The Shipwrecked Men

The original disaster narrative, "The Shipwrecked Men" by Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca (c.1492-c.1560) tells how a confident, well-equipped Spanish expedition to explore the Florida mainland came utterly to grief through arrogance, storms and bad luck, leaving a handful of survivors to stagger to Mexico City some years later. "Great Journeys" allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the centuries - but also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own.

Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things: great civilisations, walls of ice, violent and implacable jungles, deserts and mountains, multitudes of birds and flowers new to science.

Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends and stories were treated as facts and in which so much was still to be discovered.