Over 300 entries, 50 maps, and 170 photographs.

Relates the enterprises and discoveries of twelve explorers, including Vasco da Gama, Captain James Cook, and Roald Amundsen.

Provides twenty-two step-by-step projects to help readers learn about the explorers that discovered America and their voyages.

A biography of the Italian explorer who, in the fifteenth century, became the first European to discover the West Indies islands, located below the southernmost tip of the United States, in three historic voyages sponsored by Spain's monarchy.

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.

A biography of the Portuguese sea captain who commanded the first expedition that sailed around the world, thus providing the first positive proof that the earth is round.

From early mountain men searching for routes through the Rockies to West Point soldier-engineers conducting topographical expeditions, the exploration of the American West mirrored the development of a fledgling nation. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning Exploration and Empire, William H. Goetzmann analyzes the special role the explorer played in shaping the vast region once called "the Great American Desert." According to Goetzmann, the exploration of the West was not a haphazard series of discoveries, but a planned - even programmed - activity in which explorers, often armed with instructions from the federal government, gathered information that would support national goals for the new lands. As national needs and the frontier's image changed, the West itself was rediscovered by successive generations of explorers, a process that in turn helped shape its culture. Nineteenth-century western exploration, Goetzmann writes, can be divided into three stages. The first, beginning with the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804, was marked by the need to collect practical information, such as the locations of the best transportation routes through the wilderness. Then came the era of settlement and investment - the drive to fulfill the Manifest Destiny of a nation beginning to realize what immense riches lay beyond the Mississippi. The final stage involved a search for knowledge of a different kind, as botanists and paleontologists, ethnographers and engineers hunted intensively for scientific information in the "frontier laboratory." This last phase also saw a rethinking of the West's place in the national scheme; it was a time of nascent conservation movements and public policy discussions aboutthe region's future. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, Goetzmann offers a masterful overview of the opening of the West, as well as a fascinating study of the nature of exploration and its consequences for civilization.

Presents 322 men and women whose journeys shaped the modern world.

Discoverers and Explorers is a book by Edward R. Shaw. It provides an overview of past explorations and discoveries, made by some of the most influential explorers in European history.