Expedition History

Some 70 years before the Mayflower sailed, a small group of English merchants formed the world's first joint-stock company. Back then, in the mid-16th century, England was a small and relatively insignificant kingdom on the periphery of Europe. Struggling with a single export - woolen cloth - the merchants were forced to seek new markets and trading partners. As this absorbing account shows, innovation and risk-taking were at the heart of the settlement of America, as was the profit motive.

During the height of the roaring '20s, Jessie Miller longs for adventure. Fleeing a passionless marriage in the backwaters of Australia, 23-year-old Jessie arrives in London and promptly falls in with the Bright Young Things, those gin-soaked boho-chic intellectuals draped in suits, flapper dresses, and pearls. At a party Jessie meets Captain William Lancaster, married himself and fresh from the Royal Air Force, with a scheme in his head to become as famous as Charles Lindbergh, who has just crossed the Atlantic. Lancaster will do Lindy one better: fly from London to Melbourne, and in Jessie Miller he’s found the perfect co-pilot.

It was 1928: a time of illicit booze, of Gatsby and Babe Ruth, of freewheeling fun. The Great War was over, and American optimism was higher than the stock market. What better moment to launch an expedition to Antarctica, the planet's final frontier? The night before the expedition's flagship launched, Billy Gawronski - a skinny, first-generation New York City high schooler desperate to escape a dreary future in the family upholstery business - jumped into the Hudson River and snuck aboard. Could he get away with it?

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.

In 1690, a dramatic account of piracy was published in Mexico City. The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez described the incredible adventures of a poor Spanish-American carpenter who was taken captive by British pirates near the Philippines and forced to work for them for two years. After circumnavigating the world, he was freed and managed to return to Mexico, where the Spanish viceroy commissioned the well-known Mexican scholar Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora to write down Ramírez's account as part of an imperial propaganda campaign against pirates.

On Christmas Eve 2013, off the coast of East Antarctica, an abrupt weather change trapped the Shokalskiy - the ship carrying earth scientist Chris Turney and 71 others involved in the Australasian Antarctic Expedition - in a densely packed armada of sea ice, 1400 miles from civilization. With the ship's hull breached and steerage lost, the wind threatened to drive the vessel into the frozen continent, smashing it to pieces.

Published just seven weeks after the killing of Jesse James, this volume gives the full particulars of each and every dark and desperate deed in the career of this most noted outlaw of any time or nation! The facts and incidents contained herein were dictated to the author by the bandit's wife and his mother, to ensure that every secret act, every hitherto unknown incident, every crime, and every motive was truthfully disclosed!

The most seminal event of the last millennium might also be its most controversial. As schoolchildren have been taught for over 500 years, "In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue." In October of that year, the Italian Christopher Columbus immortalized himself by landing in the New World and beginning the process of European settlement in the Americas for Spain, bringing the Age of Exploration to a new hemisphere with him.

Blood Rubber: How the Amazon Died tells the extraordinary story of one of the blackest episodes in Amazonian history, known as the Putumayo Affair. In 1907, Walter Hardenburg, a young American explorer and engineer, was canoeing slowly down a meandering tributary of the great river, in deepest Amazonia, in search of adventure. The realm of Captain Kurtz’s Apocalypse Now seems tame by comparison with what he found through the mist up ahead.

Human flight is one of the last great challenges on Earth. Not like how the Wright brothers flew, but how we fly in our dreams. This is the goal of the Wingsuit Landing Project: to soar through the sky at speeds up to one hundred miles per hour and to land without the aid of a parachute. This project is the creation of 37-year-old Jeb Corliss, Jr., a Southern Californian who seeks to emulate a mode of flight more like a flying squirrel than bird or plane.

When interpreter Toussaint Charbonneau, and his Shoshone Indian wife, Sacagawea, joined the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804, they headed into country largely unknown to them, as it was to Thomas Jefferson's hand-picked explorers. There is little doubt as to the importance of Sacagawea's presence on the journey. She has become a near-legendary figure for her role as interpreter, guide, and "token of peace". Toussaint, however, has been maligned in both fiction and nonfiction alike.

A visit to the Palace of Knossos in Crete in 2005 leads to the story of the fabled Ring of Minos, lost for 2,000 years but rediscovered in the 1930s, now in the local museum of Herakleon. The author joins the tour of the ancient Minoan palace and adds historical reference to this detailed study of a great and vanished culture.

Many have believed that Atlantis was a fiction created by Plato. Well Plato was not the first to write about it. We have found a very much earlier document. It was written in 9619 BC, about 9,250 years before Plato's writing. Further, we have assembled enough evidence in terms of archeological finds and scientific facts to provide convincing proof that Atlantis really did exist. And we have found the remains. We structure the evidence to answers 3 basic questions: how was it created; did it leave evidence; how was it destroyed?

The exciting narrative begins in 1822, when Jedediah Smith ascended the Missouri River in the first fur-trading expedition of William H. Ashley and Andrew Henry, and ends in 1831, when he was killed by Comanche Indians on the Cimarron River.

In 1826, when the story begins, the region was claimed by both Mexico and the United States. Neither country knew much about the lands crossed by such rivers as the Guadalupe, Brazos, Nueces, Trinity, and Rio Grande. Jean Louis Berlandier, a French naturalist, was part of a team sent out by the Mexican Boundary Commission to explore the area. His role was to collect specimens of flora and fauna and to record detailed observations of the landscapes and peoples through which the exploring party traveled.

This audio-article explores the idea that L'Anse aux Meadows could be the gateway to the Viking Vinland settlement mentioned in the Scandinavian sagas and possibly founded by Leif Ericson. L'Anse aux Meadows is still the only widely accepted evidence of pre-Columbian contact with North America.

Galileo Galilei grew up in a time when nearly everyone thought the Earth was the center of the universe and the Sun and the planets revolved around the Earth. His intellectual world was dominated by the work of the ancient philosopher Aristotle. Science as we know it today was just starting to emerge from the dark ages and it was blended with religion so that the two at were hard to distinguish between. Galileo's work included a radial improvement in a parlor toy called a spyglass.

An exciting new audiobook on the greatest explorers in history and how their discoveries shaped the modern world. Whether it is Rabban Bar Sauma, the 13th-century Chinese monk commissioned by the Mongols to travel West form a military alliance against the Islam; Marco Polo, who opened a window to the East for Europe; or Captain James Cook, whose maritime voyages of discovery created the global economy of the 21st century, each of these explorers had an indelible impact on the modern world. This audiobook will look at the 11 greatest explorers in history.

Rife with captivating details of survival in an icy wilderness, this reimagining of the famous 1910 expedition to the South Pole, told in Cherry's voice, is an unforgettable tale of courage and camaraderie.

Marco Polo (1254-1324) is an instantly recognizable name, and he is known for his travels, but it's safe to say that his influence and importance has been greatly overlooked in the nearly 700 years since he died. Born in Venice, Marco Polo was in a fortuitous position to participate in trade. He followed in the footsteps of his own family, setting off for Asia with his well-traveled father and uncle. They would not return to Venice for 24 years. When they came back, they had allegedly traveled about 15,000 miles.