Expeditions & Discoveries

In August of 1914, the British ship Endurance set sail for the South Atlantic. In October 1915, still half a continent away from its intended base, the ship was trapped, then crushed in the ice

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....

Douglas Mawson, born in 1882 and knighted in 1914, was Australia’s greatest Antarctic explorer.

National Outdoor Book Award-winning author Buddy Levy's presents a thrilling narrative of polar exploration via airship―and the men who sacrificed everything to make history.

Rising a kilometre out of the storm-scoured waters around Scotland’s Isle of Skye is a dark battlement of pinnacles and ridgelines: the Cuillin....

Between 1606 and 1688, while the British had their hands full with the Gunpowder Plot and the English Civil War, it was highly skilled Dutch seafarers who mapped the land masses....

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

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....

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....

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....

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

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

Five hundred years before Columbus, a Viking woman named Gudrid sailed off the edge of the known world. She landed in the New World and lived there for three years, giving birth to a baby before sailing home. Or so the Icelandic sagas say....

Captain Meriwether Lewis was hand-picked by President Thomas Jefferson to explore and acquire the American West...

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

Huge international companies and corporations are a normal part of our everyday lives today. For most, their unimaginable wealth and power, rivaling even some of the smaller countries of the world, is something we take for granted....

The year was 1915. Equipment and food supplies were totally inadequate. After battling its way for six weeks through thousands of miles of pack ice and located only a day's sail from its destination...

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....

The riveting inside story of three heroic astronauts who took on the challenge of mankind's historic first mission to the moon, from the best-selling author of Shadow Divers....

From best-selling author Simon Winchester comes the immense and thrilling story of the world's most mysterious and breathtaking natural wonder: the Atlantic Ocean....

The book is many things: a history, travelogue, a social documentary and an adventure story....

From tales of chivalrous knights to the barbarity of trial by ordeal, no era has been a greater source of awe, horror, and wonder than the Middle Ages....

Anyone who has heard of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air or has seen a recent photo of climbers standing in line to get to the top of Everest may think they have a sense of what the world’s highest mountain is like....

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