Showing titles in Expeditions & Discoveries

In the spring of 1598 William Adams and a small band of skilled English mariners, including his brother, arrived at the port of Rotterdam to join a Dutch expedition intending to sail for the Spice Islands and Japan. The five ships that set sail were well-armed, for the plan was to emulate the voyage of Sir Francis Drake - to pass through the treacherous Magellan Strait, and then raid Spanish townships on the coast of Chile. Events turned out badly from the outset, however, as the fleet headed for disaster. Bad luck, sickness, and poor decision-making forced the fleet to over-winter in the ...

Si les Vikings ont abordé le continent américain bien avant lui, c'est indéniablement Christophe Colomb qui a ouvert à l'ouest la route d'un "Nouveau Monde". Pourquoi a-t-on utilisé, pour baptiser cette partie du monde, le prénom d'Amerigo Vespucci ? Alors même qu'il s'installe en Amérique, Stefan Zweig reconstitue l'enchevêtrement des circonstances, des hasards, des malentendus qui sont à l'origine de cette étrange erreur.

The people who have lived outside the boundaries of normal societies and refused to play by the rules have long fascinated the world, and nowhere is this more evident than the continuing interest in the pirates of centuries past. As the subjects of books, movies, and even theme park rides, people continue to let their imaginations go when it comes to pirates, with buried treasure, parrots, and walking the plank all ingrained in pop culture’s perception of them.

One of the most thrilling Times in American History was the Pony Express Trail stretching almost 2,000 miles from Missouri to California, where pony riders--orphans and teens were preferred for this demanding deadly job--carried mail on horseback and leaped from one animal to the next every 10-15 miles to cover 75-100 miles daily. The Pony Express, however, lasted less than two years, replaced by the trans-continental telegraph. Ellis, an adventurer since his own youth when he ran away from home thumbing from Alabama to New York, retraced the Pony Express Trail by foot, horse, covered wagon...

What is a royal family?

Ferdinand Magellan was unquestionably one of the more remarkable figures of the Age of Exploration, and given his fateful expedition, he has the era's most unique legacy. Today he is remembered as the first man to circumnavigate the globe, despite the fact he died thousands of miles away from Spain in the Philippines. It is also commonly overlooked that among the famous and historic expeditions in the early 16th century, Magellan's was by far the most dangerous, unique, and adventurous.

For almost 500 years, human beings have been finding ways to circle the Earth - by sail, steam, or liquid fuel; by cycling, driving, flying, going into orbit, even by using their own bodily power. The story begins with the first centuries of circumnavigation, when few survived the attempt: In 1519, Ferdinand Magellan left Spain with five ships and 270 men, but only one ship and 35 men returned, not including Magellan, who died in the Philippines. Starting with these dangerous voyages, Joyce Chaplin takes us on a trip of our own as we travel with Francis Drake, William Dampier, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, and James Cook.

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.

Everybody imagines the world's most interesting man to be a fictional, gray-haired lothario who drinks Mexican beer and boasts of his legendary exploits. But what if a man like this really lived? It turns out he did, and there were two of them--both Victorian explorers.

When Columbus first returned to Spain from the Caribbean, he dazzled King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella with exotic parrots, tropical flowers, and bits of gold. Inspired by the promise of riches, countless seafarers poured out of the Iberian Peninsula and wider Europe in search of spices, treasure, and land. Many returned with strange tales of the New World. Curiosity began to percolate through Europe as the New World’s people, animals, and plants ruptured prior assumptions about the biblical description of creation.

Swedish naturalist Peter Kalm traveled from 1748 to 1750 through the colonies of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and Quebec. As one of the students of Carl Linnaeus, inventor of the binomial nomenclature system, Kalm spent considerable time with the members of an international network of natural philosophers including Peter Collinson in London, Benjamin Franklin and John Bartram in Philadelphia, and the Jesuits in Quebec. Kalm identified plant life, and recorded how the colonists changed the landscape. He speculated on the geological forces that created the Hudson River Valley, may have ...

Expedition Leader, Mike Harris, gives a behind-the-scenes look at how he led a team of professional divers and filmmakers to Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, where they dove on American, German and Japanese warships that were sunk by atom bomb testing after WWII. 150-pages and 35 photographs provide a dramatic look at how they put dive equipment, two wet-subs and two decompression chambers on board a DC-6 named 'Bikini Gal', flew out to Majuro, capital of the Marshall Islands, and loaded it all onto an island freighter called the Mieco Queen. From Majuro they traveled to Wotje Atoll, ...

Travelling the circumference of the truly gigantic Pacific, Simon Winchester tells the story of the world's largest body of water and - in matters economic, political and military - the ocean of the future. The Pacific is a world of tsunamis and Magellan, of the Bounty mutiny and the Boeing Company. It is the stuff of the towering Captain Cook and his wide-ranging network of exploring voyages, Robert Louis Stevenson and Admiral Halsey.

The association of the name James Cook with ideas of seafaring adventure and discovery is truly an indelible one. In this audiobook, we will explore the life of James Cook from his birth in 1728 in a humble Yorkshire village all the way to his death on the newly discovered Sandwich Islands - today known as Hawaii - in 1779.

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.

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.

Discover the untold stories behind history's most bizarre, chilling, and unsolved mysteries in You Won't Believe This Actually Happened. This captivating collection takes you on a journey through time, exploring the strange and enigmatic events that have confounded experts, sparked endless debate, and fueled the imaginations of people around the world. From the eerie disappearance of the Somerton Man to the puzzling codes of the Voynich Manuscript, from the mysterious Taos Hum to the tragic fate of the Dyatlov Pass hikers, each chapter delves into a different mystery, unraveling the facts, ...

From a cabin boy on a China Tea Clipper to a titan of the shipping industry, Olaf Sorenson's life was a saga of resilience and cunning. Fleeing an abusive father at fifteen, Olaf braved the treacherous seas from Europe to the Far East, and ultimately to Japan. Drugged, robbed and left for dead, he was abandoned by his ship. Overcoming this, he built a shipping empire across the Western Pacific, weathering two world wars. He outwitted the Japanese army in Singapore, where his capture led to a daring escape. During his temporary exile in Malaysia, he formed a partnership with General Douglas ...

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.

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.