South Expedition

As war clouds darkened over Europe in 1914, a party led by Sir Ernest Shackleton set out to make the first crossing of the entire Antarctic continent via the Pole. But their initial optimism was short-lived as ice floes closed around their ship, gradually crushing it and marooning twenty-eight men on the polar ice. Alone in the world's most unforgiving environment, Shackleton and his team began a brutal quest for survival.

For the first time ever Roland Huntford presents each man's account of the race to the South Pole in their own words. In 1910, Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen set sail for Antarctica, each from his own starting point, and the epic race for the South Pole was on. 2010 marks the centenary of the last great race of terrestrial discovery. For the first time Scott's unedited diary entries run alongside those of Amundsen and Bjaaland, never before translated into English.

Between 1539 and 1542, the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto led a small army on an expedition of almost four thousand miles across Southeastern America. De Soto's path had been one of history's most intriguing mysteries until the publication of Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun. Using a new route reconstruction, anthropologist Charles Hudson maps the story of the de Soto expedition, tying the route to a number of specific archaeological sites.

Here is the story of the infamous 1910 race to the South Pole, as told by its fearless yet desperate leader, Robert Falcon Scott. The New York Times called Scott's Last Expedition "A splendid record of heroism not soon to be forgotten."

This is a brilliant dual biography charting British Robert Scott's and Norwegian Roald Amundsen's race to the South Pole during 1911-12. Huntuford's is the accepted, definitive account of the race and a reassessment of the two men. Thoroughly researched, revealing the adventures and misfortunes that befell them both, he describes the driving ambitions of the era, and the complex, often deeply flawed individuals who were charged with carrying them out.

For many, the colonial story of Australia starts with Captain Cook's discovery of the east coast in 1770, but it was some 164 years before his historic voyage that European mariners began their romance with the immensity of the Australian continent. Between 1606 and 1688, while the British had their hands full with the Gunpowder Plot and the English Civil War, it was highly skilled Dutch seafarers who discovered and mapped the majority of the vast, unknown waters and land masses in the Indian and Southern Oceans.

Robert Falcon Scott and the men of his polar expedition were heroes of their age, enduring tremendous hardships to further the reputation of the empire they served. But they were also husbands, fathers, sons and brothers. Now for the first time, and with unprecedented access to family archives, Katherine MacInnes retells the story of the race for the South Pole from the perspective of the women whose lives would be forever changed by it, five women who offer a window into a lost age.

The year is 1680, in the heart of the Golden Age of Piracy, and more than 300 daring, hardened pirates—a potent mix of low-life scallywags and a rare breed of gentlemen buccaneers—gather on a remote Caribbean island. The plan: to wreak havoc on the Pacific coastline, raiding cities, mines, and merchant ships. The booty: the bright gleam of Spanish gold and the chance to become a legend. So begins one of the greatest piratical adventures of the era—a story not given its full due until now.

Meet married couple Chris and Marty. At midlife, they unexpectedly find themselves weighing the responsibility of parenthood against the possibility of one more grand adventure. After securing care for their 12-year-old son, they set off to undertake one of the hardest challenges on the planet: Ski 570 miles from the edge of Antarctica to the South Pole. With no guide or resupply. Riveting and inspiring, The Expedition is about the power of family and community, the adventurous spirit that dwells within us all, and breaking through to feel fully alive.

In Polish: A stunning story of the trailblazing expedition into the heart of the most dangerous jungle in the world, full of venomous snakes, jaguars, and sandflies which spread infections. This is were the legendary, cursed City of the Monkey God was supposed to be. Many years of expeditions didn't show any results, until Steve Elkins, a documentalist, discoverer, and laureate of the Emmy Award, managed to find the position of the mistery Pre-Columbian city thanks to the use of modern laser technology.

In the early years of the 18th century, a band of French scientists set off on a daring, decade-long expedition to South America in a race to measure the precise shape of the earth. Like Lewis and Clark's exploration of the American West, their incredible mission revealed the mysteries of a little-known continent to a world hungry for discovery. Scaling 16,000-foot mountains in the Peruvian Andes, and braving jaguars, pumas, insects, and vampire bats in the jungle, the scientists barely completed their mission.

The Darkest Jungle tells the harrowing story of America's first ship canal exploration across a narrow piece of land in Central America called the Darien, a place that loomed large in the minds of the world's most courageous adventurers in the nineteenth century. With rivals from England and France days behind, the 27-member U.S. expedition landed on the Atlantic shore at Caledonia Bay in eastern Panama to begin their mad dash up the coast-hugging mountains of the Darien wilderness.

If you like to use your drive time for education by audiobook, consider this book for widening and deepening your view of an event you studied briefly in school - the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Conquistador Voices, which relies more heavily than most works of this kind on first-person accounts, 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.

A fascinating tale from the 1800s of young boys who were unfortunately wrecked in the ship Charles Eaton, of London, and lived for several years with the natives of the South Sea Islands. The remainder of the passengers and crew of this ill-fated ship were most inhumanly murdered by the savages soon after they landed from the wreck.

Into the Frozen South, by Scout Marr, of the Quest. Originally published, September 1923, now in the public domain.

In 1910, Sir Robert Falcon Scott led a team of Englishmen racing to be the first people to reach the South Pole. Amidst frigid temperatures and raging winds, Scott and four others made it to the pole only to find that another team had gotten there first. Low on morale and facing ever-plunging temperatures, the trek home would prove a harrowing task.

In July 1776 a pair of Franciscan friars, Francisco Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre Velez de Escalante, were charged by the governor of New Mexico with discovering a route across the unknown Southwest to the new Spanish colony in California. They had other goals as well, some of them secret: converting the indigenous natives along the way to the true faith, discovering a semi-mythical paradise known as Teguayo, hunting for sources of gold and silver, and paving the way for Spanish settlements from Santa Fe to Monterey. In strict terms, the expedition failed.

Originariamente publicadas como folletín, en 1870, en el diario La Tribuna, las cartas que componen este libro son el particular relato de la expedición de Lucio V. Mansilla Tierra Adentro y de su encuentro con los indios ranqueles. Con una minuciosidad por momentos cercana a la obsesión, en ellas el autor toma nota de los detalles de la geografía pampeana y describe lúcidamente los hábitos, costumbres y comportamientos del mundo indígena, ese gran Otro de la literatura argentina.

El hombre tiende siempre a inventar utopías y a perseguir quimeras, ya desde la antigüedad territorios como la Atlántida o las Islas Afortunadas, habían sido visitadas por viajeros que traían descripciones de animales increíbles y tesoros infinitos, otro tanto pasaba con regiones como la India de la que se contaban también numerosas leyendas fantásticas que fueron confirmadas, en algunos casos, por hombres que estuvieron allí, las tropas de Alejandro Magno por ejemplo.

La historia que se esconde detrás de una de las mejores novelas de aventuras de todos los tiempos. En 1875, Henry Rider Haggard escribe Las minas del rey Salomón, probablemente una de las mejores novelas de aventuras de todos los tiempos. Muchos intuyen pero pocos conocen el correlato histórico que se oculta detrás de esta novela: la lucha entre colonos ingleses y holandeses contra las tribus africanas por el control de los recursos naturales y de los territorios.