As the first european to travel extensively throughout Asia, Marco Polo was the earliest bridge between East and West. Polo introduced the cultural riches of China to Europe, spawning centuries of Western fascination with Asia. In this lively blend of history, and travelogue, biography, acclaimed author Laurence Bergreen separates myth from history, creating the most authoritative account yet of Polo's remarkable adventures.

Exceptionally narrated and written with a discerning eye for detail, Marco Polo is as riveting as the life it describes. His famous journeys took him across the boundaries of the known world, and into the court of Kublai Kahn, along the dangerous Silk Road, where he won the trust of the most feared and reviled leader of his day.

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Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492-1504

Written from the participants' vivid perspectives, simon Winchester, this breathtakingly dramatic account will be embraced by readers of Bergreen's previous biographies of Marco Polo and Magellan and by fans of Nathaniel Philbrick, and Tony Horwitz. By their conclusion, however, Columbus was broken in body and spirit.

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. In all these exploits he almost never lost a sailor. From the author of the magellan biography, Over the Edge of the World, a mesmerizing new account of the great explorer.

These later voyages were even more adventurous, violent, his mingled brilliance and delusion, and ambiguous, but they revealed Columbus's uncanny sense of the sea, and his superb navigational skills. If the first voyage illustrates the rewards of exploration, moral, the latter voyages illustrate the tragic costs- political, and economic.

In rich detail laurence bergreen re-creates each of these adventures as well as the historical background of Columbus's celebrated, controversial career. 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.

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Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe

It is all here in the wondrous detail, a first-rate historical page turner. New york times book reviewferdinand Magellan's daring circumnavigation of the globe in the sixteenth century was a three-year odyssey filled with sex, violence, and amazing adventure. The riveting story of ferdinand magellan’s historic 60, 000-mile ocean voyage—now updated with a new introduction commemorating the 500th anniversary of his journey.

Prodigious research, sure-footed prose and vivid descriptions make for a thoroughly satisfying account. Now in over the edge of the world, prize-winning biographer and journalist Laurence Bergreen entwines a variety of candid, firsthand accounts, bringing to life this groundbreaking and majestic tale of discovery that changed both the way explorers would henceforth navigate the oceans and history itself.

Now updated to include a new introduction commemorating the 500th anniversary of Magellan’s voyage.

Farther Than Any Man: The Rise and Fall of Captain James Cook

Cook's surveying skills had contributed to the British victory over France in the Seven Years' War in 1763, but no commoner had ever commanded a Royal Navy vessel. Full of action, and fascinating historical characters like King George III and Master William Bligh, lush description, Dugard's gripping account of the life and gruesome demise of Capt.

. He soon took control of the Resolution and returned to his beloved Pacific, in search of the elusive Southern Continent. After returning home a hero, Cook yearned to get back to sea. It was on this trip that cook's taste for power became an obsession, and his legendary kindness to island natives became an expectation of worship -- traits that would lead him first to greatness, then to catastrophe.

When great britain announced a major circumnavigation in 1768 -- a mission cloaked in science, but aimed at the pursuit of world power -- it came as a political surprise that James Cook was given command. In farther than any man, noted modern-day adventurer Martin Dugard strips away the myth of Cook and instead portrays a complex, conflicted man of tremendous ambition at times to a fault, intellect though Cook was routinely underestimated and sheer hardheadedness.

James cook never laid eyes on the sea until he was in his teens. Kirk. James cook is a thrilling story of a discoverer hell-bent on traveling farther than any man. Endeavor's stunning three-year journey changed the face of modern exploration, and making landfall in Tahiti, charting the vast Pacific waters, the eastern coasts of New Zealand and Australia, Tierra del Fuego, and Rio de Janeiro.

Sir Francis Drake

His scholarship is impeccable’ Frank McLynn, Sunday Telegraph. His attacks on spanish cities and ships transformed his private war into a struggle for surivival between Protestant England and Catholic Spain, in which he became Elizabeth I's most prominent admiral and marked the emergence of England as major maritime nation.

Excellent. It deserves to become the standard Drake life. The most daring of the corsairs who raided the West Indies and Spanish Main, he led the English into the Pacific, and cirumnavigated the world to bring home the Golden Hind laden with Spanish treasure. How well do you know the life of one of britain’s great maritime heroes? Discover the truth behind a man who remains a legendary figure of history more than four hundred years after his death.

Sir francis drake’s career is one of the most colourful on record.

