"A blend of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and Simon Winchester's Pacific, a thrilling intellectual detective story that looks deep into the past to uncover who first settled the islands of the remote Pacific, where they came from, how they got there, and how we know. For more than a millennium, Polynesians have occupied the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean, a vast triangle stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island. Until...

Christopher Columbus's 1492 voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in search of a trading route to China, and his unexpected landfall in the Americas, is a watershed event in world history. Yet Columbus made three more voyages within the span of only a decade, each designed to demonstrate that he could sail to China within a matter of weeks and convert those he found there to Christianity. These later voyages were even more adventurous, violent, and ambiguous,...

An account of the discovery of the Pacific Islands. Describes the adventures and accomplishments of early native canoe voyagers and of European and American seamen who sought treasure, trade, and colonies from the early sixteenth to the middle nineteenth centuries.

Text and illustrations trace the history of the exploration of Africa with emphasis on the 19th-century expeditions which helped map the continent and open it to European influence and colonization.