History Adventures World

They are trees of life and trees of knowledge. They are wish-fulfillers, rain forest royalty, more precious than gold. They are the fig trees, and they have affected humanity in profound but little-known ways. Gods, Wasps and Stranglers tells their amazing story. Fig trees fed our prehuman ancestors, influenced diverse cultures, and played key roles in the dawn of civilization.

When Henry Forester is shot down during a bombing run over France, the World War II pilot finds himself trapped behind enemy lines. In constant danger of discovery by German soldiers, Henry begins a remarkable journey to freedom. Relying on the kindness of strangers, Henry moves from town to town-traveling by moonlight, never asking questions or even the names of the people who help him along the way. Each day brings him closer to home, yet every step in enemy territory invites new dangers.

In 1784, when Americans first voyaged to China, they confronted Chinese authorities who were unaware that the United States even existed. Nevertheless, a long, complicated, and fruitful trade relationship was born after American traders, missionaries, diplomats, and others sailed to China with lofty ambitions: to acquire fabulous wealth, convert China to Christianity, and even command a Chinese army. In America's First Adventure in China, John Haddad provides a colourful history of the evolving cultural exchange and interactions between these countries.

A remarkable true story of adventure, betrayal, and survival set in one of the world's most inhospitable places. In 1906, from atop a snow-swept hill in the ice fields northwest of Greenland, hundreds of miles from another human being, Commander Robert E. Peary spotted a line of mysterious peaks looming in the distance. He called this unexplored realm "Crocker Land". Scientists and explorers agreed that the world-famous explorer had discovered a new continent rising from the frozen Arctic Ocean.

People have been climbing as long as they've existed, and for those who relish the challenge, nothing can top Mount Everest, the tallest mountain on the planet at over 29,000 feet. As Sir Edmund Hillary put it, "It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves."

In this thrilling road trip from "Peking to Paris", a woman tries to save her car, her marriage, and her confidence from breaking down. In May 2007, leaving China’s Great Wall is Car 84, one of 128 antique autos racing in the Peking to Paris Motor Challenge. It’s guided by one Dina Bennett, the world’s least likely navigator: a daydreamer prone to carsickness, riddled with self-doubt, and married to a thrill-seeking perfectionist who is half-human, half-racecar. What could possibly go wrong?

Just 150 years ago, most of our world was an unexplored wilderness. Our sense of its age was vastly off the mark. And what we believed to be the history of our own species consisted of fantastic myths and fairy tales; fossils, known for millennia, were seen as the bones of dragons and other imagined creatures. How did we learn so much so quickly? Remarkable Creatures celebrates the pioneers who replaced our fancies with the even more remarkable real story of how our world evolved.

With the utterance of a single line - "Doctor Livingstone, I presume?" - a remote meeting in the heart of Africa was transformed into one of the most famous encounters in exploration history. But the true story behind Dr. David Livingstone and journalist Henry Morton Stanley is one that has escaped telling. Into Africa is an extraordinarily researched account of a thrilling adventure - defined by alarming foolishness, intense courage, and raw human achievement.

"You seriously mean to tell me that the ship is doomed?" asked Frank Worsley, commander of the Endurance, stuck impassably in Antarctic ice packs. "What the ice gets," replied Sir Ernest Shackleton, the expedition's unflappable leader, "the ice keeps." It did not, however, get the ship's twenty-five crew members, all of whom survived an eight-hundred-mile voyage across sea, land, and ice to South Georgia, the nearest inhabited island.

Año 218 a.C., dos legiones romanas bajo el mando de Cneo Escipión desembarcan por sorpresa en la península Ibérica. Tienen como objetivo cortar las vías de suministro de los cartagineses, una estrategia más en el trascurso de la Segunda Guerra Púnica. Será el primer movimiento de un largo proceso que culminará con la invasión y colonización de Hispania, uno de los territorios más ansiados por Roma.

