Showing titles in Expeditions & Discoveries

The iconic ridge of the Black Cuillin on the Isle of Skye is the UK’s most challenging mountain range. Over 11 kilometres long and above 3,000 feet in places, the ridge contains 11 Munros and 16 other summits. In The Black Ridge, Simon Ingram offers a powerful distillation of the atmosphere, history and experience of the ridge: Britain’s ultimate mountain range.

In 1862, ambitious scientist James Glaisher set out to do the impossible: ascend higher into the skies than ever before to establish his groundbreaking research. Glaisher’s death-defying journey forms the story of the major motion picture The Aeronauts, starring Eddie Redmayne as Glaisher and Felicity Jones as his balloon companion, Amelia Wren. Written in his own words, The Aeronauts chronicles Glaisher’s incredible flights and discoveries first hand, as well as his observations on the pioneers who came before and inspired him.

On a chance visit to Plymouth Rock, Tony Horwitz makes an unsettling discovery. A history buff since early childhood, expensively educated at university - a history major, no less! - he's reached middle age with a third-grader's grasp of early America. In fact, he's mislaid more than a century of American history, the period separating Columbus' landing in 1492 from the arrival of English colonists at Jamestown in 160-something. Did nothing happen in between?

Who were the Vikings? Did they earn the reputation of remorseless raiders and greedy pirates? Where they more than the mere barbarians and plunderers that history makes them out to be? Find out the truth about the Vikings with History of Vikings: From The History of Rune Stones to Norse Mythology by Michael J. Stewart. Stewart takes you beyond rumor and speculation and into the real world of the Scandinavian seafarers known as the Vikings. You’ll get the true story, not an oversimplified Hollywood myth.

The Netherlands had a great century in the 1600s, until it all ended about three-fourths of the way along. Trading was all around; business was good. Their vast empire that reached across the world made money from spices, raw materials, metals, and so much more, with an extensive network of ships and merchants, and an entire army fleet. The Dutch Golden Era was a time in Dutch history varying from about 1588 (the start of the Dutch Republic) to 1672 (the "Catastrophe Year"), throughout which Dutch trade, science, and art, and the Dutch armed force, were amongst the world's best.

The confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers, now in Canyonlands National Park, near popular tourist destination Moab, still cannot be reached or viewed easily. Much of the surrounding region remained remote and rarely visited for decades after settlement of other parts of the West. The first US government expedition to explore the canyon country and the Four Corners area was led by John Macomb of the army's topographical engineers.

Situated about 25 miles off the Tanzanian coast, Zanzibar, with its sultans and spices, merchants and mosques, dhows and doorways of richly carved timber, has captured the imagination of travelers and writers for hundreds of years. It has long evoked a romantic mystique, calling up images of an island paradise in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. Its gleaming Muslim Swahili town, built of white coralline limestone, can trace approximately 1,000 years of maritime trading.

The Pleistocene spans a period from around 2.5 million years ago to just over 12,000 years ago, and it was an epoch of enormous change on Earth, mainly characterized by climate changes involving fluctuations between periods of extreme heat and long periods of glaciation. This period is commonly known as the Ice Age, despite the fact there were actually a number of separate periods of cold.

El Diario de navegación es el primer documento en español escrito en América y en él se usan por primera vez varios americanismos que luego formaron parte del vocabulario usual de este idioma. Esta versión cuenta con una introducción histórica del Mgtr. Javier Martínez, licenciado en letras con posgrado en lingüística, así como antropólogo con maestría en comunicación para el desarrollo. La intervención del Mgtr. Martínez facilita la comprensión del lector y expone el contexto socio-histórico del Diario de navegación.

John C. Frémont was the most celebrated explorer of his era. In 1842, on the first of five expeditions he would lead to the Far West, Frémont and a small party of men journeyed up the Kansas and Platte Rivers to the Wind River Range in Wyoming. At the time, virtually this entire region was known as the Great Desert, and many Americans viewed it and the Rocky Mountains beyond as natural barriers to the United States.

