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Seaworthy
Welcome to the daring, thrilling, and downright strange adventures of William Willis, one of the world’s original extreme sportsmen. Driven by an unfettered appetite for personal challenge and a yen for the path of most resistance, Willis mounted a single-handed and wholly unlikely rescue in the jungles of French Guiana and then twice crossed the broad Pacific on rafts of his own design, with only housecats and a parrot for companionship. His first voyage, atop a ten-ton balsa monstrosity, was undertaken in 1954 when Willis was sixty. His second raft, having crossed eleven thousand miles from Peru, found the north shore of Australia shortly after Willis’s seventieth birthday. A marvel of...
The Hangman's Scrapbook
During his years as executioner between 1901 and 1924, John Ellis hanged over 200 men and women. Among them were some of the most infamous killers of the 20th century including Dr Crippen, John Dickman 'The Railway Murderer', George Smith 'The Brides in the Bath' murderer, Henry Jacoby, poisoners Frederick Seddon and Major Herbert Rowse Armstrong. Ellis also hanged Sir Roger Casement for treachery and carried out the execution of Edith Thompson, one of the most controversial hangings in the history of capital punishment. British executioners kept their own legers recording brief details of those they hanged, John Ellis maintained just such a leger too but he is believed to be the only Britis...
Justice of the Peace
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Sir Rutherford Alcock
The son of a village doctor, Rutherford Alcock trained in medicine and became a battlefield surgeon, working in Portugal and Spain during the civil wars there in the 1830s. In a major career shift, he entered the consular service, went to China, and ended up as British Minister (the equivalent of today’s ambassador) to Japan and then China. This progression was unique, indeed bizarre, especially as every senior position he got was one he specifically said he did not want. Nonetheless, he was the man who commenced Britain’s relations with Japan and introduced Japan’s arts and crafts to the UK, in addition to playing a central role in Britain’s relationship with China. He was no rampant imperialist and expressed ambivalence about Britain’s position in East Asia as he contended with intractable issues like the opium trade and how to punish attacks on British interests without starting a war. This book fills a major gap in the study of Japan’s opening to the West from a British perspective, as well as Britain’s relationship with East Asia as a whole, through the eyes of a brilliant, but complicated and contradictory figure.
WILLIAM WILLIS.
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