Expeditions & Discoveries

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 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....

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....

David Grann retraces the footsteps of Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett and his followers as he unravels one of the greatest mysteries of exploration....

Published to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the moment that Howard Carter and Lord Carnavon broke open Tutankhamun’s tomb, a riveting account of the treasures they found, by one of Britain’s leading Egyptologists....

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....

The Plant Hunter's Atlas is a volume telling some of the most extraordinary tales of horticultural discovery and exploring the characters behind the stories....

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....

Follow bioarchaeologist Cat Jarman—and the cutting-edge forensic techniques central to her research—as she uncovers epic stories of the Viking age and follows a small ‘Carnelian’ bead found in a Viking grave in Derbyshire to its origins thousands of miles to the east in Gujarat....

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....

The conquistadores, the early explorers and settlers of Spanish America, have become the stuff of legends and nightmares. In their own time, they were glorified as heroic adventurers, spreading Christian culture and helping to build an empire unlike any the world had ever seen....

Fans of Sapiens will love this “fascinating forensic inquiry into human origins” (Kirkus), where a renowned paleontologist takes listeners behind the scenes of one of the most groundbreaking investigations into the origins of humankind....

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....

Desperate to beat the Russians into space, NASA put together a crew of the nation's most daring test pilots: the seven men who were to lead America to the moon. The first into space was Alan Shepard; the last was Deke Slayton, whose irregular heartbeat kept him grounded until 1975....

An almost forgotten moment in history, a story for our times, this is the true story of the mission to discover the shape of the Earth....

Without calculus, we wouldn't have cell phones, TV, GPS, or ultrasound. We wouldn't have unraveled DNA or discovered Neptune or figured out how to put 5,000 songs in your pocket....   

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....

From the author of the Magellan biography, Over the Edge of the World, a mesmerizing new account of the great explorer....

Beautifully written and full of wonderful descriptions and intriguing tales, In Patagonia is an account of Bruce Chatwin's travels to a remote country in search of a strange beast and his encounters with the people whose fascinating stories delay him on the road....

From award-winning writer Edward Wilson-Lee, this is a thrilling true historical detective story set in 16th-century Portugal....

Captain James Cook is one of the greatest maritime explorers of all time.... 

The saga of the Vikings rises and falls on the banks of history, ebbing and flowing with popular opinion and whimsical anecdotes. The Vikings are routinely typecast and labeled anywhere from bloodthirsty tyrants to valiant heroes. Listen to learn more....

On November 14, 1889, Nellie Bly, the crusading young female reporter for Joseph Pulitzer’s World newspaper, left New York City by steamship on a quest to break the record for the fastest trip around the world....

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....

An inspiring selection of hand-picked adventures, chosen by Ed Stafford. For those who don’t mind a bit of discomfort in order to experience the wilder side of our amazing planet.

In his book, Rasmus Rasmussen provides a full account of the Viking's [1893] journey from Norway to Chicago from a crew member's point of view.

In 1620, a group of English families, known now as the Pilgrims, were carried from England to the New World on the Mayflower. When the Mayflower finally showed up in America on November 21, 1620, it had 102 guests and a team of around 30 on board, and was anchored off Cape Cod. The Pilgrims, as opposed to their Puritan coworkers, chose to break away from the Church of England because of its Roman Catholic heritage and the church's hesitation to reform, requiring them to pray in private instead of in the church.

Captain James Cook FRS was a British explorer, navigator, cartographer, and captain in the Royal Navy who is most well-known for his three explorations to the Pacific Ocean, especially to Australia, between 1768 and 1779. Prior to finishing three trips to the Pacific, he drew precise maps of Newfoundland and made the first documented European encounter with the eastern coast of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands, and the first noted circumnavigation of New Zealand.

This is a bundle of titles that shows you historical facts about voyagers and explorers in history.

The Pleistocene spans a period from around 2.5 million years ago to just over 12,000 years ago, and it was an epoch of enormous change on Earth, mainly characterized by climate changes involving fluctuations between periods of extreme heat and long periods of glaciation. This period is commonly known as the Ice Age, despite the fact there were actually a number of separate periods of cold.