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CATLINS BOUND. William McPhee's Southern-Built Sailing Ships, New Zealand 1860-1870s.
By Mike McPhee. Paperback with flaps, 170mm x 240mm, 262 pages, colour and monochrome photographs and a CD of music by The Maritime Crew.
In 1856 William McPhee finished his shipbuilding apprenticeship in Canada, signed on board a sailing ship, and set out to see the world. A year or two later he arrived in southern New Zealand and began working his trade. This is the story of the ships he built on Stewart Island and in the Catlins.
His ketches and schooners delivered timber and general cargo to villages and towns around New Zealand. They battled through both Foveaux and Cook Straits; storms accompanied them and dangerous river entrances awaited them. The Nora, Eliza Simpson, Jane Hannah, Owake and Catlin served for years before the unforgiving sea claimed them and their brave crewmen. Two of his smaller vessels, the Anna and the Jane ventured into the Southern Ocean and somehow survived the sub-Antarctic. His biggest ship, the John Bullock, traded regularly from Melbourne to Hokitika and was finally lost in Northern New South Wales.
There were few navigation aids in those days and all coastal vessels had near-misses or strandings; only good luck, sturdy construction and a skilled captain could save a ship that got into trouble - captains like Stephen Tall, Bill Hanning, Daniel Mcphaiden, Edward Tonge, Roert Norman, Alexander Purdie, James Tunbridge, Roderick Currie, Otto Arndt, John Mason and Charles Hayward.
You will meet the ships, and the captains - good ships and good seaman, they knew their business well.
NZ$70.00 + delivery.
THE OCEAN RAILWAY.By Stephen Fox. Paperback, 128mm x 197mm, 493 pages, colour and monochrome photographs.
In a wave of entrepreneurial and engineering zeal, the small, slow, uncomfortable sailing vessels of the early nineteenth century were transformed into vast, swift, graceful steamships, which became emblems of the Victorian age. Through the innovations of key engineers and shipping magnates - Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Samuel Cunard, Edward Knight Collins and Edward Harland - the 'largest moveable objects in human history' were created, and transatlantic crossing times shrank from six weeks to six days. At their peak, steamships delivered over one million Europeans to America each year and tranformed the fearsome North Atlantic Ocean from a barrier to a highway.
In this fascinating history, Stephen Fox chronicles the tragedies that marked the evolution of the ocean liner (including the sinking of the Lusitania) and uses contemporary records, diaries and writings to bring to life the experience of transatlantic passage and the societies created on these vast floating cities.
NZ$36.00 + delivery.
A HISTORY OF NEW ZEALAND SCOWS AND THEIR TRADES.By David Langdon. Hardback, 297mm x 240mm, 336 pages, monochrome and colour photographs.
Click here for a Java driven browse through this book.
This beautifully presented book describes the 140 New Zealand scows from the aspect of an essential part of the early, and definitive, mercantile development of New Zealand. It covers the contribution that they made to all aspects of the growth of the nation, its industry and society.
The book is the result of 15 years dedicated research and a lifetime of enthusiasm by the author, David Langdon. It contains personal and family recollections, and many anecdotes recorded from scow sailors – capturing and recording for posterity a formative era long passed.
Many of the photos are in print for the first time and the author and publisher are indebted to several well-known, New Zealand seafaring personalities who have granted permission to use their archival material.
This book is without doubt an essential addition to any library, personal or institutional, that documents the craft, and the development of the nation.
This is what one of the authors of 'Ranger' Sandra Gorter thinks of the book.
I dropped in earlier this week to get a copy of David Langdon's 'A
History of New Zealand Scows and their Trades'. I had seen a copy
that he gave the Squadron and thought, I've got to have that book.
Have to say that it's worth every cent - it's a Great book, I've been
reading it ever since and love the collection of photos. I also love
the way the book is sectioned so that you can track down the story of
a specific boat, or master, or trade... etc to follow the hard work
that these vessels did.
NZ$100.00 + Delivery.
ORDINARY WOMEN EXTRAORDINARY LIVES, In The Fishing Industry.By Heather Heberley. Pbk, 150mm x 210mm, 245 pages, colour and monochrome photographs.
This is the authors fifth book, it is a delightful and inspiring story of New Zealand women, many of whom call themselves "just ordinary". How very far from ordinary they and their lives actually are becomes plain from the beginning. Courage, strength of character, humour - here are so many touching stories. They range from hand-on fishing and diving to the many skills needed in aspects of management, research and policing the seas in New Zealand waters and around the world.
New Zealand was the first country to introduce an all embracing quota management scheme, and is up with the leading fishing countries in the places women have won for themselves in the fishing industry.
