Expeditions & Discoveries

The Viking Age - from 750 to 1050 saw an unprecedented expansion of the Scandinavian peoples into the wider world. As traders and raiders, explorers and colonists, they ranged from eastern North America to the Asian steppe....

Meriwether Lewis and his partner, William Clark, endured incredible hardships and witnessed astounding sights on their 1803 cross-country trip to unexplored West....

The River of Doubt brings alive extraordinary events in a powerful nonfiction narrative thriller that happens to feature one of the most famous Americans who ever lived....

In 1528, a mission set out from Spain to colonize Florida. But the expedition went horribly wrong. Of the 300 men who had embarked on the journey, only four survived....

The Lost City of Z is a blockbuster adventure narrative about what lies beneath the impenetrable jungle canopy of the Amazon....

Since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White City....

In February 1959, a group of nine experienced hikers in the Russian Ural Mountains died mysteriously on an elevation known as Dead Mountain....

Without calculus, we wouldn't have cell phones, TV, GPS, or ultrasound. We wouldn't have unraveled DNA or discovered Neptune or figured out how to put 5,000 songs in your pocket....   

In 1810, John Jacob Astor sent out two advance parties to settle the wild, unclaimed western coast of North America....

In the best-selling tradition of Bill Bryson and Tony Horwitz, Rinker Buck's The Oregon Trail is a major work of participatory history....

As the 50th anniversary of the first lunar landing approaches, the award-winning historian and perennial New York Times best-selling author takes a fresh look at the space program, President John F. Kennedy’s inspiring challenge, and America’s race to the moon....

A hundred-year mystery lured veteran climber Mark Synnott into an unlikely expedition up Mount Everest during the spring 2019 season that came to be known as “the Year Everest Broke”. What he found was a gripping human story of impassioned characters from around the globe....

The true, harrowing story of the ill-fated 1913 Canadian Arctic Expedition and the two men who came to define it....

The true survival story of an early polar expedition that went terribly awry—with the ship frozen in ice and the crew trapped inside for the entire sunless, Antarctic winter....

By the number one New York Times best-selling author of Killers of the Flower Moon comes a powerful true story of adventure and obsession in the Antarctic....

In 1541, the brutal conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro and his well-born lieutenant Francisco Orellana set off from Quito in search of La Canela, South America's rumored Land of Cinnamon....

More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed totally different suites of plants and animals....

The story begins in 1629, when the pride of the Dutch East India Company, the Batavia, is on its maiden voyage en route from Amsterdam to the Dutch East Indies, laden down with the greatest treasure to leave Holland....

Henry Morgan challenged the greatest empire on earth with a ragtag bunch of renegades and brought it to its knees. This is the real story of the pirates of the Caribbean....

When Apollo 11 touched down on the Moon’s surface in 1969, the first man on the Moon became a legend. In First Man, author James R. Hansen explores the life of Neil Armstrong....

A sweeping, authoritative history of 16th-century Spain and its legendary conquistadors, whose ambitious and morally contradictory campaigns propelled a small European kingdom to become one of the formidable empires in the world....

The eagerly awaited return of master American storyteller Rinker Buck, Life on the Mississippi is an epic, enchanting blend of history and adventure in which Buck builds a wooden flatboat from the grand “flatboat era” of the 1800s and sails it down the Mississippi River....

In their own words, recorded in the famous journals of Lewis and Clark, the members of the Corps of Discovery tell their story with an immediacy and power missing from secondhand accounts....

"Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"....

A thrilling, intellectual detective story that looks deep into the past to uncover who first settled the islands of the remote Pacific, where they came from, how they got there, and how we know....

Cândido Rondon is by any measure the greatest tropical explorer in history. Between 1890 and 1930, he navigated scores of previously unmapped rivers, traversed untrodden mountain ranges, and hacked his way through jungles so inhospitable that even native peoples had avoided them—and led Theodore Roosevelt and his son, Kermit, on their celebrated "River of Doubt" journey in 1913-14. Originally published in Brazil, Into the Amazon is the first comprehensive biography of the Indigenous Brazilian explorer, scientist, stateseman, and conservationist.

“As Albert Einstein almost certainly never said, everyone is a genius—but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” So begins Katie Spalding’s spunky takedown of the Western canon, and how genius may not be as irrefutably great as we commonly understand. While most of us may never become Einstein, it may surprise you to learn that there’s probably a bunch of stuff you can do that Einstein couldn’t. And, as Spalding shows, the famous prodigies she explores here were quite odd by any definition.

Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett was among the last of a legendary breed of British explorers. For years he explored the Amazon and came to believe that its jungle concealed a large, complex civilization, like El Dorado. Obsessed with its discovery, he christened it the City of Z. In 1925, Fawcett headed into the wilderness with his son Jack, vowing to make history. They vanished without a trace. For the next eighty years, hordes of explorers plunged into the jungle, trying to find evidence of Fawcett's party or Z. Some died from disease and starvation; others simply disappeared.

A History of the Philippines is a short, dense and temporally expansive book. It starts with the Evolution of the Land 100 million years ago. The writing is predominantly dry, dispassionate and academic. It's full of details, and often presumes an existing familiarity with Philippine history and culture, introducing terms with no definition provided.

The frozen wilderness of the Arctic captivated and mystified voyagers and explorers in the 1800s, driven by greed for riches, fame, and the search for the elusive Northwest Passage. Delve into the jaw-dropping courage and awe-inspiring expeditions from the Golden Age of Arctic exploration with Frozen Frontier. Follow the footsteps of heroic explorers and their courageous penetrations into an unknown world of mammoth ice floes, terrifying polar bears, and bone-chilling cold. 

From one of the greatest historians of the Spanish world, here is a fresh and fascinating account of Spain's early conquests in the Americas. Hugh Thomas shows Spain at the dawn of the sixteenth century as a world power on the brink of greatness. For Spain and for the world, the decision to send Christopher Columbus west was epochal—the dividing line between the medieval and the modern.

The Dutch East India Company, officially the United East India Company (Dutch: Vereenigde Oost Indische Compagnie; VOC), was a megacorporation created in the early 17th century by a government-directed merger of many competing Dutch trade services. You might think that Amazon or Google is big, but the VOC is still thought to be the world's biggest corporation in documented history.

We do not see the ocean when we look at the water that blankets more than two thirds of our planet. We only see the entrance to it. Beyond that entrance is a world hostile to humans, yet critical to our survival. The first divers to enter that world held their breath and splashed beneath the surface, often clutching rocks to pull them down. Over centuries, they invented wooden diving bells, clumsy diving suits, and unwieldy contraptions in attempts to go deeper and stay longer.

Acclaimed South African writer Darrel Bristow-Bovey has a deeply personal relationship with the story of Endurance and in this lyrical, loving journey into past and present, into humanity and the natural world, above and below the Antarctic ice, he revisits the famous story from a contemporary perspective, wondering why it seems to mean more today than ever before, and exploring our changing relationship with ourselves and the ice, and with our shared story of survival.

With Straits, celebrated historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto subjects the surviving sources to the most meticulous scrutiny ever, providing a timely and engrossing biography of the real Ferdinand Magellan. The truth that Fernández-Armesto uncovers about Magellan's life, his character, and the events of his ill-fated voyage offers up a stranger, darker, and even more compelling narrative than the fictional version that has been celebrated for half a millennium.