The cabin boy on the "Santa Maria" keeps a diary which records his experiences when he sails with Columbus on his first voyage to the New World in 1492.

"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 and his crew of sixteen, who ventured farther north than any Europeans before and, on their third polar exploration, lost their ship off the frozen coast of Nova Zembla to unforgiving ice. The men would spend the next year fighting off ravenous polar bears, gnawing...

"An exploration of humanity's relationship with ice since the dawn of civilization, Of Ice and Men reminds us that only by understanding this unique substance can we save the ice on our planet--and perhaps ourselves. Ice tells a story. It writes it in rock. It lays it down, snowfall by snowfall at the ends of the earth where we may read it like the rings on a tree. It tells our planet's geological and climatological tale. Ice tells another story too:...

After months of seclusion following a tragic accident, journalist Michael Wolfe accepts an assignment in Antarctica, where the scientists and explorers from a South Pole research station stumble upon two bodies at the bottom of the ocean.

Herbert Eugene Bolton, who was well-known for his books on the Southwest and Spanish Americas, here recounts in detail Francisco Vasquez de Coronado's sixteenth-century entrada to the North American frontier of the Spanish Empire. In retracing Coronado's route, Professor Bolton-with access to new information-was able to relive the experiences of the original exploration. Originally published in 1949, he brings fresh insight and profound knowledge...

Was an advanced civilization lost to history in the global cataclysm that ended the last Ice Age? Graham Hancock has made it his life's work to find out -- and in America Before, he draws on the latest archaeological and DNA evidence to bring his quest to a stunning conclusion. We've been taught that North and South America were empty of humans until around 13,000 years ago -- amongst the last great landmasses on earth to have been settled by our...

Introduces the lives, actions, and impact of the Spanish explorers of the Americas, who were known as the conquistadors.

On May 24, 1869, a one-armed Civil War veteran named John Wesley Powell and a ragtag band of nine mountain men embarked on the last great quest in the American West. No one had ever explored the fabled Grand Canyon; to adventurers of that era it was a region almost as mysterious as Atlantis -- and as perilous. The ten men set out down the mighty Colorado River in wooden rowboats. Six survived. Drawing on rarely examined diaries and journals, Down...

In 1898, a Minnesota farmer uprooted a large stone covered with mysterious runes allegedly dating back to 1362. Initially thought to be a hoax, new evidence suggests the find could be real, and a clue that the Knights Templar discovered America 100 years before Columbus, perhaps bringing with them the Holy Grail. Follow the clues as experts use erosion studies on the rune stone and match symbols in Templar ruins all over Europe to support this theory....