For both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians, Captain James Cook is a figure of great historical significance. Non-Aboriginal histories of Australia generally regard Captain Cook as the person who discovered Australia, although historical records show that he was not the first European to step onto Australian shores. Contemporary Aboriginal accounts of Captain Cook that survive bear little relationship to this history upheld by non-Aboriginal...

List of Maps - Prologue: The Lost Century - PART I: DISCOVERY: 1. Vinland: First Contact - 2. 1492: The Hidden Half of the Globe - 3. Santo Domingo: The Columbus Jinx - 4. Dominican Republic: You Think There Are Still Indians? - PART II: CONQUEST: 5. The Gulf Coast: Naked in the New World - 6. The Southwest: To the Seven Cities of Stone - 7. The Plains: Sea of Grass - 8. The South: De Soto Does Dixie - 9. The Mississippi: Conquistador's Last Stand...

"1855: Virginia Reeve is summoned by an eccentric Brit with a compelling offer. Lady Jane Franklin wants her to lead a dozen women into the Arctic in search of the ships of her husband's lost expedition, and she's willing to pay handsomely. All four search attempts Lady Franklin has sponsored have failed. She has decided only a radical new approach can succeed: let women make the decisions. Lady Franklin will disavow all knowledge of the expedition...

Christopher Columbus's 1492 voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in search of a trading route to China, and his unexpected landfall in the Americas, is a watershed event in world history. Yet Columbus made three more voyages within the span of only a decade, each designed to demonstrate that he could sail to China within a matter of weeks and convert those he found there to Christianity. These later voyages were even more adventurous, violent, and ambiguous,...

"The outstanding new Fargo adventure from the #1 New York Times-bestselling author. Baffin Island: Husband-and-wife team Sami and Remi Fargo are on a climate-control expedition in the Arctic, when to their astonishment they discover a Viking ship in theice, perfectly preserved-and filled with pre-Columbian artifacts from Mexico. How can that be? As they plunge into their research, tantalizing clues about a link between the Vikings and the legendary...

The story of Daniel Boone is the story of America-its ideals, its promise, its romance, and its destiny. Bestselling, critically acclaimed author Robert Morgan reveals the complex character of a frontiersman whose heroic life was far stranger and more fascinating than the myths that surround him. This rich, authoritative biography offers a wholly new perspective on a man who has been an American icon for more than two hundred years, a hero as important...

"From the author of 1491--the best-selling study of the pre-Columbian Americas--a deeply engaging new history that explores the most momentous biological event since the death of the dinosaurs. More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed totally different suites of plants and animals. Columbus's voyages brought them back together--and marked the beginning...

"The true, harrowing story of the ill-fated 1913 Canadian Arctic Expedition and the two men who came to define it. In the summer of 1913, the wooden-hulled brigantine Karluk departed Canada for the Arctic Ocean. At the helm was Captain Bob Bartlett, considered the world's greatest living ice navigator. The expedition's visionary leader was a flamboyant impresario named Vilhjalmur Stefansson hungry for fame. Just six weeks after the Karluk departed,...

In the bestselling tradition of Hampton Sides's In the Kingdom of Ice, a riveting and cinematic tale of Dutch polar explorer William Barents and his three harrowing Arctic expeditions-the last of which resulted in a relentlessly challenging year-long fight for survival. The human story has always been one of perseverance-often against remarkable odds. The most astonishing survival tale of all might be that of 16th-century Dutch explorer William Barents...

In 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton sailed south aboard the Endurance to be the first to cross Antarctica. Shackleton's endeavor is legend, but few know the astonishing story of the Ross Sea party, the support crew he dispatched to the opposite side of the continent to build a vital lifeline of food and fuel depots. When the Ross Sea ship, the Aurora, broke free of her moorings and disappeared in a gale in 1915, she left ten men stranded on the continent...