Travels of Marco Polo Signet Classics

His amazing chronicle is both fascinating and awe-inspiring—and still serves as the most vivid depiction of the mysterious East in the Middle Ages. Edited and with an introduction by Milton Rugoff and an Afterword by Howard Mittelmark. His journey through the east began in 1271—when, still a teenager, he set out of Venice and found himself traversing the most exotic countries.

His acceptance into the court of the great emperor kublai Khan, led him to places as far away as Tibet and Burma, and his service to the vast and dazzling Mongol empire, lands rich with gems and gold and silk, but virtually unknown to Europeans. Later, marco polo would record the details of his remarkable travels across harsh deserts, as a prisoner of war, great mountain ranges, as well as of his encounters with beasts and birds, and dangerous seas, plants and people.

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Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

In nearly every country the Mongols conquered, expanded trade, they brought an unprecedented rise in cultural communication, and a blossoming of civilization. Vastly more progressive than his European or Asian counterparts, granted universal religious freedom, Genghis Khan abolished torture, and smashed feudal systems of aristocratic privilege.

New york times bestseller • the startling true history of how one extraordinary man from a remote cornerof the world created an empire that led the world into the modern age. The mongol army led by genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in twenty-five years than the Romans did in four hundred. From the story of his rise through the tribal culture to the explosion of civilization that the Mongol Empire unleashed, this brilliant work of revisionist history is nothing less than the epic story of how the modern world was made.

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Magellan: Over the Edge of the World

Thrilling, grisly, and completely true, magellan: Over the Edge of the World tells a story that not only marks a turning point in history, but also resonates powerfully with the present. They were survivors of the first European expedition to circle the globe. A middle-grade adaptation of Laurence Bergreen's adult bestseller, about Magellan's historic voyage around the globe.

On september 6, a horribly battered ship manned by eighteen malnourished, 1522, scurvy-ridden sailors appeared on the horizon near a Spanish port. Originally comprised of five ships and 260 sailors, the fleet's captain and most of its crew were dead. How did ferdinand magellan's voyage to circle the world—one of the largest and best-equipped expeditions ever mounted—turn into this ghost ship? The answer is provided in this thoroughly researched tale of mutiny and murder spanning the entire globe, marked equally by triumph and tragedy.

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Victors and Vanquished Bedford Series in History and Culture

A substantial introduction is followed by 9 chronological sections that illuminate the major events and personalities in this powerful historical episode and reveal the changing attitudes toward European expansionism. Using excerpts primarily drawn from bernal diaz's 1632 account of the Spanish victory and testimonies — many recently uncovered — of indigenous Nahua survivors, Victors and Vanquished clearly demonstrates how personal interests, class and ethnic biases, and political considerations influenced the interpretation of momentous events.

The volume includes a broad array of visual images and maps, questions for consideration, a selected bibliography, a glossary of Spanish and Nahua terms, a chronology, biographical notes, and an index. In 1519 hernán cortés and a small band of Spanish conquistadors overthrew the mighty Mexican empire of the Aztecs.

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When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405-1433

She sheds new light on the historical and cultural context in which this great civilization thrived, as well as the perception of China by other contemporary cultures. In when china ruled the seas, louise levathes takes a fascinating and unprecedented look at this dynamic period in China’s enigmatic history, focusing on the country’s rise as a naval power that briefly brought half the world under its nominal authority.

One hundred years before columbus and his fellow europeans began their voyages of discovery, lacquerware, fleets of giant junks commanded by the eunuch admiral Zheng He and filled with the empire’s finest porcelains, and silk ventured to the world’s “four corners. Seven epic expeditions brought china’s treasure ships across the china seas and indian ocean, to china’s “El Dorado, ” and perhaps even to Australia, on to the rich ports of the Persian Gulf and down the East African coast, from Japan to the spice island of Indonesia and the Malabar Coast of India, three hundred years before Captain Cook’s landing.

It was a time of exploration and expansion, but it ended in a retrenchment so complete that less than a century later, it was a crime to go to sea in a multimasted ship. Drawing on eyewitness accounts, many translated for the first time, Arab, and African, and Indian sources, official Ming histories, Levathes brings readers inside China’s most illustrious scientific and technological era.

Beautifully illustrated and engagingly written, When China Ruled the Seas is the fullest picture yet of the early Ming dynasty—the last flowering of Chinese culture before the Manchu invasion.