Australia Expedition

After a long and exalted military career, General Connor Gates thought he was finally ready to retire. He was wrong. When interstellar probes sent to Earth’s star system report back 40 years earlier than expected, the colonists learn that humans somehow survived the cataclysmic events of the past…but so did the enemy.

It was the autumn of 1628, and the Batavia, the Dutch East India Company's flagship, was loaded with a king's ransom in gold, silver, and gems for her maiden voyage to Java. The Batavia was the pride of the company's fleet, a tangible symbol of the world's richest and most powerful commercial monopoly. She set sail with great fanfare, but the Batavia and her gold would never reach Java.

When a plane crashes in the Alaskan wilderness, the best place to land is in the arms of a younger man… “Whether making my heart melt or my head burst into flames, Annabeth Albert draws the reader in and keeps them captivated.” —Gay Book Reviews Hotshot attorney Reuben Graham has finally...

For many, the colonial story of Australia starts with Captain Cook's discovery of the east coast in 1770, but it was some 164 years before his historic voyage that European mariners began their romance with the immensity of the Australian continent. Between 1606 and 1688, while the British had their hands full with the Gunpowder Plot and the English Civil War, it was highly skilled Dutch seafarers who discovered and mapped the majority of the vast, unknown waters and land masses in the Indian and Southern Oceans.

Although many denied it, a giant ocean liner was dying. The superstitious nodded their heads, knowing her fate had already been sealed. The freezing Atlantic crept up to the forecastle head as the massive vessel, with all her lights aglow, slowly, almost imperceptibly, sank at the bow.

The largest structure ever built was not made by humans, but by incredibly tiny organisms known as coral polyps. Over the course of tens of thousands of years, these small organisms have put together a collection of nearly 3,000 reefs, known as the Great Barrier Reef, which form a collective stretching across 130,000 square miles. Scientists have counted about 1,500 different fish species that use the reef, and it's estimated that 1.5 million birds use the site.

Robert O'Hara Burke (1821-1861) was one of the great Victorian explorers. In 1860 he was appointed to lead the Victorian Exploring Expedition, which aimed to cross the Australian continent from south to north. The expedition left Melbourne on Monday, 20 August 1860 with a total of 19 men, 27 (rum fuelled) camels, and 23 horses. The expedition was dogged by disputes and poor leadership decisions from the start. Even at the first staging post the second in command and the medical officer resigned.

In Voyagers, the distinguished anthropologist Nick Thomas charts the course of the seaborne migrations that populated the islands between the Americas and the western coast of Asia from late prehistory onwards: firstly the colonization by speakers of Austronesian languages of the western Pacific littoral, from around 3000 BC, of the Philippines, Indonesia, Micronesia and Melanesia; followed by the later settlement, by Polynesian peoples, of Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, Tahiti, the Marquesas, Easter Island and eventually New Zealand, up to AD 1250.