Showing titles in 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. But for centuries, the Vikings have been seen through the eyes of others, distorted to suit the tastes of medieval clerics and Elizabethan playwrights, Victorian imperialists, Nazis, and more. None of these appropriations capture the real Vikings, or the richness and sophistication of their culture.

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. For five months, Sir Ernest Shackleton and his men, drifting on ice packs, were castaways in one of the most savage regions of the world. Lansing describes how the men survived a 1,000-mile voyage in an open boat across the stormiest ocean on the globe and an overland trek through forbidding glaciers and mountains.

Canada’s greatest modern-day explorer sets out into the arctic wilderness to solve a mystery more than 100 years old. In November 1910, explorer Hubert Darrell vanished in the uncharted wilds of the Northwest Territories. A prospector who had been swept up in the Klondike Gold Rush, Darrell...

The sea is the largest museum on earth, with more than a million lost ships resting in its depths. Those shipwrecks date back thousands of years, some from civilizations long vanished, others from more recent history. Some are famous, others obscure and unremembered but each has a story to tell. In The Great Museum of the Sea, archaeologist, museum director, television host, journalist, and award-winning author James Delgado takes the listener on a personal tour of the world's wrecks, including many of the more than a hundred lost ships he has personally discovered and investigated.

Food is never just food. Every bite carries history. Before the potato reached Europe, millions starved on failing grain harvests. Before coffee, there were no coffeehouses — and no Enlightenment debates that changed the course of ideas. Before sugar, there were no Caribbean empires, no transatlantic slave trade, no sweetness without suffering. 50 Foods That Changed the World takes you on a journey across every continent and every era of human civilization — from the wheat fields of ancient Mesopotamia to the sushi restaurants of modern Tokyo. Each of the fifty foods in these pages ...

You'll be awe-inspired by the heroic efforts of the crew of the Endurance, a ship that battled its way for six weeks through thousands of miles of pack ice while ironically only a day's sail from its destination.

At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait, The River of Doubt is the true story of Theodore Roosevelt’s harrowing exploration of one of the most dangerous rivers on earth. The River of Doubt—it is a black, uncharted tributary of the Amazon that snakes...

Saints and spies, pirates and philosophers, artists and intellectuals: They all crisscrossed the grey North Sea in the so-called "dark ages", the years between the fall of the Roman Empire and the beginning of Europe's mastery over the oceans. Now the critically acclaimed Michael Pye reveals the cultural transformation sparked by those men and women: the ideas, technology, science, law, and moral codes that helped create our modern world.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Band of Brothers and D-Day, the definitive book on Lewis and Clark’s exploration of the Louisiana Purchase, the most momentous expedition in American history and one of the great adventure stories of all time. In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson...

From the author of In the Hurricane's Eye and Valiant Ambition, the riveting and critically acclaimed bestseller and a major motion picture starring Chris Hemsworth, directed by Ron Howard. Chris Hemsworth, Cillian Murphy, Ben Whishaw, and Brendan Gleeson star in a film based on this National...

The Great Polar Fraud explores the history of the three men who claimed the pole, their claims, and the subsequent doubts of those claims, effectively rewriting the history of polar exploration and putting Amundsen center stage as the rightful conqueror of both poles.

Nineteen-year-old Mary Ann Patten and her husband, Joshua, were young and ambitious. Both from New England seafaring families, they had already completed their first clipper-ship voyage around the world with Joshua as captain. If they could win the race to San Francisco that year, their dream of building a farm and a family might be within reach. It would mean freedom. And the price of that freedom was one last dangerous transit―into the most treacherous waters in the world.

Richard Henry Dana called this book a "a voice from the sea". It had an influence on both Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville, both of whom sang its praises. Dana was a law student at Harvard College who decided, in 1834, to take a break from his studies in order to experience the "real world" by signing on as a common sailor for a two year voyage from Boston around Cape Horn to California. He kept a journal which he turned into a book after the voyage.

The #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, named one of the best books of the year by The Boston Globe and National Geographic: acclaimed journalist Douglas Preston takes readers on a true adventure deep into the Honduran rainforest in this riveting narrative about the discovery...

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. It describes the unprecedented engineering challenges that had to be overcome to create the mammoth Saturn V and the facilities to launch it. It takes you into the tragedy of the fire on Apollo 1, the first descent to the lunar surface, and the rescue of Apollo 13.

In the tradition of The Lost City of Z and Skeletons in the Zahara, Astoria is the thrilling, true-adventure tale of the 1810 Astor Expedition, an epic, now forgotten, three-year journey to forge an American empire on the Pacific Coast. Peter Stark offers a harrowing saga in which a band of...

A grand mystery reaching back centuries. A sensational disappearance that made headlines around the world. A quest for truth that leads to death, madness or disappearance for those who seek to solve it. The Lost City of Z is a blockbuster adventure narrative about what lies beneath the...

In the late 1890s, Edmund Dene Morel, a young British shipping company agent, noticed something strange about the cargoes of his company’s ships as they arrived from and departed for the Congo, Leopold II’s vast new African colony. Incoming ships were crammed with valuable ivory and rubber...

Every spice in your kitchen has a secret. Most of them involve war. Black pepper paid the ransom for a Roman city. Nutmeg drove a company to genocide. Vanilla was locked inside a single country for three centuries until a twelve-year-old enslaved boy discovered how to set it free. Saffron was guarded so jealously that adulterating it was punishable by death. 50 Spices That Shaped History takes you inside the stories behind civilization's most coveted flavors — from the ancient trade routes that made fortunes and broke empires, to the kitchens where the world's cuisines were transformed by...

Every drink tells a story. Some of them changed the world. Beer built the first cities. Tea triggered two wars and reshaped an empire. Rum was inseparable from the slave trade—and from the American Revolution. Champagne became humanity's universal signal that a moment deserves to be remembered. And Coca-Cola? It became the most recognized commercial brand in history, embraced and resisted by nations with the intensity reserved for things that truly matter. 50 Drinks That Changed the World takes you inside the stories behind civilization's most consequential beverages—from the ancient ...