megacontinent is a fundamental discovery in Earth sciences, and represents a new level in the understanding of the planet's structure. The text will appeal to researchers of Earth sciences, university teachers and students, and secondary school teachers of geography and geology, as well as all readers with an interest in the history of our planet.