Explorer Memoirs

On le surnomme l’Indien blanc. Tout jeune, Étienne Brûlé commence sa vie d’aventurier en s’embarquant comme mousse sur le Don-de-Dieu, commandé par Samuel de Champlain. Quelques années plus tard, il se porte volontaire pour passer un an dans une tribu de la grande famille des Hurons afin d’apprendre leur langage et leurs coutumes. Peu de temps après, il adopte le mode de vie des Hurons et passe de nombreuses années à faire des expéditions de toutes sortes. Un héros attachant et hors du commun, à la vie mouvementée et trépidante.

The Strawbridge family found themselves shivering in a cold rain on a high pass in the North Cascade Mountains far from civilization and armed with little more than a vague notion of what it would take to walk 2650 miles up and down a wild and remote wilderness trail from Canada to Mexico. Vince and Monica set out with their four children, ranging in age from 11 to 16, on the walk of a lifetime.

A large family migrated over from Europe in the early 1700s and settled in Pennsylvania. After some time, one of the sons, Marcus Boylan, and his family decided to join others to travel and settle the frontier. Disaster struck when two young boys were stolen by Indians, one being Marcus' son George. This is a true account of his life with this Indian tribe, his eventual escape and journey back home.

Set in the remote arctic region of Northern Canada, this book takes listeners on a harrowing canoe voyage that results in tragedy, redemption, and, ultimately, transformation. George Grinnell was one of six young men who set off on the 1955 expedition led by experienced wilderness canoeist Art Moffatt. Poorly planned and executed, the journey seemed doomed from the start. Ignoring the approaching winter, the men became entranced with the peace and beauty of the arctic in autumn.

The third and most ambitious of Michael Palin's adventures is a voyage of epic proportions - the circumnavigation of the Pacific Rim. He travels for almost a year through the 18 countries that border the world's largest ocean, and is forced to negotiate mountains, plunging gorges, cross glaciers and dodge icebergs. Volcanoes also mark Palin's journey. He climbs one which has freshly erupted and follows great rivers like the Yangtze and the Amazon to some of the most remote places on earth.

Edmund Hillary - A Biography is the story of the New Zealand beekeeper who climbed Mount Everest. A man, who against expedition orders, drove his tractor to the South Pole; a man honored around the world for his pioneering climbs, yet who collapsed on more than one occasion on a mountain, and a man who gave so much to Nepal yet lost his family to its mountains.

West with the Night is the story of a remarkable woman molded and shaped by many things: the African jungle, a certain dog, horses, airplanes, friendships with white men and black. There is no life, no story quite like it.

Robert Morgan's Gap Creek was an Oprah's Book Club selection and a phenomenal New York Times best-seller. Here he turns his talent to chronicling the life of American frontier legend Daniel Boone.

Samuel de Champlain est le véritable père de la Nouvelle-France. Navigateur, cartographe, écrivain, ethnographe, il avait une vision : celle d’installer une colonie française sur les bords du Saint-Laurent. Il a toujours manifesté un grand respect pour les nations amérindiennes qu’il a côtoyées. Malgré tous les obstacles rencontrés sur sa route et les multiples voyages qu’il a dû effectuer entre la France et le Nouveau-Monde, il n’a jamais cédé, jamais fait de compromis.

A retired law enforcement officer turned pilot and a former math teacher chose to leave their home in Texas for a cabin in the wilderness of Alaska. They left life as they knew it behind to start fresh in the land of the Last Frontier. Their cabin on Cub Lake was only accessible by bush plane in the summer or snow machine during the winter, making life challenging. They knew their learning curve would be steep. What they didn't realize was living on a homestead in the wilderness of Alaska would make them face obstacles they had never experienced before.

Carrot Quinn fears that she's become addicted to the Internet. The city makes her numb, and she's having trouble connecting with others. In a desperate move, she breaks away from everything to walk 2,660 miles from Mexico to Canada on the Pacific Crest Trail. It will be her first long-distance hike.

Having grown disillusioned with the miserable existence that is expected of young college students, the newlyweds Bill and Ruth Albee dream of heading to Alaska, on foot, by way of a vast blank space on the map that is modern day Western British Columbia. Like most most dreams, it dug into their body, mind, and soul until nothing could satisfy it until they had given it a try. So, in 1930, they started off, ignoring all warnings and leaving from Vancouver on foot up through western B.C.

Two thousand books have been written about Columbus, most of them spirited defenses or relentless attacks. Recently, the balance has shifted: the Genoese navigator, once considered a hero, is now blamed for bringing plunder and genocide to the Americas. In The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus, historian Matthew Restall takes us beyond polemic, sifting through the evidence across nations, languages, and five centuries to explore the central questions of Columbiana.

In 2018, amateur cyclist Jenny Graham left family and friends behind in Scotland to become the fastest woman to cycle around the world. Alone and unsupported, she crossed the finish line at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin four months later, smashing the female record by nearly three weeks. With infectious wit and honesty, Jenny brings listeners into her remarkable Round the World adventure, as she takes on four continents, 16 countries – and countless cups of coffee.

Turmoil in the Mideast convinces Glen and Julie to linger in the South Pacific, visiting primitive villages on remote islands. But hang on tight, because to finish their voyage, they must leave friendly shores and navigate through trouble in the Indian Ocean, Gulf of Aden, and the Red Sea before arriving in Europe. Full of dry wit and compelling descriptions, Julie takes the listener along for the ride of a lifetime in this sequel (book two of the Escape Series) to her previous best seller Escape from the Ordinary.

Nearly everything the American public has seen, read, and heard in the media for nearly 80 years about the so-called Amelia Earhart mystery is intentionally false or inadvertently misleading. The widely accepted myth that the disappearance of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan during their ill-fated world-flight attempt in July 1937 is among the greatest aviation mysteries of the 20th century is an abject lie, the result of decades of government propaganda that continues unabated to this day.

I met Tony Bourdain in 2001, in Saint Petersburg, Russia, filming an episode of A Cook’s Tour. From that day on, we were comrades in search of new emotions and experiences greater than ourselves. In 2011, he told me to write my story. It took me 14 years to look back, to filter my life through the lens of our 17-year friendship. Tony showed me the way out of my cage, from the weight of being Soviet-born to becoming a citizen of the world. I had the honor of being his travel companion for 10 TV episodes.

British maritime history in the age of sail is full of the deeds of officers like Nelson but has given little voice to plain, "illiterate" seamen. Now, Stephen Taylor draws on published and unpublished memoirs, letters, and naval records, including court-martials and petitions, to present these men in their own words. In this exhilarating account, ordinary seamen are far from the hapless sufferers of the press gangs.

On 8 August 1914, five days after the outbreak of World War One, the Endurance, a wooden-hulled, coal-fired icebreaker, set sail for the South Pole, in a bid to complete the first-ever trans-Antarctic expedition, which would cross the continent from the Weddell Sea to Scott's base at Cape Evans, via the Pole. However, despite the best planning, the ship succumbs to the ice floes of the Weddell Sea, and is subjected to months of uncontrollable drifting before its crew makes a scramble for Elephant Island, where they battle constant cold and starvation.

The iconic Australian exploration story - brought to life by Peter FitzSimons, Australia's storyteller. 'They have left here today!' he calls to the others. When King puts his hand down above the ashes of the fire, it is to find it still hot. There is even a tiny flame flickering from the end of one log. They must have left just hours ago. Melbourne, 20 August 1860. In an ambitious quest to be the first Europeans to cross the harsh Australian continent, the Victorian Exploring Expedition sets off, with 15,000 well-wishers cheering them on.