Sail to the exotic Galapagos Islands with Herman Melville, author of "Moby-Dick." Let History and Legend, Fiction and Fact, Myth and Mystery swirl around you as you enter "The Encantadas," a unique island world stretching along our planet's Equator. Discover teeming seabird rookeries, stark volcanic landscapes, and world famous giant tortoises . . . Meet buccaneers and explorers, colonists and castaways, whalers and naturalists . . . Explore these Enchanted Isles with one of America's greatest writers . . . Enrich your once-in-a-lifetime visit to . . . The Galapagos Islands. Travelers have been arriving in the Galapagos Islands since at least 1535. While naturalist Charles Darwin made these volcanic peaks famous, Spanish explorers, English buccaneers, American whalers, Ecuadorian colonists, and a United States President all put in appearances here over the centuries. Herman Melville was one such visitor. He first glimpsed the Galapagos Islands as a young seaman on the whaler "Acushnet" out of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Years later, after the failure of his novel "Moby-Dick," he tried to regain his lost popularity with the reading public by writing a series ten of magazine sketches recalling the strange worlds he found in these Enchanted Isles. This current book was created for today's visitor-or armchair visitor. Bring it with you, or read it before you leave home. Enhance your enjoyment of the Galapagos Islands with these glimpses of its captivating natural and human history written over 150 years ago by that famous fellow traveler. Discover . . . - Herman Melville's ten sketches called "The Encantadas or Enchanted Isles." - Forty of Moses Michelsohn's striking b&w photographs (in color in the ebook) from the Galapagos islands: birds, iguanas, giant tortoises, sea lions, exotic plants, and volcanic landscapes. - Lynn Michelsohn's introduction to the work, and to each individual sketch. Enjoy your visit to the Galapagos Islands! About the Authors Herman Melville wrote in the genre that has been called "dark romanticism." "The Encantadas," like "Moby-Dick" (considered by many to be the best novel ever written) and his well respected novella "Billy Budd," draws on his shipboard experiences in the South Seas as a young man. Lynn Michelsohn has written such diverse books as "Roswell, Your Travel Guide to the UFO Capital of the World!" and "Gullah Ghosts, Stories and Folktales from the South Carolina Lowcountry." Her longstanding interests in both the Galapagos Islands and Herman Melville led to this work. Like Melville, biologist and wildlife photographer Moses Michelsohn found tortoises on the Galapagos Islands fascinating. Tree frogs in Ecuador, Costa Rica, and the southeastern United States remain his primary research interest, however.

This encyclopedia provides readers with a comprehensive look at the Galápagos Islands, from the wildlife and scientists that made them famous to the challenges and issues the islands face today. In the mid-1800s, the Galápagos Islands served as Charles Darwin's playground, a volcanic archipelago where he famously worked on his theories of evolution and natural selection. But who actually discovered the islands? Why didn't any country claim them for more than 200 years? And is ecotourism hurting or helping these mysterious islands? This volume explores the history, science, and culture of the Galápagos Islands. A Preface, Introduction, Chronology, and Galápagos at a Glance primer introduce readers to the islands that are so famously associated with Charles Darwin. Twelve thematic essays allow readers to explore such topics as evolution, the geology of the islands, invasive species, and tourism in depth. Topical entries follow, covering key individuals and organizations as well as other important concepts and ideas. Thirteen primary document excerpts allow readers to study firsthand accounts from explorers and visitors to the islands. Appendices, a glossary, a bibliography, and sidebars round out the text. Students of history, geography, and science will find this volume informative, while general readers will be intrigued to learn about these unique islands.

Billy Budd, Sailor and Bartleby, the Scrivener are two of the most revered shorter works of fiction in history. Here, they are collected along with 19 other stories in a beautifully redesigned collection that represents the best short work of an American master.As Warner Berthoff writes in his introduction to this volume, "It is hard to think of a major novelist or storyteller who is not also a first-rate entertainer . . . a master, according to choice, of high comedy, of one or another robust species of expressive humour, or of some special variety of the preposterous, the grotesque, the absurd. And Melville, certainly, is no exception. A kind of vigorous supervisory humour is his natural idiom as a writer, and one particular attraction of his shorter work is the fresh further display it offers of this prime element in his literary character."

