Designed for Grade 8 students, Voyage to Discovery explores the development and growth of Newfoundland and Labrador from 1800 to present, analyzing and exposing those key elements and individuals that shaped this country into a province of Canada

A biography of the English explorer who set sail for Asia and eventually discovered Newfoundland. Chronicles the life of explorer John Cabot, describing his expeditions to the Orient and Newfoundland.

The sixth-century voyage of St Brendan from Ireland to America, is one of the most fascinating of all sea legends. Could the myth of the Irish monk and his crew sailing the Atlantic in a boat made of leather, nearly a thousand years before Columbus, have been reality? In 1976, Tim Severin and a crew of four men, set out to recreate the Brendan legend. Using the exact same methods in constructing their sailing vessel, they set out on their hazardous voyage, making it one of the most inspiring expeditions in the history of exploration.

The Voyage of John De Verazzano, written 1524, was a letter to King Francis the I of France by Giovanni (or John) da Verrazzano upon his exploration of North Carolina and the Pamlico Sound, which he thought was the entrance to the Pacific Ocean. His analysis resulted in one of many errors in the way North America was represented on a map; it was not fully and correctly mapped until the late 1800s. The letter, translated from its original Italian, provides an interesting insight into how the newly-discovered continent was viewed by explorers and other countries. Also included is an account, in Italian, of Verazzano's discovery of New York Harbor.GIOVANNI DA VERRAZZANO (1485-1528) was an Italian explorer of North America, the first European since the colonization of the Americas by the Norse colonies to explore the Atlantic coast. Born near Florence, he soon moved to France and started a career as a navigator, after which he was invited to explore North America by the French King Francis I. Throughout his years, he explored New York Harbor, Narragansett Bay, the coast of Maine, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, Florida, the Bahamas, and the Lesser Antilles. Verrazzano made a total of three trips, dying in 1528 after embarking on an island and being killed and eaten by the local Carib cannibals.

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 “thrilling adventure story" (San Francisco Chronicle) that brings to life the astronomers who in the 1700s embarked upon a quest to calculate the size of the solar system, and paints a vivid portrait of the collaborations, rivalries, and volatile international politics that hindered them at every turn. • From the author of Magnificent Rebels and New York Times bestseller The Invention of Nature. On June 6, 1761, the world paused to observe a momentous occasion: the first transit of Venus between the Earth and the Sun in more than a century. Through that observation, astronomers could calculate the size of the solar system—but only if they could compile data from many different points of the globe, all recorded during the short period of the transit. Overcoming incredible odds and political strife, astronomers from Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Sweden, and the American colonies set up observatories in the remotest corners of the world, only to be thwarted by unpredictable weather and warring armies. Fortunately, transits of Venus occur in pairs; eight years later, they would have another opportunity to succeed. Thanks to these scientists, neither our conception of the universe nor the nature of scientific research would ever be the same.

The letters and thoughts of Thomas Jefferson, members of the Corps of Discovery, their guide Sacagawea, and Captain Lewis's Newfoundland dog, all tell of the historic exploratory expedition to seek a water route to the Pacific Ocean.