The Modern Explorers

Stories of the thrills and hardships faced by modern expeditions that continue to enhance our understanding of the world around us, now in a compact edition. This book profiles forty modern explorers who have disproved the idea that there is nowhere left to discover. Some are experienced and celebrated worldwide, while others are just starting to make their mark. The Modern Explorers delves into challenging and extraordinary expeditions to the remotest parts of the world by explorers from the United States, Australia, China, France, and beyond. Nine thematic sections cover all terrains: Polar, Desert, Rainforest, Mountain, Ocean, River, Under Sea, Under Land, and Lost Worlds. Written mainly by the explorers themselves, these accounts provide unique insight into what it is like to join an expedition, from being dragged through the top of the rainforest canopy in an inflatable raft suspended from a balloon to pedaling a boat across the Pacific to standing on the edge of an erupting volcano.

Stories of the thrills and hardships faced by modern expeditions that continue to enhance our understanding of the world around us, now in a compact edition. This book profiles forty modern explorers who have disproved the idea that there is nowhere left to discover. Some are experienced and celebrated worldwide, while others are just starting to make their mark. The Modern Explorers delves into challenging and extraordinary expeditions to the remotest parts of the world by explorers from the United States, Australia, China, France, and beyond. Nine thematic sections cover all terrains: Polar, Desert, Rainforest, Mountain, Ocean, River, Under Sea, Under Land, and Lost Worlds. Written mainly by the explorers themselves, these accounts provide unique insight into what it is like to join an expedition, from being dragged through the top of the rainforest canopy in an inflatable raft suspended from a balloon to pedaling a boat across the Pacific to standing on the edge of an erupting volcano.

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.

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.

There was a time when every voyage contained an element of the unknown. Today, however, the world spreads out before us carefully mapped and plotted. One must credit explorers with this transformation. Readers will devour these tales of explorers who have pushed geographic and personal boundaries, leaving virtually no corner of the globe off limits.

The brilliant new novel by the author of The Restraint of Beasts