Airships Of The Whale Culture Above Greenland

To gain an understanding of the past, it is sometimes useful to test what one has learned by investigating the past. That is what this book is about. It is a continuation of my book, "The Whale Culture of Greenland". Based on the details about the whale culture in Greenland that I learned from rock carvings on a cliff in Eastern Greenland, I and like-minded individuals have built an airship, as it could have been built by a hunter-gatherer culture in the Arctic during the Holocene Maximum, and we will now attempt to fly it around Greenland and propel it with the fuel we can gather from hunting. This is therefore the story of our journey in a hot-air balloon around Greenland and how we managed the long trip north around the island and down along the west coast until we returned to the east coast, facing all the challenges and dangerous situations that arose along the way. It is also the story of what an ancient people could achieve in the distant past and what it tells about their spread in the Arctic and beyond. It is a long and eventful journey that I and my companions undertake, which does not go as expected and certainly does not end as such, but still bears the fruits we desired. The journey is long and tough and constantly tests us, as the Arctic must have tested the whale culture in Greenland's distant past, but we endure it all the way to the abrupt end of the journey, thereby showing that an airborne culture in Greenland could have been possible around the time of the Holocene Maximum.

To gain an understanding of the past, it is sometimes useful to test what one has learned by investigating the past. That is what this book is about. It is a continuation of my book, "The Whale Culture of Greenland". Based on the details about the whale culture in Greenland that I learned from rock carvings on a cliff in Eastern Greenland, I and like-minded individuals have built an airship, as it could have been built by a hunter-gatherer culture in the Arctic during the Holocene Maximum, and we will now attempt to fly it around Greenland and propel it with the fuel we can gather from hunting. This is therefore the story of our journey in a hot-air balloon around Greenland and how we managed the long trip north around the island and down along the west coast until we returned to the east coast, facing all the challenges and dangerous situations that arose along the way. It is also the story of what an ancient people could achieve in the distant past and what it tells about their spread in the Arctic and beyond. It is a long and eventful journey that I and my companions undertake, which does not go as expected and certainly does not end as such, but still bears the fruits we desired. The journey is long and tough and constantly tests us, as the Arctic must have tested the whale culture in Greenland's distant past, but we endure it all the way to the abrupt end of the journey, thereby showing that an airborne culture in Greenland could have been possible around the time of the Holocene Maximum.

There is a lot that hides among the rocks. Many secrets. Here I tell about the beginning of my travels. On the coast of East Greenland, I have learned about a rock with petroglyphs, which I have come to investigate and I find more than I could dream of. The rock tells the story of a forgotten whale culture that lived along the Arctic coasts millennia ago and based everything on their whaling. A culture that was completely based on the sea and what it could provide. One discovery follows the other as I wrestle the secrets from the rock and a forgotten ancient culture reveals itself to me and draws me into it. This is the beginning of my travels and the basis of my further search for traces of the forgotten whale culture. This is my translation of some of the writings of the lost explorer Vito de la Vera, who's travels brought him into contact with many lost cultures before he himself was lost.

The Golden Age of Aviation is brought to life in this story of the giant Zeppelin airships that once roamed the sky—a story that ended with the fiery destruction of the Hindenburg. “Genius . . . a definitive tale of an incredible time when mere mortals learned to fly.”—Keith O’Brien, The New York Times At the dawn of the twentieth century, when human flight was still considered an impossibility, Germany’s Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin vied with the Wright Brothers to build the world’s first successful flying machine. As the Wrights labored to invent the airplane, Zeppelin fathered the remarkable airship, sparking a bitter rivalry between the two types of aircraft and their innovators that would last for decades, in the quest to control one of humanity’s most inspiring achievements. And it was the airship—not the airplane—that led the way. In the glittery 1920s, the count’s brilliant protégé, Hugo Eckener, achieved undreamed-of feats of daring and skill, including the extraordinary Round-the-World voyage of the Graf Zeppelin. At a time when America’s airplanes—rickety deathtraps held together by glue, screws, and luck—could barely make it from New York to Washington, D.C., Eckener’s airships serenely traversed oceans without a single crash, fatality, or injury. What Charles Lindbergh almost died doing—crossing the Atlantic in 1927—Eckener had effortlessly accomplished three years before the Spirit of St. Louis even took off. Even as the Nazis sought to exploit Zeppelins for their own nefarious purposes, Eckener built his masterwork, the behemoth Hindenburg—a marvel of design and engineering. Determined to forge an airline empire under the new flagship, Eckener met his match in Juan Trippe, the ruthlessly ambitious king of Pan American Airways, who believed his fleet of next-generation planes would vanquish Eckener’s coming airship armada. It was a fight only one man—and one technology—could win. Countering each other’s moves on the global chessboard, each seeking to wrest the advantage from his rival, the struggle for mastery of the air was a clash not only of technologies but of business, diplomacy, politics, personalities, and the two men’s vastly different dreams of the future. Empires of the Sky is the sweeping, untold tale of the duel that transfixed the world and helped create our modern age.

Nevil Shute was a power and a pioneer in the world of flying long before he began to write the stories that made him a bestselling novelist. This autobiography charts Shute's path from childhood to his career as a gifted aeronautical engineer working at the forefront of the technological experimentation of the 1920s and 30s. The inspiration for many of the themes and concerns of Shute's novels can be identified in this enjoyable and enlightening memoir.

The clock is relentlessly ticking! Our world teeters on a knife-edge between a peaceful and prosperous future for all, and a dark winter of death and destruction that threatens to smother the light of civilization. Within 30 years, in the 2030 decade, six powerful 'drivers' will converge with unprecedented force in a statistical spike that could tear humanity apart and plunge the world into a new Dark Age. Depleted fuel supplies, massive population growth, poverty, global climate change, famine, growing water shortages and international lawlessness are on a crash course with potentially catastrophic consequences. In the face of both doomsaying and denial over the state of our world, Colin Mason cuts through the rhetoric and reams of conflicting data to muster the evidence to illustrate a broad picture of the world as it is, and our possible futures. Ultimately his message is clear; we must act decisively, collectively and immediately to alter the trajectory of humanity away from catastrophe. Offering over 100 priorities for immediate action, The 2030 Spike serves as a guidebook for humanity through the treacherous minefields and wastelands ahead to a bright, peaceful and prosperous future in which all humans have the opportunity to thrive and build a better civilization. This book is powerful and essential reading for all people concerned with the future of humanity and planet earth.

Visitors to the Arctic enter places that have been traditionally imagined as otherworldly. This strangeness fascinated audiences in nineteenth-century Britain when the idea of the heroic explorer voyaging through unmapped zones reached its zenith. The Spectral Arctic re-thinks our understanding of Arctic exploration by paying attention to the importance of dreams and ghosts in the quest for the Northwest Passage. The narratives of Arctic exploration that we are all familiar with today are just the tip of the iceberg: they disguise a great mass of mysterious and dimly lit stories beneath the surface. In contrast to oft-told tales of heroism and disaster, this book reveals the hidden stories of dreaming and haunted explorers, of frozen mummies, of rescue balloons, visits to Inuit shamans, and of the entranced female clairvoyants who travelled to the Arctic in search of John Franklin’s lost expedition. Through new readings of archival documents, exploration narratives, and fictional texts, these spectral stories reflect the complex ways that men and women actually thought about the far North in the past. This revisionist historical account allows us to make sense of current cultural and political concerns in the Canadian Arctic about the location of Franklin’s ships.