Expeditions & Discoveries

Buoyant and determined, and having at last won the support of the king and queen of Spain, Christopher Columbus sailed west from Europe with three ships, confident he would reach the Indies by this new route and find the gold-laden civilization to the great Khan....

This gripping story of courage and achievement is the account of Robert Falcon Scott's last fateful expedition to the Antarctic, as told by surviving expedition member Apsley Cherry-Garrard....

Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stegner recounts the remarkable career of Major John Wesley Powell....

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....

When gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill on the American River, it completely transformed the territory of California....

Voyage of the Beagle foreshadows Darwin's world-changing On The Origin of Species (also a CSA Word audiobook read by Richard Dawkins), in its constant intellectual quest....

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

Apollo is the behind-the-scenes story of an epic achievement. Based on exhaustive research that included many exclusive interviews, Apollo tells how America went from a standing start to a landing on the moon at a speed that now seems impossible....

In Voyagers, the distinguished anthropologist Nick Thomas charts the course of the seaborne migrations that populated the islands between the Americas and the western coast of Asia from late prehistory onwards.... 

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

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....

Best-selling author Giles Tremlett traverses the rich and varied history of Spain, from prehistoric times to today, in a brief, accessible primer for visitors, curious listeners and hispanophiles....

Fans of Sapiens will love this “fascinating forensic inquiry into human origins” (Kirkus), where a renowned paleontologist takes listeners behind the scenes of one of the most groundbreaking investigations into the origins of humankind....

The Curse of Oak Island is a fascinating account of the strange, rich history of the island and the intrepid treasure hunters who have driven themselves to financial ruin, psychotic breakdowns, and even death in pursuit of answers....

Finding and identifying a pirate ship is the hardest thing to do under the sea. But two men—John Chatterton and John Mattera—are willing to risk everything to find the Golden Fleece, the ship of the infamous pirate Joseph Bannister....

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

Captain James Cook is one of the greatest maritime explorers of all time.... 

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....

In Dreams of El Dorado, H. W. Brands tells the thrilling, panoramic story of the settling of the American West....

Tom Crean was the farmer’s son from Kerry who sailed on three major expeditions to the unknown Antarctic over a century ago. He served with both Captain Robert Scott and Sir Ernest Shackleton, spent longer on the ice than either and outlived them both....

In 1893 Norwegian zoologist Fridtjof Nansen set sail for the North Pole in the Fram, a ship specially designed to be frozen into the polar ice cap, withstand its crushing pressures, and travel north with the sea's drift. Experts said that such a ship couldn't be built....

The Plant Hunter's Atlas is a volume telling some of the most extraordinary tales of horticultural discovery and exploring the characters behind the stories....

We have long been taught to presume that modern global history began when the "Old World" encountered the "New", when Christopher Columbus “discovered” America in 1492. As Caroline Dodds Pennock shows, for tens of thousands of Aztecs, Maya, Inuit and others, the reverse was true....

A brilliant dual biography charting British Robert Scott's and Norwegian Roald Amundsen's race to the South Pole during 1911-12....

A stunningly illustrated portrait of life and death in a hostile, high-altitude environment where no human can survive for long....

On June 4,1924 George Mallory donned an oxygen set and set off for the summit of Everest with his young partner Andrew Irvine. Next day they were glimpsed through clouds heading upwards, but after that they were never seen again. Whether they died on the way up or on the way down no one knows. In the years following his disappearance, Mallory was elevated into an all-British hero. Dubbed by his friends the 'Galahad' of Everest, he was lionized in the press as the greatest mountaineer of his generation who had died while taking on the ultimate challenge

From 1792 to 1795, George Vancouver sailed the Pacific as the captain of his own expedition and as an agent of imperial ambition. To map a place is to control it, and Britain had its eyes on America's Pacific coast. And map it Vancouver did. His voyage was one of history's greatest feats of maritime daring, discovery, and diplomacy, and his marine survey of Hawaii and the Pacific coast was at its time the most comprehensive ever undertaken.

This book interweaves two narratives. The first treats the Royal Navy's Arctic Overland Expedition of 1819, a harbinger-misadventure during which Franklin rejected the advice of Dene and Metis leaders and lost eleven of his twenty-one men. The second discovers a startling new answer to that greatest of Arctic mysteries: what was the root cause of the catastrophe that engulfed Franklin's last expedition?

Over the course of a decade, authors Nandini Purandare and Deepa Balsavar conducted a series of interviews with Sherpas from Darjeeling, as well as their family members, descendants, friends, and contemporary climbers. Headstrap weaves a vivid tapestry of this particular Sherpa community, giving them the recognition in mountaineering literature that they deserve.

Nel 1519 l’esploratore Ferdinando Magellano si imbarca dalla Spagna con cinque navi e più di duecento uomini alla volta delle Isole delle Spezie, in cerca di una più rapida via. Per arrivarci compirà un viaggio lungo tre anni attraverso gli oceani, e realizzerà un’impresa che rivoluzionerà la concezione geografica del mondo conosciuto: circumnavigare la terra per la prima volta nella Storia.