Everyone wants to conserve fish stocks. Heather Heberley opens up a whole new world of science and enterprise, threaded through with love stories and the seizing of triumph from disaster.
With her fishing and farming family on Arapawa Island in Tory Channel, she has herself gone fishing for crayfish, groper, school shark and tuna, and taken part in fisheries research. All four of her previous books have been bestsellers - Weather Permitting, Flood Tide, Riding with Whales, Last of the Whalers. In this book, she celebrates a vital part of the natural world, and women who belong in it.
NZ$30.00 + delivery.
1434 - THE YEAR A MAGNIFICENT CHINESE FLEET SAILED TO ITALY AND IGNITED THE RENAISSANCEByGavin Menzies. Pbk, 129m x 198mm, 400 pages.
The international bestselling author of 1421 offers compelling new evidence that traces the roots of the European Renaissance to Chinese exploration in the fifteenth century.
The brilliance of the European Renaissance laid the foundation of the modern world. Textbooks tell us that it came about as a result of a re-discovery of the ideas and ideals of classical Greece and Rome.
But now Gavin Menzies makes the startling argument that in the year 1434, China - then the world's most technologically advanced civilization - provided the spark that set the Renaissance ablaze.
Fifteenth-century Florence and Venice were hubs of world trade, attracting merchants from across the globe. In 1434, a Chinese fleet - official ambassadors of the Emperor - arrived in Tuscany and met with Pope Eugenius IV in Florence. Based on nearly twenty years of research, Menzies' compelling history argues that the delegation presented the influential Pope with a diverse wealth of Chinese learning: art, geography (including world maps which were later passed on to Columbus and Magellan), astonomy, mathematics, printing, architecture, civil engineering, military weapons, and more. This vast treasure of knowledge spread across Europe, igniting the legendary inventiveness of the Renaissance, including Da Vinci's mechanical creations, the Copernican revolution and Galileo's discoveries.
In 1434, Gavin Menzies combines historical reinterpretation with the excitement of an investigative adventure. He brings us aboard the remarkable Chinese fleet as it sets sail from China to Cairo and Florence, and then back across the world. Erudite and brilliantly reasoned, 1434 will change the way we see ourselves, our history and our world.
This new edition has 30 extra pages with new controversial material.
NZ$27.00 + delivery.
1421 - THE YEAR CHINA DISCOVERED AMERICAByGavin Menzies. Pbk, 150mm x 227mm, 649 pages.
On March 8, 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen set sail from China. Its mission was "to proceed all the way to the ends of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas" and unite the whole world in Confucian harmony.
When it returned in October 1423, the emperor had fallen, leaving China in political and economic chaos. The great ships were left to rot at their moorings and the records of their journeys were destroyed. Lost in China's long, self-imposed isolation that followed was the knowledge that Chinese ships had reached America seventy years before Columbus and had circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan. Also concealed was how the Chinese colonised America before the Europeans and transplanted in America and other countries the principal economic crops that have fed and clothed the world.
Unveiling incontrovertible evidence of these astonishing voyages, 1421 rewrites our understanding of history. Our knowledge of world exploration as it has been commonly accepted for centuries must be reconceived due to the landmark work of historical investigation.
NZ$33.00 + delivery.
ROUNDING THE HORN, A Story of Discovery and Adventure.By Dallas Murphy. Paperback, 128mm x 197mm, 395 pages, monochrome maps.
Located at the southernmost tip of the Andes, Cape Horn is a place where the storms are bigger, the winds stronger and the geography more dangerous fro a seafarer than anywherer else in the world.
From when it was named in 1616 until the present day, Cape Horn has had a rich history filled not only with tales of perilous voyage but also with landmark discoveries such as those made by Darwin and Magellan. Cape horn also played a pivotal role in the race to trade in new and exotic spices such as nutmeg and cinnamon.
In this fascinating narrative the author uses his own passage around Cape Horn to weave together the history of exploration, along with tales of the Indians who lived there, the oceanography and meteorology of the region and the science of navigation. The result is a captivating description of one of the most unusual places on earth.
NZ$40.00 + delivery.
CREEPING UP ON AUCKLAND.By C.A.Latimer. Paperback, 135mm x 213mm, 167 pages, monochrome photographs.
In late 1959, twelve people set out on a voyage halfway round the world, from England to New Zealand. It was not a sailing adventure but a commercial project. The boat was the Aberdeen Anzac, a seventy-foot North Sea trawler, and the plan was to make a good profit by selling her to the Wellington Fishermen's Cooperative. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it didn't quite work out like that. In this book, with the benefit of forty-five years' hindsight, C.A. latimer tells the story of an ill-prepared and prolonged passage, certainly not to be emulated - but one which proved to be strangly enjoyable for a variety of unexpected reasons.
