Chronicles the 1912 expeditions to Antarctica, including those by Robert Scott, Roald Amundsen, Nobu Shirase, Wilhelm Filchner, and Douglas Mawson. "Chris Turney shows how their discoveries marked the dawn of a new age in our understanding of the natural world. He makes use of original and exclusive unpublished archival material, and weaves in the latest scientific findings to show how we might reawaken the public's passion for discovery and exploration."...

In 1787 the Royal Navy ship HMS Bounty, captained by William Bligh, set sail for Tahiti in search of breadfruit plants. Soon after leaving Tahiti, Master's Mate Fletcher Christian led a successful revolt, setting Bligh and eighteen of his men adrift. In his journal, Boatswain's Mate James Morrison recounts the Bounty's voyage, placing considerable blame for the mutiny on Bligh's irascible personality and style of command.
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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. Until...

The Karluk set out in 1913 in search of an undiscovered continent, with the largest scientific staff ever sent into the Arctic. Soon after, winter had begun, they were blown off course by polar storms, the ship became imprisoned in ice, and the expedition was abandoned by its leader. Hundreds of miles from civilization, the castaways had no choice but to find solid ground as they struggled against starvation, snow blindness, disease, exposure—and...

"For a long time, most people believed that Christopher Columbus was the first explorer to 'discover' America--the first to make a successful round-trip voyage across the Atlantic. But in recent years, as new evidence has come to light, our understanding of history has changed. We know now that Columbus was among the last explorers to reach the Americas, not the first"--Jacket.

Admiral of the Ocean Sea is Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison's classic biography of the greatest sailor of them all, Christopher Columbus. It is written with the insight, energy, and authority that only someone who had himself sailed in Columbus' path to the New World could muster. Morison undertook this expedition in a 147-foot schooner and a 47-foot ketch, the dimensions of these craft roughly matching those of Columbus' Santa Maria and Niña.

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Describes the epic journey undertaken by Douglas Mawson, who suffered starvation, the loss of his team, and a crippling foot injury as he resorted to crawling back to base camp during the Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1913.

Brandt tells the fascinating whole story of the search for the Northwest Passage, from its beginnings early in the age of exploration through its development into a British national obsession to the final sordid, terrible descent into scurvy, starvation, and cannibalism.

"Naira de Gracia's The Last Cold Place offers a dramatic, captivating window into a once-in-a-lifetime experience: a season living and working in a remote outpost in Antarctica alongside seals, penguins, and a small crew of fellow field workers. In one of the most inhospitable environments in the world (for humans, anyway), Naira follows a generation of chinstrap penguins from their parents' return to shore to build nests from pebbles until the chicks...

A powerfully built man more than six feet tall, Amundsen's career of adventure began at the age of fifteen (he was born in Norway in 1872 to a family of merchant sea captains and rich ship owners). Twenty-five years later he was the first man to reach both the North and South Poles. The author, an adventurer and swimmer, author of Swimming to Antarctica, gives us in this new work a full-scale account of Amundsen's life and expeditions. We see Amundsen,...