Showing titles in Expeditions & Discoveries

For thousands of years, we have set out sailing for all kinds of reasons - for battle, for infinite wealth, for the excitement of exploring the unknown, and for escape from the mundane. We have always had a primal relationship with the sea - even those who have never been to sea remain fascinated by the seafaring life and tales of salty adventure. Now in a brand–new series collection, The Best Sailing Stories Ever Told brings together such diverse authors as Charles Dickens, Jack London, John Masefield, Stephen Crane, Herman Melville, and dozens more.

In Voyagers, the distinguished anthropologist Nick Thomas charts the course of the seaborne migrations that populated the islands between the Americas and the western coast of Asia from late prehistory onwards: firstly the colonization by speakers of Austronesian languages of the western Pacific littoral, from around 3000 BC, of the Philippines, Indonesia, Micronesia and Melanesia; followed by the later settlement, by Polynesian peoples, of Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, Tahiti, the Marquesas, Easter Island and eventually New Zealand, up to AD 1250.

Acclaimed South African writer Darrel Bristow-Bovey has a deeply personal relationship with the story of Endurance and in this lyrical, loving journey into past and present, into humanity and the natural world, above and below the Antarctic ice, he revisits the famous story from a contemporary perspective, wondering why it seems to mean more today than ever before, and exploring our changing relationship with ourselves and the ice, and with our shared story of survival.

"Damron's subtle pacing manages the tension perfectly." —AudioFile on Empire of Ice and Stone "Listen to this if you want to hear a narrator at the top of his game recount a fascinating—and at times disturbing—true story of adventure, disaster, discovery, cannibalism, and more. Will Damron...

The Spanish Conquest: What really happened? If you like to use your drive time for education by audiobook, consider this audiobook for widening and deepening your view of an event you studied briefly in school - the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Conquistador Voices, neither glamorizes nor condemns the conquistadors. Somewhat in the manner of a modern film documentary, it treats the so-called conquest as an historical event that’s worth learning about for its own sake, with most of the moralizing left to the listener.

The companion volume to Ken Burns's PBS documentary film, with more than 150 illustrations, most in full color. In the spring of 1804, at the behest of President oThomas Jefferson, a party of explorers called the Corps of oDiscovery crossed the Mississippi River and started up the Missouri...

Published to coincide with the centenary of the first expeditions to reach the South Pole, An Empire of Ice presents a fascinating new take on Antarctic exploration. Retold with added information, it's the first book to place the famed voyages of Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, his British rivals Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton, and others in a larger scientific, social, and geopolitical context.

An exhilarating collection of letters and stories from the world-renowned Explorers Club, featuring firsthand accounts of crossing boundaries and making history over the past century For centuries, explorers from all over the globe have traveled the far reaches of what the world has to offer...

In a male-driven world, Bell managed to become one of the greatest policymakers the world has ever known; without her, the Middle East might very well be a much different place, and her influence in the territory gave her the nickname "Queen of the Desert". This biography tells the extraordinary story of one of the most adventurous and fascinating women you will ever encounter.

""GRIPPING. ... One of the greatest polar rescue efforts ever mounted."" —Wall Street Journal The riveting true story of the largest polar rescue mission in history: the desperate race to find the survivors of the glamorous Arctic airship Italia, which crashed near the North Pole in 1928...

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.

The original recounting of the events from Sir Francis Drake himself. Listen to Drake's piratical raid on the Spanish Main and the various battle and adventures therein.

On a cold, cloudy day in early February 1985, Shelley Wachsmann, then resident nautical archaeologist for the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums, drove to Kibbutz Ginosar, an agricultural settlement near the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Two brothers, avid amateur archaeologists, had found a boat buried in the lake, its outlines revealed by receding lake waters. The boat was "possibly ancient," according to the handwritten note placed on Wachsmann's desk a day or two before.

Huge international companies and corporations are a normal part of our everyday lives today. For most, their unimaginable wealth and power, rivaling even some of the smaller countries of the world, is something we take for granted. And we see them as the living embodiment of the capitalist system, regardless if we take it as a good or a bad omen. However, this wasn’t always the case.

Inspired by Wondery’s hit podcast Against the Odds—learn how to survive whatever nature can throw at you through gut-twisting true stories of survival on the brink How to Survive Against the Odds places you at the center of fifteen real life-or-death scenarios. Each story explores the...

Between 1896 and 1899, thousands of people lured by gold braved a grueling journey into the remote wilderness of North America. Within two years, Dawson City, in the Canadian Yukon, grew from a mining camp of four hundred to a raucous town of more than thirty thousand. The stampede to the Klondike was the last great gold rush in history. Scurvy, dysentery, frostbite, and starvation stalked all who dared to be in Dawson. And yet the possibilities attracted people from all walks of life.

The families behind America’s astronaut heroes are just like yours...sort of. This is the hilarious true story of one of those families. While many children grow up wanting to become an astronaut, Patrick Mullane grew up the child of one. In his memoir, The Father, Son, and Holy Shuttle: Growing Up an Astronaut’s Kid in the Glorious 80s, Mullane shares his hilarious coming-of-age story. It’s a story about his quirky and death-defying father, a mother with a secret, and a cast of characters from his extended family who showed their love for him in often bizarre ways.

In Polish: This is a story about the journey of two brothers who travelled through the largest river in the world on...bikes. But not ordinary bikes - they were "Amazonian” bikes. The story is as bodacious as the trip itself, which seemed like an unachievable madness, but turned out to be a great adventure and a valuable life lesson. For one of its heroes it was a dream come true, for another the last chance for salvation. The book is written by Piotr Chmieliński - the first person on Earth who sailed through the Amazon River in a kayak.

Canada’s greatest modern-day explorer sets out into the arctic wilderness to solve a mystery more than 100 years old. In November 1910, explorer Hubert Darrell vanished in the uncharted wilds of the Northwest Territories. A prospector who had been swept up in the Klondike Gold Rush, Darrell...

From the New York Times bestselling author of First Man comes a sweeping saga involving two extraordinary—and extraordinarily different—adventurers who have only one thing in common: the ambition to cross the Atlantic in a rowboat . . . alone. With gripping and insightful prose, James R. Hansen brings to life John Fairfax and Tom McClean's expeditions, from their battle with the elements to their own inner demons. Completely Mad is a nail-biting, epic tale of endurance, and listeners will be gripped until the end to find out who won.