"A treasure of a book." (David McCullough)

The harrowing story of a pathbreaking naval expedition that set out to map the entire Pacific Ocean, dwarfing Lewis and Clark with its discoveries, from The New York Times best-selling author of Valiant Ambition and In the Hurricane's Eye.

A New York Times Notable Book

America's first frontier was not the West; it was the sea, and no one writes more eloquently about that watery wilderness than Nathaniel Philbrick. In his best-selling In the Heart of the Sea, Philbrick probed the nightmarish dangers of the vast Pacific. Now, in an epic sea adventure, he writes about one of the most ambitious voyages of discovery the Western world has ever seen - the US Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842.

On a scale that dwarfed the journey of Lewis and Clark, six magnificent sailing vessels and a crew of hundreds set out to map the entire Pacific Ocean and ended up naming the newly discovered continent of Antarctica, collecting what would become the basis of the Smithsonian Institution.

Combining spellbinding human drama and meticulous research, Philbrick reconstructs the dark saga of the voyage to reveal why, instead of being celebrated and revered as that of Lewis and Clark, it has - until now - been relegated to a footnote in the national memory.

Winner of the Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt Naval History Prize