"From the author of 1491--the best-selling study of the pre-Columbian Americas--a deeply engaging new history that explores the most momentous biological event since the death of the dinosaurs. 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. Columbus's voyages brought them back together--and marked the beginning...

A blend of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and Simon Winchester's Pacific, 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.
For more than a millennium, Polynesians have occupied the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean, a vast triangle stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island.

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"From New York Times bestselling author Hampton Sides, an epic account of the most momentous voyage of the Age of Exploration, which culminated in Captain James Cook's death in Hawaii, and left a complex and controversial legacy still debated to this day. On July 12th, 1776, Captain James Cook, already lionized as the greatest explorer in British history, set off on his third voyage in his ship the HMS Resolution. Two-and-a-half years later, on a...

Provides an account of the Shackleton expedition of 1914, during which explorer Ernest Shackleton and his crew of twenty-seven set out to cross the Antarctic continent on foot, only to have their ship, Endurance, break up eighty-five miles short of their destination, leaving them stranded for close to two years. Includes a photographic record of the adventure.

Capturing a crucial moment in the history of exploration the mid nineteenth-century romance with the Arctic, this book focuses on a particular expedition & its accompanying scholar-naturalist, Frasmus Darwin Wells. Through his eyes, we meet the Narwhal's crew & its commander-obsessed with the search for an open polar sea-& encounter the far-north culture of the Esquimaux. In counterpoint, we see the women left behind in Philadelphia, explorers only...

This book retraces the voyages of Captain James Cook, the Yorkshire farm boy who drew the map of the modern world. Captain James Cook's three epic journeys in the eighteenth century were the last great voyages of discovery. His ships sailed 150,000 miles, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, from Tasmania to Oregon, from Easter Island to Siberia. When Cook set off for the Pacific in 1768, a third of the globe remained blank. By the time of his violent...

"A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author of Where War Lives and expedition member describes how an unlikely combination of marine science and Inuit knowledge helped solve the mystery of the lost Franklin expedition of 1845."--NoveList. The spellbinding story of the greatest cold case in Arctic history--and how the rare mix of marine science and Inuit knowledge finally led to the recent discovery of the shipwrecks. Spanning nearly 200 years, this...

From the author of The Ice Master comes the remarkable true story of a young Inuit woman who survived six months alone on a desolate, uninhabited Arctic island
In September 1921, four young men and Ada Blackjack, a diminutive 25-year-old Eskimo woman, ventured deep into the Arctic in a secret attempt to colonize desolate Wrangel Island for Great Britain. Two years later, Ada Blackjack emerged as the sole survivor of this ambitious...

A simple account of Christopher Columbus' first voyage to America.

"Based on the author's exhaustive research, the incredible true story of the Greely Expedition, one of the most harrowing adventures in the annals of polar exploration. In July 1881, Lt. A.W. Greely and his crew of 24 scientists and explorers were bound for the last region unmarked on global maps. Their goal: Farthest North. What would follow was one of the most extraordinary and terrible voyages ever made. Greely and his men confronted every possible...