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Books > Earth & environment > Geography > Geographical discovery & exploration
Since the time of Columbus, explorers dreamed of a water passage
across the North American continent. President Thomas Jefferson
shared this dream. He conceived the Corps of Discovery to travel up
the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains and westward along
possible river routes to the Pacific Ocean. Meriwether Lewis and
William Clark led this expedition of 1804-6. Along the way they
filled hundreds of notebook pages with observations of the
geography, Indian tribes, and natural history of the
trans-Mississippi West.
This volume includes Lewis's and Clark's journals beginning in
August 1803, when Lewis left Pittsburgh to join Clark farther down
the Ohio River. The two men and several recruits camped near the
mouth of the Missouri River for five months of training, acquiring
supplies and equipment, and gathering information from travelers
about the trip upriver. They started up the Missouri in May 1804.
This volume ends in August, when the Corps of Discovery camped near
the Vermillion River in present-day South Dakota.
Since the time of Columbus, explorers dreamed of a water passage
across the North American continent. President Thomas Jefferson
shared this dream. He conceived the Corps of Discovery to travel up
the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains and westward along
possible river routes to the Pacific Ocean. Meriwether Lewis and
William Clark led this expedition of 1804-6. Along the way they
filled hundreds of notebook pages with observations of the
geography, Indian tribes, and natural history of the
trans-Mississippi West.
The late-summer and fall months of 1805 were the most difficult
period of Lewis and Clark's journey. This volume documents their
travels from the Three Forks of the Missouri River in present-day
Montana to the Cascades of the Columbia River on today's
Washington-Oregon border, including the expedition's progress over
the rugged Bitterroot Mountains, along the nearly impenetrable Lolo
Trail. Along the way, the explorers encounter Shoshones, Flatheads,
Nez Perces, and other Indian tribes, some of whom had never before
met white people.
Since the time of Columbus, explorers dreamed of a water passage
across the North American continent. President Thomas Jefferson
shared this dream. He conceived the Corps of Discovery to travel up
the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains and westward along
possible river routes to the Pacific Ocean. Meriwether Lewis and
William Clark led this expedition of 1804-6. Along the way they
filled hundreds of notebook pages with observations of the
geography, Indian tribes, and natural history of the
trans-Mississippi West.
After a rainy winter, the Corps of Discovery turned homeward in
March 1806 from Fort Clatsop on the mouth of the Columbia River.
Detained by winter snows, they camped among the friendly Nez Perces
in modern west-central Idaho. Lewis and Clark attended to sick
Indians and continued their scientific observations while others in
the party hunted and socialized with Native peoples.
Launched as part of the United States participation in the first
International Polar Year, the Greely Arctic Expedition sent
twenty-five volunteers to Ellesmere Island off the northwest coast
of Greenland. The crew was commanded by Adolphus W. Greely, a
lieutenant in the U.S. Army's Signal Corps. The ship sent to
resupply them in the summer of 1882 was forced to turn back before
reaching the station, and the men were left to endure short
rations. The second relief ship, sent in 1883, was crushed in the
ice. The crew spend a third, wretched winter camped at Cape Sabine.
Supplies ran out, the hunting failed, and men began to die of
starvation. At last, in the summer of 1884, the six survivors were
brought home, but the excitement of their return soon turned into a
national scandal-rumors of cannibalism during that dreadful, final
winter were supported by grisly evidence.
"Abandoned" is the gripping account of men battling for survival as
they are pitted against the elements and each other. It is also the
most complete and authentic account of the controversial Greely
Expedition ever published, an exemplar of the best in chronicles of
polar exploration.
This two-volume work by Theodor Koch-Gr nberg (1872 1924), director
of the Ethnographical Museum in Berlin, tells the story of his
major expedition to North-West Brazil and describes the indigenous
tribes and the local geography. In contrast to Koch-Gr nberg's many
monographs and essays on the same subject, this book is directed at
a lay readership. Koch-Gr nberg states his aim of correcting a
false impression of the indigenous peoples drawn from 'novels about
Indians read during one's youth' and the accounts of his
explorations are permeated by a deeply-held respect for the
humanity he encounters. Although its primary interest to scholars
lies in its anthropological and ethnographical content, the text is
full of botanical, geographical and linguistic detail, interspersed
with photographs taken by the author. Volume 2 (1910) describes the
S o Felippe region and includes an index and appendix with records
of climate, flora and fauna.
Captain Cook's Journals provide his own vivid first-hand account of three extraordinary expeditions. These charted the entire coast of New Zealand and the east coast of Australia, and brought back detailed descriptions of Tahiti, Tonga, and a host of until then unknown islands in the Pacific. The journals amply reveal the determination, courage and skill which enabled Cook to wrestle with the continuous dangers of uncharted seas and the problems of achieving a working relationship with the peoples whose unannounced guest he became. This edition, abridged from the definitive four-volume collection published by the Hakluyt Society, makes Cook's inimitable personal account of his nine years of voyaging widely accessible for the first time. The selection preserves the spirit and rhythm of the full narrative, as well as Cook's idiosyncratic spelling. Philip Edwards gives an introduction to each voyage together with maps, a glossary of unusual words and indexes of people and places. A postscript offers a full assessment of the continuing controversies surrounding Cook's death.
On a bright July morning in 1870 the British explorer George
Hayward was brutally murdered high in the Hindu Kush. Who was he,
what had brought him to this wild spot, and why was he killed? Told
in full for the first time, this is the gripping tale of Hayward's
journey from a Yorkshire childhood to a place at the forefront of
the 'Great Game' between the British Raj and the Russian Empire,
and of how, driven by 'an insane desire', he crossed the Western
Himalayas, tangled with despotic chieftains and ended up on the
wrong side of both the Raj and the mighty Maharaja of Kashmir. It
is also the tale of the conspiracies that surrounded his death,
while the author's own travels in Hayward's footsteps bring the
story up to date, and reveal how the echoes of the Great Game still
reverberate across Central Asiain the twenty-first century.
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