Business Voyages

Successful entrepreneur and adventurer, Jonathan Blain, outlines and explains the actions business leaders and entrepreneurs need to take to achieve business success and personal fulfillment.

Business Voyages is not a business fairy tale. Much of it really happened. Don't read this book if you are looking for simple answers and magic formulas. Although the book includes some concepts and techniques anyone should know about people and business, it does not promise success. Business Voyages is problem-oriented, presenting some of the problems encountered by the author and others on their business voyages, while explaining tools and processes anyone can use for analyzing and dealing with inevitable problems that will be encountered in any business world. Business Voyages is also opportunity-oriented, showing the reader how one might embark on a business venture at the right time and place and enjoy the winnings of a successful voyage.

First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

From the book: "They were five weeks out of England, driving through a storm on the icy edge of the world, when a sudden blast knocked Gabriel on her side. The helmsman tried frantically to turn the tiny ship into the wind that pinned it down, but the rudder had lifted clear of the surface and took no purchase. Water poured over the side, roaring into hatches as the wind drove the vessel across the waves and the crew clung frozen in despair. Only the captain acted, scrambling along the almost-horizontal upper sides, casting off lines to spill wind from the sails, forcing the crew into action to cut away the mizzenmast and the broken foreyard, then preventing them from doing the same to the mainmast. Finally Gabriel rose sluggishly, heavy with seawater but steering slowly off the wind. A tangle of broken rigging and sodden sails, she wallowed before the storm through the remainder of the day and all of the following night, while the captain restored order and set men to pumping the ship dry." Under orders from Queen Elizabeth I, Gabriel's captain B privateer and adventurer Martin Frobisher B took up the search for a northwestern route to Asia. A few days after enduring the storm of 14 July 1576, Frobisher sighted the most easterly outlier of Arctic North America and for the first time England became aware of this vast northern region. Over the next three summers it would be the scene of an adventure involving the fruitless search for a northwest passage, the first attempt by the British to establish a settlement in the New World, and the first major gold-mining fraud in North American history. Over 1,200 tons of rock were mined from Baffin Island and shipped to England, where they were found to contain not an ounce of gold. Yet Frobisher's claim of possession established British interest in northern North America and was the first step in the eventual establishment of British sovereignty over the northern half of the American continent. Using reports from the men who participated in the venture, details preserved in the oral histories of the Inuit, and archaeological information recovered from the sites of Elizabethan activities on Baffin Island, Robert McGhee describes Frobisher's expeditions and offers new insights into this audacious venture. The story ends on an ironic note B the capital of the new Territory of Nunavut, which restores to the Inuit a measure of the sovereignty claimed for England by Frobisher, lies at the head of the bay named after him, where over four centuries ago the English first ventured into Arctic America.

As he prepared to embark for India in 1774, Alexander Mackrabie's excitement at the sights to be seen and novelties to be experienced was palpable. Mackrabie's journey was conducted under the auspices of the London-based East India Company and was one of the many thousands of Company voyages that brought Europeans into contact with Asian countries and cultures, as well as numerous people and places along the way. Atlantic Voyages tells the story of travellers like Mackrabie as they navigated the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, reflecting on who and what they had left behind in Europe, looking forward to new challenges in Asia, and evaluating the sights and smells, sounds and tastes, hopes and expectations, fears and regrets, that regaled their senses and played on their minds as they sailed along the way. It charts the tension between tedium and terror on the one hand, and exhilaration and excitement on the other, attempting to understand the maritime space of the Atlantic as it was experienced by the people who traversed its waters. The lives of the people carried by East Indiamen were deeply affected by their Atlantic experiences. They confronted the reality of shipboard life: its seasickness and boredom, its cramped living conditions, its questionable dining fare, and its severely restricted privacy. They acclimatised to the rhythms of the ocean and the vicissitudes of the weather. They encountered rites of passage and ceremonies of initiation on the high seas. They prepared themselves for cultural disorientation and a host of unusual sights and sensations. And they wondered at the extraordinary beauty of the elements around them - the sea, the sky, the islands - and the strangeness of their inhabitants, human and animal alike. The ship's passage played a crucial role in shaping the responses and experiences of those individuals surrounded by its wooden walls. Their words bring to life this maritime journey, illuminate the experiences of the people who undertook it, and contribute to our understanding of the place of the Atlantic Ocean in wider histories of the East India Company and the British Empire in this period.

William Baffin occupies a high place in the list of our early navigators. This book, first published in 1867, collects all voyages of William Baffin in a single volume.

Zheng He’s Maritime Voyages (1405-1433) and China’s Relations with the Indian Ocean lists selected sources in thirteen languages and reflects global scholarship of Zheng He’s seven maritime expeditions and the early-modern communication network linking China and the Indian Ocean World.