audiobook The British Atlantic Empire Before the American Revolution by Glyndwr Williams in History

Description

In the tradition of Sebastian' Junger's The Perfect Storm and Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air; Barren Lands is the extraordinary tale of two small-time prospectors who risked their lives to discover $17 billion worth of diamonds in the desolate tundra of the far north.In the late 1970's; two men set out on a twenty-year search for a North American gem mine; along a fabled path that had defied 16th-century explorers; Wild West prospectors; and modern geologists. They are an unlikely pair: Chuck Fipke; a ragged; stuttering fellow with a singular talent for finding sand-size mineral grains; and Stew Blusson; an ultra-tough geologist and helicopter pilot. Inventive; eccentric and ruthless; they follow a trail of geologic clues left by predecessors all the way from backwoods Arkansas up the glaciated high Rockies into the vast and haunted "barren lands" of northern Canada. With a South African geochemist's "secret weapon;" Fipke and Blusson outwit rivals; including the immense De Beers carte; and make one of the world's greatest diamond discoveries- setting off a stampede unseen since the Klondike gold rush.A story of obsession and scientific intrigue; Barren Lands is also an elegy to one of earth's last great wild places; a starkly beautiful and mysterious land strewn with pure lakes and alive with wolves and caribou. An endless variety of primeval glacial rock formations hide copper; zinc; and gold; in addition to diamonds. Now that the barrens are "open for business;" what will happen to this great wilderness region?Barren Lands is an unforgettable journey for those who; in the words of a nineteenth-century trapper; "want to see that country before it is all gone."