In early to mid-19th century America, there were growing debates concerning the social acceptability of alcohol and its consumption. Temperance reformers publicly decried the evils of liquor, and America's greatest authors began to write works of temperance fiction, stories that urged Americans to refrain from imbibing. Herman Melville was born in an era when drunkenness was part of daily life for American men but came of age at a time when the temperance movement had gained social and literary momentum. This first full-length analysis of alcohol and intoxication in Melville's novels, short fiction and poetry shows how he entered the debate in the latter half of the 19th century. Throughout his work he cautions readers to avoid alcohol and consistently illustrates negative outcomes of drinking.

Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) and Herman Melville (1819-1891) addressed in their writings a range of issues that continue to resonate in American culture: the reach and limits of democracy; the nature of freedom; the roles of race, gender, and sexuality; and the place of the United States in the world. Yet they are rarely discussed together, perhaps because of their differences in race and social position. Douglass escaped from slavery and tied his well-received nonfiction writing to political activism, becoming a figure of international prominence. Melville was the grandson of Revolutionary War heroes and addressed urgent issues through fiction and poetry, laboring in increasing obscurity. In eighteen original essays, the contributors to this collection explore the convergences and divergences of these two extraordinary literary lives. Developing new perspectives on literature, biography, race, gender, and politics, this volume ultimately raises questions that help rewrite the color line in nineteenth-century studies. Contributors: Elizabeth Barnes, College of William and Mary Hester Blum, The Pennsylvania State University Russ Castronovo, University of Wisconsin-Madison John Ernest, West Virginia University William Gleason, Princeton University Gregory Jay, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Carolyn L. Karcher, Washington, D.C. Rodrigo Lazo, University of California, Irvine Maurice S. Lee, Boston University Robert S. Levine, University of Maryland, College Park Steven Mailloux, University of California, Irvine Dana D. Nelson, Vanderbilt University Samuel Otter, University of California, Berkeley John Stauffer, Harvard University Sterling Stuckey, University of California, Riverside Eric J. Sundquist, University of California, Los Angeles Elisa Tamarkin, University of California, Irvine Susan M. Ryan, University of Louisville David Van Leer, University of California, Davis Maurice Wallace, Duke University Robert K. Wallace, Northern Kentucky University Kenneth W. Warren, University of Chicago

In this book, Guillermo Paz-y-Miño-C and Avelina Espinosa synthesize the events connecting the accidental discovery of the Galápagos Islands by Tomás de Berlanga in 1535 with Charles Darwin's exploration of the archipelago in 1835, Herman Melville's sketches of The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles, of 1856, and the geopolitics to control Baltra Island, or "The Rock", where the United States established a military base from 1942 to 1946, during World War II. These themes are intertwined with discussions about the historical cartography of the Galápagos Islands, the geology of the archipelago, the hypotheses about the origins of the Galápagos terrestrial and marine organisms, and comparisons between Galápagos and other archipelagos, particularly Hawai'i. Offering over 250 figures and diagrams, this work will appeal to a broad audience, including professors in academia, college instructors, study-abroad and international field-trip leaders (with destination Galápagos), science writers, and policymakers.

Leading geographer Denis Cosgrove provides a series of personal reflections on the complex connections between seeing, imagining and representing the world geographically. In a series of eloquent essays he draws upon pictorial images - including maps, sketches, cartoons, paintings, and photographs - to explore and elaborate upon the many and varied ways in which the vast and varied earth, and at times the heavens beyond, have been both imagined and represented as a place of human habitation. The essays include reflections upon geographical discovery; urban cartography and utopian visions; ideas of landscape and the shaping of America; wilderness and masculinity; conceptions of the Pacific; and the imaginative grip of the Equator. Extensively illustrated, this engaging work reveals the richness of the geographical imagination as expressed over the past five centuries.