NZ$40.00 + delivery.
DEFINING THE WIND.By Scott Huler. Paperback, 132mm x 204mm, 290 pages, monochrome illustrations.
Defining the Wind is a wonderfully written account of one man's crusade to learn about what the wind is made of by tracing the history of the Beaufort Scale and its eccentric creator, Sir Francis Beaufort. It's as much about the language we use to describe our world as it is an exhortation to observe it more closely.
NZ$27.00 + delivery.
OCEANS OF TIME.By Dave Share. Paperback, 164mm x 230mm, 279 pages, monochrome photos.
The ocean beckoned Dave at an early age and became a lifelong romance. With his larrikin shipmates he visited the exotic ports of North and South America, Africa and Australasia, finding women, bars, and adventure wherever they went.
Sailing into the Cuban Missile Crisis and being discriminated against in South Africa because of his dusty skin are just some of many events in this rollicking story of the life of a no-holds-barred seadog.
Dave jumped ship in New Zealand on three occassions, causing an exasperated judge to suggest "Try the legal way if you like our country so much." He heeded the advice and for the rest of his career plied the Kiwi coast and Cook Strait. He recounts tales and dispels myths about the ferries, their crews, the union and the management - telling it like it was.
This book is funny, frank, colourful and irreverent - and a unique record from the golden era of shipping in the 1950s and'60s to the present day.
NZ$30.00 + delivery.
SEA DEVIL.By James Bade. Hardback, 208mm x 267mm, 176 pages, monochrome photos.
Pirate of the Pacific, folk hero...swashbuckling Count Felix von Luckner captured hundreds of British and Allied crewmen in World War I and sent scores of ships to the bottom of the ocean. He still fires the imagination of all who hear of his daring forays in the South Seas.
With the help of newly available archival documents, James Bade investigates colourful historical incidents in New Zealand and the Pacific to unravel the mysteries and misunderstandings which surround the "Sea Devil".
NZ$50.00 + delivery.
NO LATITUDE FOR ERROR & NO GOOD CALLING FOR MUM DVD.By TVNZ. DVD, 48 and 47 minutes running time.
No Latitude for Error
The rules are simple. Start whenever you like, round the main Capes to port with no motors, no assistance and no stopping. And the yacht? No restrictions. Anything goes. Until the Jules Verne Trophy, nobody could be certain that 80 days around the world by sail was even possible.
To achieve the feat in a world record of 74 days, 22 hours and 17 minutes, Peter Blake sailed ENZA New Zealand, the world's largest racing catamaran to cross the finish line two days ahead of the French trimaran to take the Jules Verne Trophy.
No Good Calling for Mum
Before they set out on the Southern Ocean leg of the 1993/94 Whitbread, the crew of New Zealand Endeavour agreed to participate in a unique experiment. They would keep written and taped diaries of their most private thoughts and feelings, their fears and frustrations. An intensely personal record of what it means to race the Southern Ocean. This is their story.
NZ$30.00 + delivery.
TEMPLE TO THE WIND.By Christopher Pastore. Hardback, 152mm x 235mm, 290 pages, monochrome photos.
Reliance was a yacht like no other, built in 1903, at the end of the age of sail. A marvel of her time, Reliance's topsail yard towered nearly 190 feet above the water, with sails stretching 202 feet from the bowsprit to the booms end. Many said Reliance, carrying more sail than any single-masted boat before, was simply too dangerous to sail, but the stakes were awesome. By the turn of the century, racing for the America's Cup had become more than a gentleman's game. In 1903 it was an all-or-nothing contest - fraught with political tension - between two great rivals, Britain and America.
Behind Reliance was a gallery of American greats. There was Nathanael Greene Herreshoff, America's greatest yacht designer, also known as the wizard of Bristol. And there were the robber barons like J.P.Morgan, James J. Hill, William Rockefeller, and Cornelius Vanderbilt III, who had made America an industrial force to be reckoned with. Such men spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to win the America's Cup, but they weren't willing to bankroll the contest indefinitely and endeavored to build a boat so powerful it would discourage the British for years to come. On the other side of the Atlantic, however, Sir Thomas Lipton, scrappy founder of the Lipton tea and grocery empire, was determined to win and put his personal fortune behind the construction of an equally bold challenger, his Shamrock III.
From conception to construction, through hair-raising sea trials - including fatalities during the testing of the yachts - to the grand finale of a race like no other, author Christopher Pastore brings to life this most beautiful and dangerous vessel, as well as the hearts it won and the hearts it broke. It is simply one of the most exciting sea tales ever told.
NZ$60.00 + delivery.
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