On 24 June 1497, the Genoese adventurer John Cabot, bearing letters patent from King Henry VII, became the first European known to have set foot in North America. (Cabot’s contemporary, Christopher Columbus, never actually landed in North America. To his dying day he thought it was the Orient.) Cabot’s triumphant appropriation of the “New Founde Land” for England capped one of the great maritime adventures of the late fifteenth century. Five hundred years later, the Matthew, a painstakingly constructed replica of Cabot’s three-masted caravel, sailed from Bristol, England, to Bonavista, Newfoundland. Her arrival marked the culmination of a maritime adventure as daring in its way as the voyage it commemorates. This time, however, the trials of the captain and sailors on board were recorded on camera and in reporters' notebooks for armchair onlookers to enjoy. Peter Firstbrook has been intimately involved in the recreation of Cabot’s voyage, from the laying down of the modern-day Matthew’s keel in 1993 to its sea trials in 1996 and the voyage itself in 1997. In these pages he relates all that is known about the fifteenth-century adventurer and describes the many challenges that confronted the team that set out to replicate his voyage. The book concludes, like Cabot’s own life, with a mystery: there is no record of how the great seafarer ended his days. He may have simply retired. He may have been lost in a storm on his last attempted voyage to America. Or he may, in fact, have returned to the newly discovered continent only to be murdered by a notorious Spanish buccaneer. This is a finely wrought story of adventure and discovery that will delight and entertain readers on both sides of the Atlantic.

A hilarious fictionalized retelling of the first international balloon flight.

Grade level: 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, e, i, s.

One of the most successful sailing stories ever written is Desperate Voyage by John Caldwell. Now, almost sixty years later, his wife Mary tells her own inspiring story. Born in England, Mary immigrated with her family to Australia where she spent her early youth on a farm. As a young woman, she served in the Australian Air Force. During the war she met Tex (future husband John Caldwell), a young cocky American who became the inspirational mainspring for her adventures. In 1952, after living in California for several years, Mary and John and their children became the first family to attempt a voyage around the world on a small sailing craft using only a sextant and dead reckoning to guide them across thousands of miles of ocean. Mary was pregnant at the beginning of the voyage and already had a toddler and an infant son in tow. Months would pass without sight of land. She gave birth to her youngest son in Tahiti, weathered constant seasickness and survived frightening ocean storms, several hurricanes, and a tsunami. Mary and John finally settled in the Grenadines where they built the world-renowned Palm Island resort. Mary's story of endurance and fearlessness is remarkable and inspiring.

In 1905, eight men from the California Academy of Sciences set sail from San Francisco for a scientific collection expedition in the Galapagos Islands, and by the time they were finished in 1906, they had completed one of the most important expeditions in the history of both evolutionary and conservation science. These scientists collected over 78,000 specimens during their time on the islands, validating the work of Charles Darwin and laying the groundwork for foundational evolution texts like Darwin's Finches. Despite its significance, almost nothing has been written on this voyage, lost amongst discussion of Darwin's trip on the Beagle and the writing of David Lack. In Collecting Evolution, author Matthew James finally tells the story of the 1905 Galapagos expedition. James follows these eight young men aboard the Academy to the Galapagos and back, and reveals the reasons behind the groundbreaking success they had. A current Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, James uses his access to unpublished writings and photographs to provide unprecedented insight into the expedition. We learn the voyagers' personal stories, and how, for all the scientific progress that was made, just as much intense personal drama unfolded on the trip. This book shares a watershed moment in scientific history, crossed with a maritime adventure. There are four tangential suicides and controversies over credit and fame. Collecting Evolution also explores the personal lives and scientific context that preceded this voyage, including what brought Darwin to the Galapagos on the Beagle voyage seventy years earlier. James discusses how these men thought of themselves as "collectors" before they thought of themselves as scientists, and the implications this had on their approach and their results. In the end, the voyage of the Academy proved to be crucial in the development of evolutionary science as we know it. It is the longest expedition in Galapagos history, and played a critical role in cementing Darwin's legacy. Collecting Evolution brings this extraordinary story of eight scientists and their journey to life.

In this edited selection of his journals, Matthew Flinders, Australia’s greatest navigator and the man who named our island continent, describes in captivating detail his epic mission to map our shores between 1796 and 1803.