Expeditions & Discoveries

In August of 1914, the British ship Endurance set sail for the South Atlantic. In October 1915, still half a continent away from its intended base, the ship was trapped, then crushed in the ice

A sweeping, authoritative history of 16th-century Spain and its legendary conquistadors, whose ambitious and morally contradictory campaigns propelled a small European kingdom to become one of the formidable empires in the world....

Meriwether Lewis and his partner, William Clark, endured incredible hardships and witnessed astounding sights on their 1803 cross-country trip to unexplored West....

The River of Doubt brings alive extraordinary events in a powerful nonfiction narrative thriller that happens to feature one of the most famous Americans who ever lived....

Long before books were mass-produced, hand-copied scrolls made from Nile River reeds were the treasures of the ancient world. Emperors and pharaohs, determined to possess them, dispatched emissaries to the edges of the known world to bring them back.

On May 24, 1869 a one-armed Civil War veteran, John Wesley Powell, and a ragtag band of nine mountain men embarked on the last great quest in the American West. The Grand Canyon, not explored before, was as mysterious as Atlantis - and as perilous....

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....

The true survival story of an early polar expedition that went terribly awry—with the ship frozen in ice and the crew trapped inside for the entire sunless, Antarctic winter....

Since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White City....

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 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....

National Outdoor Book Award-winning author Buddy Levy's presents a thrilling narrative of polar exploration via airship―and the men who sacrificed everything to make history.

In April 1970, during the glory days of the Apollo space program, NASA sent Navy Captain Jim Lovell and two other astronauts on America's fifth mission to the moon. Only 55 hours into the flight of Apollo 13, disaster struck: a mysterious explosion rocked the ship....

For millennia the location of the Nile River’s headwaters was shrouded in mystery. In the 19th century, there was a frenzy of interest in ancient Egypt. At the same time, European powers sent off waves of explorations intended to map the unknown corners of the globe....

In 1519 Magellan and his fleet of five ships set sail from Seville, Spain, to discover a water route to the fabled Spice Islands in Indonesia, where the most sought-after commodities flourished....

They came on foot and by horseback, in wagons and on rafts, singly and by the score, restless, adventurous, enterprising, relentless, seeking a foothold on the future. European immigrants and American colonists, settlers and speculators, soldiers and missionaries, fugitives from justice....

In Into the Ice, Mark and his crew race against time and treacherous storms in search of answers to the greatest mystery of all time: What is it that drives someone to risk it all in the name of exploration?

Douglas Preston, the #1 bestselling author of The Lost City of the Monkey God, presents this collection of the most jaw-dropping true stories from his career as a journalist and explorer....

"Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"....

Henry Morgan challenged the greatest empire on earth with a ragtag bunch of renegades and brought it to its knees. This is the real story of the pirates of the Caribbean....

In 1810, John Jacob Astor sent out two advance parties to settle the wild, unclaimed western coast of North America....

In the best-selling tradition of Bill Bryson and Tony Horwitz, Rinker Buck's The Oregon Trail is a major work of participatory history....

The mesmerizing, larger-than-life tale of an eccentric adventurer who traversed some of the greatest frontiers of the twentieth century, from uncharted Arctic wastelands to the underground resistance networks of World War II....

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....

For lovers of history, nature, and adventure, the stunning true story of Theodore Roosevelt’s sons and their 1929 Himalayan expedition to prove the existence of the beishung, the panda bear, to the western world, from the New York Times bestselling author of Rise of the Rocket Girls.