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,...

Acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Winchester illuminates the men who toiled fearlessly to discover, connect, and bond the citizenry and geography of the U.S.A. from its beginnings and ponders whether the historic work of uniting the States has succeeded, and to what degree.

"Christopher Columbus is one of the most famous explorers of all time, but he was neither the first nor last adventurer to ever stumble upon a great discovery. From the Silk Road of Asia to the icy shores of Antarctica, our knowledge of the world today is in large part due to several intrepid pioneers, risking life and limb for the sake of exploration. After all, setting off into the dark unknown requires an enormous amount of bravery. But every explorer...

"It is 1950. London is still reeling from World War II, and Margery Benson -- a sensible schoolmarm and lonely spinster -- is just trying to get through life. But one day, she reaches her breaking point, abandoning her job and her tidy, circumscribed life, to set out on an expedition to the other side of the world in search of an insect that may or may not exist: the golden beetle of New Caledonia, Margery's childhood obsession ever since her father...

Maps and text depict major areas and routes of exploration from about 6000 B.C. to the present.

"For a long time, most people believed that Christopher Columbus was the first explorer to 'discover' America--the first to make a successful round-trip voyage across the Atlantic. But in recent years, as new evidence has come to light, our understanding of history has changed. We know now that Columbus was among the last explorers to reach the Americas, not the first"--Book jacket.

Kit, Zander, and M. K. West are settling into their new lives as students at the Academy for the Exploratory Sciences when Kit finds another mysterious map left for him by their father, the brilliant, famous--and presumed dead--explorer Alexander West. Why did Alexander leave the maps behind, and why are government agents so determined to seize them? What is really going on in a mysterious and unknown stretch of the Caribbean, famous for its violent...

Traces the epic journey of the Portuguese explorer who, five years after Columbus set sail, traveled around the southernmost tip of Africa to find a sea route to India.