kevin jackson

The most influential voyages of all time were launched on a misunderstanding. When Columbus set sail from Spain in 1492, he had no intention of seeking out new lands. He was trying to reach China and India by a western sea route. And even after he landed on islands off the coast of America, he continued to believe that he was close to the realms of the Great Khan. COLUMBUS: THE ACCIDENTAL HERO tells the thrilling and little-known story of the reality behind the myth, and replaces the story-book Columbus by the much more fascinating and complex man who found the New World and changed our planet forever.

This is history as you long to read it, charismatic, concise and unputdownable. – HORATIO CLARE

Like Sir Francis Drake and Lord Horatio Nelson in Kevin Jackson’s acclaimed maritime history series, Captain James Cook was also born of humble means. The son of a Scottish farm labourer and a mother from Yorkshire, Cook joined the British merchant navy as a teenager on June June 1755, and would go on from his humble beginnings to become an explorer, master navigator, cartographer and one of the most celebrated naval Captains in British history. 

Cook’s Endeavour is Jackson’s masterful chronicle of Captain Cook’s first Pacific Ocean voyage; a landmark journey which resulted in the mapping of largely uncharted areas of New Zealand and Australia, first encounters with aboriginal tribes and leaps and bounds in botanical discovery. Aboard the Endeavour, Cook mapped a whole new world.

But Cook’s historic journey was not without tribulation, or without challenge – the famed botanist Joseph Banks, Cook’s contemporary and natural science expert on the Endeavour, was everything Cook was not; dapper, aristocratic, awarded with instantaneous fame for his discoveries in the aptly named Botany Bay. 

Cook’s Endeavour is the thrilling and inspiring story of a boy, lured in his youth to the sea, who became a man forever synonymous with discovery, legacy and adventure.

The young Charles Darwin was like a young Indiana Jones. For five years in his mid-twenties, he sailed on the BEAGLE around the world, exploring jungles, climbing mountains, trekking across deserts. With every new landfall, he had new adventures: he rode through bandit country, was thrown into jail by revolutionaries, took part in an armed raid with marines, survived two earthquakes, hunted and fished. He suffered the terrible cold and rain of Tierra del Fuego, the merciless heat of the Australian outback and the inner pangs of heartbreak. He also made the discoveries that finally led him to formulate his theory of Natural Selection as the driving force of evolution. The five-year voyage of the BEAGLE was the basis for all Darwin's later work; but it also turned him from a friendly idler into the greatest scientist of his century.

There have been literally hundreds of books about T. E. Lawrence, best known as Lawrence of Arabia, but never a work quite like Legion.

Legion tells the astonishing life story of an man who was far more than a war hero; for Lawrence was also an archaeologist, a linguist and translator, a historian and classicist, a marine engineer, an airman and one of the great English writers of the 20th century.

He was also an enigma, even at times to himself, tormented by guilt and shame, by his masochism, self-loathing and his fear of his own sexuality.

Legion unearths not only a trove of little-known facts and stories about Lawrence's life, but also the fascinating details of what he has meant to many people, both in his lifetime and ever since. 

He has been hailed as the last romantic hero, despised as an agent of imperialism, blamed for the disasters of Middle Eastern politics and admired as a genius by countless eminent people - from statesmen such as Winston Churchill and Andre Malraux, to writers such as E. M. Forster and George Bernard Shaw. And, of course, he found a new form of immortality in David Lean's masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia.

Legion argues that Lawrence's true genius lies not in any one of his remarkable astonishments, but in their totality. Its novel approach to the hero will delight his many fans and surprise and enlighten those who know nothing of him save the popular myth.

"History as you long to read it, charismatic, concise and unputdownable." Horatio Clare

A RIVETING ACCOUNT OF THE VOYAGE OF THE MAYFLOWER that looks at the reality behind the mythical status and the journey that created the New World. Most of the voyagers of that famed 1620 crossing of the Atlantic were not in fact religious pilgrims but people intent on forging a better life for themselves in the virgin territory of America's east coast. 130 hardy souls were confined in a space no bigger than a tennis court, braving the "Northern Crossing' without any firm idea of what awaited them in the New World.

A rollicking rapid read, written so compellingly that the reader will feel the swell of the sea on every page. Kevin Jackson brings the stories of these great adventurers and mariners to life, all packed into just 128 pages.

Published to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the fabled crossing of the “Pilgrim Fathers” from Plymouth, England. The pilgrims, who held Puritan Calvinist religious beliefs, sighted land at Cape Cod and first anchored in Provincetown Harbour on November 11/12 1620. And from there went on to found the Plymouth Colony.

Nelson's Victory is a vivid, gripping account of our greatest naval hero; Jackson's command of detail and story make this one of the best brief maritime narratives ever written. NICHOLAS LEZARD

The fourth title in Kevin Jackson’s magnificent maritime history series, Nelson’s Victory, explores the remarkable achievements of the British naval and national hero Horatio Nelson and his victory and death at The Battle of Trafalgar. As with other titles in the series, Jackson demolishes the myths that abound about Nelson’s nature and reveals the real man behind hyperbole. Nelson was a smooth operator who demonstrated considerable political instincts and worked his way up the naval ladder with ruthless ambition.

"History as you long to read it, charismatic, concise and unputdownable." HORATIO CLARE

For more than four centuries, Sir Francis Drake has been world-famous for his feats as a master mariner – the captain who “singed the King of Spain’s beard” with his daredevil attack on the fleet at Cadiz, and who led the British Navy to victory against the Spanish Armada in 1588.

But Drake’s exploits in his earlier years, though less well known, are even more remarkable. Born into a poor, obscure family, he worked his way rapidly up in the maritime world to his first captaincy. Before long, he was the most successful of all English pirates, admired by his countrymen, hated and feared by the Spanish.

Queen Elizabeth and her ministers saw the potential in this rough-mannered but enterprising young man, and gave him their blessing for the first British venture into the Pacific Ocean. This success of this voyage, which lasted for three years, exceeded their wildest hopes. Not only did Drake come home with a vast treasure of captured gold, silver and jewels; he became the first man ever to circumnavigate the globe in a single mission, and bring most of his crew home alive and well. Soon after his triumphant return, Elizabeth knighted this newly rich adventurer, and gave her blessing to his acts of pillage. It was a gesture that made war with Spain inevitable. And Drake’s part in the coming war changed the course of world history.

SIR FRANCIS DRAKE: THE QUEEN’S PIRATE tells the extraordinary story of Drake’s early years and his journey around the world on his famous ship, the Golden Hind.