Western Exploration

After a long and exalted military career, General Connor Gates thought he was finally ready to retire. He was wrong. When interstellar probes sent to Earth’s star system report back 40 years earlier than expected, the colonists learn that humans somehow survived the cataclysmic events of the past…but so did the enemy.

Lewis and Clark set on their famous trek across the unexplored American continent with Seaman, a remarkable black Newfoundland dog, who saves their lives several times along the way.

It’s 1806. A young republic just three decades old - the United States of America - is about to make a great push westward, across the Mississippi, into a wild, beautiful, and dangerous land. A territory of towering mountains and violent waters, of icy glaciers and searing deserts. The great northwest. It is a time and a place where fortunes will be made, destinies will be revealed, and legends will rise.

Mankind’s wanderlust will eventually carry our species to the stars. Earth’s pioneers have always risen to the challenge of exploring our planet’s remote rain forests, highest mountain peaks, deepest ocean abysses, and deadly frozen polar caps. Answering the wanderlust deep within us is exactly what motivated the colonists of Byanntia to brave the dangers of space travel. Their reward is the opportunity to test their mettle against an alien planet - to explore an unknown environment and attempt to survive on their own terms.

Cambridge professor and renowned historian Anthony Pagden covers a vast subject in a compact package with Peoples and Empires. This wide-ranging and intellectually stimulating work examines the origins and history of the West with terse, efficient prose. With a captivating narration by Robert O'Keefe, listeners will find this work enjoyable and utterly absorbing.

The Dutch East India Company, officially the United East India Company (Dutch: Vereenigde Oost Indische Compagnie; VOC), was a megacorporation created in the early 17th century by a government-directed merger of many competing Dutch trade services. You might think that Amazon or Google is big, but the VOC is still thought to be the world's biggest corporation in documented history.