Showing titles in Expeditions & Discoveries

A gripping and wholly original account of the epic human tragedy that was the great Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-98. One hundred thousand men and women rushed heedlessly north to make their fortunes; very few did, but many thousands of them died in the attempt. In 1897, the United States was mired...

Celebrated historian Diana Preston presents betrayals, escapes, and survival at sea in her account of the mutiny of the Bounty and the flight of convicts from the Australian penal colony. The story of the mutiny of the Bounty and William Bligh and his men's survival on the open ocean for 48 days and 3,618 miles has become the stuff of legend. But few realize that Bligh's escape across the seas was not the only open-boat journey in that era of British exploration and colonization.

Breaking All The Rules: The Inside Story of the New Race traces the origins of a second Space Race that began at the end of the original 1960s US-Soviet space race and eventually led to SpaceX and the explosive growth in commercial space being seen today. The story covers how this revolution began with a band of misfit engineers and scientists and the inside story of how this was eventually ignited with the money and vision of billionaires such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson.

In 2014, the wreck of HMS Erebus, the flagship of Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition to find the Northwest Passage, was discovered. Finding Franklin outlines the larger story and the cast of detectives that led to the discovery, solving one of the Arctic’s greatest mysteries. In compelling and accessible prose, Russell Potter details his decades of work alongside key figures in the era of modern searches for the expedition and elucidates how shared research and ideas have led to a fuller understanding of the Franklin crew’s final months.

The great unknown of the Southwest is conquered by a one-armed man and his crew of adventurers, placing the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon on the map of the American continent. It is a journey no human being had ever made before. Dangerous rapids, narrow canyon walls offering no escape, terrifying river waterfalls, capsized boats, near drowning, lost equipment and disillusioned men are dramatically described by John Wesley Powell, leader of this adventurous party.

Vilhjálmur Stefánsson left New York in April 1908 to begin his journey northwards and into the Arctic Circle. For the next two years, he made his way northwards to Victoria Island to study an isolated group of Inuit who still used primitive tools and had strong Caucasian features, and whom some believed were descended from Vikings. The journey into these remote areas was incredibly tough and being delayed by blizzards Stefánsson, along with his companions, were forced to eat the tongue of a beached whale that had been dead for at least four years.

What if humanity's most important invention wasn't the steam engine or the printing press, but a machine that you've never heard of, built by a man that history forgot? Eight billion people owe their lives to a man you've never heard of. In Forgotten, Jaime Dávila uncovers the astonishing true story of Cornelis Corneliszoon, a 16th-century Dutch tinkerer whose simple invention – the wind-powered sawmill – unleashed a chain reaction that built the modern world. Faster ships. Global trade. Stock markets. The Industrial Revolution.

In Cities of Gold: Legendary Kingdoms, Quixotic Quests, and Fantastic New World Wealth, Bill Yenne takes the listener from the rainforests and mountains of Peru, Paraguay, Brazil, and Guiana to the deserts and peaks of Mexico and the United States to tell the extraordinary, and often brutal story of how the search for mysterious New World riches fueled the exploration of an unknown hemisphere for hundreds of years.

The height of Mt. Everest was first measured in 1850, but the closest any westerner got to Everest during the next 71 years, until 1921, was 40 miles. The Hunt for Mt. Everest tells the story of the 71-year quest to find the world's highest mountain. It's a tale of high drama, of...

Triumphs and disasters in the deep sea This is a journey through time and water, to the bottom of the ocean and the future of our planet. 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...

Unfurling a tapestry of surprising and historically overlooked figures spanning forty centuries and six continents, historian Matthew Lockwood narrates lives filled with imagination and wonder, curiosity, connection, and exchange. Adventurers from every corner of the globe search for the unknown and try to understand it, remaking the world and themselves in the process. Exploration is for everyone who sets off into the unknown. It is the inheritance of all.

Shortlisted for the André Simon Food & Drink Book Award An intoxicating interconnected history of booze and medicine, from one of the world’s foremost cocktail writers. Consider the Negroni. The bittersweet cocktail dating to the early 1900s is made of equal parts gin, sweet vermouth and...

Het laatste boek van professor Stephen Hawking. Hoe is alles begonnen? Is er intelligent leven elders in het heelal? Kunnen we de toekomst voorspellen? Bestaat er een God? Wat zit er in een zwart gat? Zijn tijdreizen mogelijk? Zullen we overleven op aarde? Moeten we de ruimte koloniseren? Zal kunstmatige intelligentie slimmer worden dan wij? Hoe geven wij de toekomst vorm? De wereldberoemde wetenschapper en bestsellerauteur Stephen Hawking laat ons zijn laatste ideeën over de grootste vragen van het universum na in dit briljante postuum uitgegeven werk.

Perhaps the most famous – or as many would put it, infamous – of these naval corporations was the Dutch East India Company, also known as VOC. Established around the beginning of the 17th century, this nautical behemoth of a corporation was determined to squeeze everyone else out of the market. Vested with the power to wage war and exterminate any who dared stand in their way, the rest of the world stood by as the unstoppable force took over the whole of international maritime trade.

John Auden was a pioneering geologist of the Himalayas. Michael Spender was the first to survey the northern approach to the summit of Mount Everest. While their younger brothers - W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender - achieved literary fame, they vied for a place on an expedition that would finally conquer Everest, a quest that had become a metaphor for Britain’s efforts to maintain power over India. To this rivalry was added another: in the summer of 1938 both men fell in love with a painter named Nancy Sharp. Her choice would determine each man’s wartime loyalties.

Everybody imagines the world's most interesting man to be a fictional, gray-haired lothario who drinks Mexican beer and boasts of his legendary exploits. But what if a man like this really lived? It turns out he did, and there were two of them--both Victorian explorers.

Grab a warm blanket. This audiobook puts you right into the action of the life-and-death decisions made by early Antarctic explorers. It is filled with unforgettable stories about the challenges and decisions they faced on the ice. While we might not be pulling sledges across Antarctica in the early 1900s, this audiobook also reveals valuable lessons in leadership, teamwork, and sheer grit and determination that can help all of us make better decisions in our lives today.

From the late eighth century to somewhere around the middle of the 11th century, the history of Europe was dominated by the people who have become known as the Vikings. The Vikings were among the first global explorers who established territory that stretched from North America in the west to Constantinople in the east, and from the frigid wastes of the Arctic in the north to the warm shores of the Mediterranean Sea in the south.

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.

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: firstly the colonization by speakers of Austronesian languages of the western Pacific littoral, from around 3000 BC, of the Philippines, Indonesia, Micronesia and Melanesia; followed by the later settlement, by Polynesian peoples, of Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, Tahiti, the Marquesas, Easter Island and eventually New Zealand, up to AD 1250.