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Penetrating biographies written by a group of distinguished travel writers, broadcasters, and historians reveal the lives, motives, and passions of forty major explorers in history. It has always been mankind’s gift, or curse, to be inquisitive, and through the ages people have been driven to explore the limits of the worlds known to them—and beyond. Here are the stories of forty of the world’s greatest explorers from Europe, America, Asia, and Australia. These are men and women who changed our perception of the world through their courageous adventures. Organized thematically, the book opens with the oceanic journeys of five hundred years ago, when the great era of recorded exploration began. The following sections look at The Land, Rivers, Polar Ice, Deserts, Life on Earth, and New Frontiers. Many of these explorers recounted their journeys in vivid firsthand accounts; others were superb artists or photographers. The book features quotes from their journals and reports, and it is illustrated with paintings, photographs, engravings, and maps, so that we can experience their adventures through their own eyes and in their own words. Featured explorers include: Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, James Cook, Lewis and Clark, Richard Burton, Samuel de Champlain, David Livingstone, Roald Amundsen, Gertrude Bell, Alexander von Humboldt, Yuri Gagarin, and Jacques-Yves Cousteau.

"Travel back in time and meet the explorers! Who was Leif Erikson? What did Christopher Columbus discover? When was the moon landing? Find the answers to these questions and more with interactive flaps that bring history to life. Don't just read about the explorers ... meet them!"--Page 4 of cover

There are few thrills as exciting as weather at its worst. We often hear on the news that the day was the hottest, coldest, wettest, or snowiest on record. Is the climate really becoming more extreme as a result of global warming? The facts are in this book. Extensively illustrated with colour photographs of some of the most extreme weather ever captured on camera, more than fifty colour maps, and tables of weather records for over three hundred U.S. cities, this book is both an entertainment and an indispensable reference. Also included are historical examples of some of the more bizarre weather events observed: heat bursts, electrified dust storms, snow rollers, pink snowstorms, luminous tornadoes, falls of fish and toads, ball lightning, super bolts, and other strange meteorological events. Here's the must-have book for Weather Channel and Guinness Book of World Records fans.

A fun, informative, chronological guide to the history of world explorers. This book begins with the ancient explorers, such as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, and includes the reasons behind exploration, and how technology and exploration have gone hand-in-hand throughout history.

Marco Polo, Ferdinand Magellan, David Livingstone, Amelia Earhart, Neil Armstrong: these are some of the greatest travellers of all time. This book chronicles their stories and many more, describing epic voyages of discovery from the extraordinary migrations out of Africa by our earliest ancestors to the latest voyages into space. In antiquity, we follow Alexander the Great to the Indus and Hannibal across the Alps; in medieval times we trek beside Genghis Khan and Ibn Battuta. The Renaissance brought Columbus to the Americas and the circumnavigation of the world. The following centuries saw gaps in the global maps filled by Tasman, Bering and Cook, and journeys made for scientific purposes, most famously by von Humboldt and Darwin. In modern times, the last inhospitable ends of the earth were reached including both poles and the world's highest mountain and new elements were conquered. With evocative photographs, paintings and portraits, The Great Journeys in History reveals the stories of those who were there first, who explored the unexplored and who set out into the unknown, bringing alive the romance and thrill of travel.

Describes the adventures of the seventeenth-century English explorer, from his search for a short route from Europe to the Orient to his mysterious disappearance after members of his crew mutinied.