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Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe
Laurence Bergreen · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Man Who Ate His Boots: The Tragic History of the Search for the Northwest Passage
Anthony Brandt · 464 pages
The enthralling and often harrowing history of the adventurers who searched for the Northwest Passage, the holy grail of nineteenth-century British exploration.After the triumphant end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the British took it upon themselves to complete something they had been trying to do since the sixteenth century: find the fabled Northwest Passage, a shortcut to the Orient via a sea
Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival
Peter Stark · 368 pages
In 1810, John Jacob Astor sent out two advanced parties to settle the wild, unclaimed western coast of North America. More than half of his men died violent deaths. The others survived starvation, madness, and greed to shape the destiny of a continent. At a time when the edge of American settlement barely reached beyond the Appalachian Mountains, two visionaries, President Thomas Jefferson and mil
The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition
Caroline Alexander · 224 pages
In August 1914, days before the outbreak of the First World War, the renowned explorer Ernest Shackleton and a crew of twenty-seven set sail for the South Atlantic in pursuit of the last unclaimed prize in the history of exploration: the first crossing on foot of the Antarctic continent. Weaving a treacherous path through the freezing Weddell Sea, they had come within eighty-five miles of their de
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
Nathaniel Philbrick · 320 pages
In 1819, the 238-ton Essex set sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage to hunt whales. Fifteen months later, the Essex was rammed and sunk by an enraged sperm whale.
Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World: The Extraordinary True Story of Shackleton and The Endurance
Jennifer Armstrong · 139 pages
A very comprehensive account of one of the most important scientific and cultural expeditions in the western world--the third exploration of Antarctica, in 1914. This text captures the emotions, strengths and weaknesses of the 28-man crew as individuals, their trials and conflicts, and gives an excellent account of the difficulties that through collective will they conquered. The conditions they f
In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette
Hampton Sides · 480 pages
A dramatic account of the ill-fated 19th-century naval expedition to the North Pole cites the contributions of German cartographer August Peterman, New York Herald owner James Gordon Bennett and famed naval officer George Washington De Long in the team's efforts to survive brutal environmental conditions.
Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage
Alfred Lansing · 282 pages
Bound for Antarctica, where polar explorer Ernest Shackleton planned to cross on foot the last uncharted continent, the Endurance set sail from England, in August 1914. The ship became locked inside an island of ice, and was later crushed. This tale of survival by Shackleton and all 27 of his men for over a year on the ice-bound Antarctice seas defined heroism.
Batavia's Graveyard
Mike Dash · 399 pages
From the bestselling author of Tulipomania comes Batavia's Graveyard, the spellbinding true story of mutiny, shipwreck, murder, and survival.It was the autumn of 1628, and the Batavia, the Dutch East India Company's flagship, was loaded with a king's ransom in gold, silver, and gems for her maiden voyage to Java. The Batavia was the pride of the Company's fleet, a tangible symbol of the world's ri
The Story of the Titanic As Told by Its Survivors
Lawrence Beesley, Archibald Gracie · 320 pages
Neptune's Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire
Julian Sancton · 384 pages
Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley and Livingstone
Martin Dugard · 340 pages
Describes the disappearance of explorer Dr. David Livingstone while searching for the source of the Nile River, journalist Henry Morton Stanley's search for him, and the individual journeys of the two men through uncharted Africa.
The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea
Sebastian Junger · 256 pages
It was the storm of the century, boasting waves over one hundred feet high --- a tempest created by so rare a combination of factors that meteorologists deemed it "the perfect storm." When it struck in October 1991, there was a virtually no warning. "She's comin; on, boys, and she's comin' on strong." radioed Captain Billy Tyne of the Andrew Gail off the coast of Nova Scotia, and soon afterward th
Kon-Tiki: Across The Pacific In A Raft
Thor Heyerdahl · 239 pages
Presents the Kon-Tiki expedition led by explorer Thor Heyerdahl as he and his crew travel from South America and Polynesia on a raft made from balsa wood.
A Night to Remember
Walter Lord · 209 pages
She was the world's biggest-ever ship. A luurious miracle of twentieth-century technology, the Titanic was equipped with the most ingenious safety devices of the time. Yet on a moonlit night in 1912, the "unsinkable" Titanic raced across the glassy Atlantic on her maiden voyage, with only twenty lifeboats for 2,207 passengers. A Night to Remember is the gut-wrenching, minute-by-minute account of h
Dove
Robin Lee Graham, Derek L.T. Gill · 199 pages
Setting out in his sloop Dove to encircle the globe, a sixteen-year-old boy finds adventure and romance.
Sailing Alone Around The World
Joshua Slocum · 294 pages
Joshua Slocum, one of the most famous of American sea captains, really was the first to single-handedly circumnavigate the world. The epitome of Yankee independence, he had risen from a seaman to the captain of his own ship. Marooned in Brazil, he built a "canoe" in which he returned to America (see The Voyage of the Liberdade). At loose ends at fifty-one, he was offered an old oyster boat which h
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption
Laura Hillenbrand · 514 pages
On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane’s bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Se
Shadow Divers
Robert Kurson · 405 pages
In the tradition of Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air and Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm comes a true tale of riveting adventure in which two weekend scuba divers risk everything to solve a great historical mystery--and make history themselves.For John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, deep wreck diving was more than a sport. Testing themselves against treacherous currents, braving depths that induce
1421: The Year China Discovered America
Gavin Menzies · 649 pages
This volume presents the author's assertion that the fleets of Chinese Admiral Zheng visited the Americas prior to European explorer Christopher Columbus in 1492, and that this same Chinese fleet circumnavigated the globe a century before the expedition of Ferdinand Magellan. The author presents a series of vignettes describing his travels around the globe, examining what he claims is evidence for
Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea
Gary Kinder · 536 pages
In September 1857, the SS Central America, a side-wheel steamer carrying nearly six hundred passengers returning from the California Gold Rush, foundered in a hurricane and sank two hundred miles off the Carolina coast. Over four hundred lives and twenty-one tons of California gold were lost. It was the worst peacetime disaster at sea in American history, a tragedy that remained lost in legend for
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
David Grann · 339 pages
A grand mystery reaching back centuries. A sensational disappearance that made headlines around the world. A quest for truth that leads to death, madness or disappearance for those who seek to solve it. The Lost City of Z is a blockbuster adventure narrative about what lies beneath the impenetrable jungle canopy of the Amazon. After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, acclaimed New Yorker wr
In the Land of White Death: An Epic Story of Survival in the Siberian Arctic
Valerian Albanov · 285 pages