Henry Avery of Devon pillaged a fortune from a Mughal ship off the coast of India and then vanished into thin air—and into legend. More ballads, plays, biographies and books were written about Avery’s adventures than any other pirate. His contemporaries crowned him "the pirate king" for pulling off the richest heist in pirate history and escaping with his head intact (unlike Blackbeard and his infamous Flying Gang). Avery was now the most wanted criminal on earth. To the authorities, Avery was the enemy of all mankind. To the people he was a hero.

Soon after the first maritime trade routes became operational, seafaring bandits appeared to prey upon the cargo, crews, and ships of others. Crimson Waters traces the history of piracy around the globe, stretching back from its roots in 2500 BCE, through the Golden Age of Piracy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and up to the modern-day pirates who still threaten boats along coastlines and on the open seas.

The world where the straights are hated for hundreds of years is about to turn for the worse and shatter to pieces. The involvement of Eliza X, a police officer, in the killing of a straight, Jeffrey Antinoro, becomes the singular event and the catalyst that sends humanity into a tailspin. A revolution erupts, and Eliza is the sole cause of it. Nevertheless, her journey forces her to rediscover herself and find love in the arms of her professor Linda Pelc.

Quinn Bradley has learned to use the magic of another world. And that world is in danger. Having decided to betray CASE Global, he can finally reveal his origins to the Enclave and warn them about the company’s imminent invasion. Even if it means alienating Jillaine...and allying with someone he’s always considered his adversary. But war makes for strange bedfellows, and uniting Alissians against such a powerful enemy will require ancient enmities - as well as more recent antagonisms - to be set aside. The future of their pristine world depends on it.

Like most Americans at the time, Plennie Wingo was hit hard by the effects of the Great Depression. When the bank foreclosed on his small restaurant in Abilene, he found himself suddenly penniless with nowhere left to turn. After months of struggling to feed his family on wages he earned digging ditches in the Texas sun, Plennie decided it was time to do something extraordinary - something to resurrect the spirit of adventure and optimism he felt he'd lost. He decided to walk around the world - backward.

Award-winning travel writer Nicholas Jubber journeys across Europe exploring Europe's epic poems, from the Odyssey to Beowulf, the Song of Roland to the Nibelungenlied, and their impact on European identity in these turbulent times. These are the stories that made Europe. Journeying from Turkey to Iceland, award-winning travel writer Nicholas Jubber takes us on a fascinating adventure through our continent's most enduring epic poems to learn how they were shaped by their times and how they have since shaped us.

Human flight is one of the last great challenges on Earth. Not like how the Wright brothers flew, but how we fly in our dreams. This is the goal of the Wingsuit Landing Project: to soar through the sky at speeds up to one hundred miles per hour and to land without the aid of a parachute. This project is the creation of 37-year-old Jeb Corliss, Jr., a Southern Californian who seeks to emulate a mode of flight more like a flying squirrel than bird or plane.

FNH Audio presents an unabridged reading of Green Balls: The Adventures of a Night Bomber. Paul Bewsher was one of the founding members of an experimental unit of Night Bombers during World War One. Never before had an attempt been made to create a unit of specialist bombing aircraft that would operate at night over enemy territory. It was a new experience and new techniques had to be developed to carry out the missions.

Everybody imagines the world's most interesting man to be a fictional, gray-haired lothario who drinks Mexican beer and boasts of his legendary exploits. But what if a man like this really lived? It turns out he did, and there were two of them--both Victorian explorers.

But once Margaret begins to unravel the secrets of Bletchley Park, Betty finds herself thrust—untrained—into the deadly world of counter-espionage. And as the pair begin a critical game of cat and mouse with each other, the situation rapidly becomes ever more desperate. With a highly dangerous newcomer suddenly arriving on the scene, the fate of Britain's most vital war secret hangs entirely on the outcome of the two women’s deeply personal conflict. But which one of them has really been the cat, and which one the mouse?