This narrative about the creation and early growth of the United Fruit Company comes across like an adventure novel. The author whisks the listener to Central America to experience the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of a group of visionaries who carved a commercial empire out of virtually uninhabited Central American tropical jungles. These American businessmen and the people who worked for them were the early pioneers. They overcame tropical disease, financial problems, weather, and other obstacles by innovation and sheer grit.

When Oxford archeologist Mensun Bound, dubbed the "Indiana Jones of the Deep" by the Discovery Channel, teamed up with a financier to salvage a sunken trove of 15th-century porcelain, it seemed a dream enterprise. The stakes were high: the Hoi An wreck lay hundreds of feet down in a typhoon-prone stretch of water off the coast of Vietnam known as the Dragon Sea.

What do you do when someone tells you, “It can’t be done”? Here is the extraordinary story of three people - an explorer, an engineer, and a statesman - who repeatedly proved critics and naysayers wrong. Roald Amundsen - the Norwegian explorer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel - the greatest engineer the world has ever seen, and Teddy Roosevelt - the cowboy turned statesman. Audacious Goals, Remarkable Results reveals the outsized risks and setbacks each faced in their quest to change the world.

Most people know that Britain was invaded by the Romans, by the Vikings, and by the Normans. Many will know about the Spanish Armada, launched by Philip II in 1588 to bring Protestant England to submission. But fewer people know that Philip launched a second armada in 1596 or that invasion plans were drawn up by the French in 1692, 1708, 1743, 1756, 1759, 1796, and 1801, and by the French together with the Spanish in 1779.

In his book, Rasmus Rasmussen provides a full account of the Viking's [1893] journey from Norway to Chicago from a crew member's point of view.

Die HMS Erebus war eines der wichtigsten Forschungsschiffe ihrer Zeit, ihre Expeditionen galten als bahnbrechend. Im Jahr 1848 verschwand sie spurlos in der Arktis - 2014 wurde sie gefunden. Dies ist ihre Geschichte - voller Aufbruchsgeist und Entdeckerlust, Abenteuer, Tragödien, Mut und Menschheitsgeschichte, mitreißend geschildert von niemand geringerem als Michael Palin: Monty-Python-Star, Weltreisender und begnadeter Erzähler.

"Come along on the trail with Jerry Ellis. You'll love every step of it."—Tony Hillerman (Tony Hillerman) "Jerry Ellis is an ideal companion for a long ramble along the back roads of America. . . . He introduces us to a collection of characters—some of them welcoming, some of them weird—that are too vivid for mere fiction."—Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles Times) "Ellis, like his Cherokee ancestors, treasures a good story. He writes lucidly, simply, about the people he met and the stories he was told. . . . He walked to discover himself and his ancestors; he came back with stories and...

Perhaps the most famous – or as many would put it, infamous – of these naval corporations was the Dutch East India Company, also known as VOC. Established around the beginning of the 17th century, this nautical behemoth of a corporation was determined to squeeze everyone else out of the market. Vested with the power to wage war and exterminate any who dared stand in their way, the rest of the world stood by as the unstoppable force took over the whole of international maritime trade.

Throughout Lewis and Clark for Dummies, you find out about Jefferson's western exploration from his earliest efforts to see the Corps assembled through the aftermath for the explorers, the tribes, and the United States. But the focus of Lewis & Clark for Dummies is on the period between Jefferson's confidential letter to Congress requesting dollars to mount a western exploration (January 18,1803) and the expedition's triumphant (and improbable) return to St. Louis (September 23, 1806): 42 months that changed the world.

This work covers Darwin's part in the second survey expedition of the ship HMS Beagle. It is both a travel memoir and a scientific field journal of anthropological, biological, and geological interest. Darwin conveys his fascination with the natural world in an engaging writing style.