There are hundreds of books and thousands of scientific articles about the Galápagos. This volume is distinctive. The authors, Guillermo Paz-y-Miño-C and Avelina Espinosa, synthesize, integrate, and conceptualize the most recent evolutionary-biology research being conducted in the archipelago’s terrestrial and aquatic environments; the conflicts resulting from human interactions with nature, including local population growth and tourism practices in the context of short- and long-term conservation efforts; and make predictions about the destiny of the Galápagos’ unique biodiversity and landscapes under various scenarios of climate-change impacts, urbanization trends, diversification of tourism, and conservation investments. Offering over 260 figures and diagrams, this work will appeal to a broad audience, including professors in academia, college instructors, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and research undergraduates. Another target audience is study-abroad and international field-trip instructors and their students who travel to the Galápagos year-round. Science writers and policymakers will find in this book useful information to discuss and debate about imminent environmental threats to afflict the Galápagos as a consequence of human population growth, tourism practices, and climate change.

Based on more than a half-century of research, Herman Melville's Whaling Years is an essential work for Melville scholars. In meticulous and thoroughly documented detail, it examines one of the most stimulating periods in the great author's life--the four years he spent aboard whaling vessels in the Pacific during the early 1840s. Melville would later draw repeatedly on these experiences in his writing, from his first successful novel, Typee, through his masterpiece Moby-Dick, to the poetry he wrote late in life. During his time in the Pacific, Melville served on three whaling ships, as well as on a U.S. Navy man-of-war. As a deserter from one whaleship, he spent four weeks among the cannibals of Nukahiva in the Marquesas, seeing those islands in a relatively untouched state before they were irrevocably changed by French annexation in 1842. Rebelling against duty on another ship, he was held as a prisoner in a native calaboose in Tahiti. He prowled South American ports while on liberty, hunted giant tortoises in the Galapagos Islands, and explored the islands of Eimeo (Moorea) and Maui. He also saw the Society and Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands when the Western missionary presence was at its height. Heflin combed the logbooks of any ship at sea at the time of Melville's voyages and examined nineteenth-century newspaper items, especially the marine intelligence columns, for mention of Melville's vessels. He also studied British consular records pertaining to the mutiny aboard the Australian whaler Lucy Ann, an insurrection in which Melville participated and which inspired his second novel, Omoo. Distilling the life's work of a leading Melville expert into book form for the first time, this scrupulously edited volume is the most in-depth account ever published of Melville's years on whaleships and how those singular experiences influenced his writing.

The Galapagos Islands, a remote paradise, are as mysterious as ever. But the details of travel to the Galapagos are no longer a mystery. The essentials of a how-to travel adventure to the Land of Darwin are now available in the comprehensive "Traveler's Guide to the Galapagos Islands." From which airlines to choose and why, to a detailed analysis of the Tour Operator network, Barry Boyce describes the rules and tells the reader how to play the adventure travel game. Entire chapters are devoted to topics such as choosing a tour (with descriptions, analyses, and price structures of all the yachts and cruise ships), what to pack and what not to pack, photographic opportunities and equipment on land and underwater, Galapagos history, wildlife and a detailed tour of the islands. First edition reviews: "Boyce's excitement and knowledge mix to produce a comprehensive and responsible guide to touring the Galapagos." -- Brad Hooper, Booklist. "Just on the market and badly needed... Boyce's effort is likely to be a definitive work." -- Zeke Wigglesworth, San Jose Mercury News. To order, call or write Hunter Publishing - 130 Campus Drive, Edison, NJ 08818. Phone 800-255-0343 or 732-225-1900; fax 732-417-1744; www.hunterpublishing.com. E-mail comments@hunterpublishing.com.