My 15 seasons at Grand Canyon inspired me to understand its story of revelation, which led to a fascination with the history of exploration overall. This has resulted in a series of books about explorers, places explored, and a conceptual scaffolding by which to understand it all: a geologist of the American West (Grove Karl Gilbert); Antarctica (The Ice); revisiting the Rim with better conceptual gear, How the Canyon Became Grand; and using its mission as a narrative spine, Voyager: Exploration, Space, and Third Great Age of Discovery. The grand sweep deserved a grand summary, so I’ve ended with The Great Ages of Discovery.
I wrote...
The Great Ages of Discovery: How Western Civilization Learned about a Wider World
Exploration by Western civilization - a kind of quest narrative – has proceeded in three great waves, each with its crest and a trough. Each had a geography of special interest, an alignment with larger cultural movements, a critical geopolitical rivalry, and a grand gesture that captured what the age most exemplifies.
The Great Ages narrates this larger arc, moving from the Mediterranean and Baltic Seas to the world ocean, to the crossing of all the Earth’s continents, and finally, after World War II, pivoting from Antarctica, probing into the deep oceans and interplanetary space. More than a compilation of adventure stories, Great Ages uses the tradition of exploration to discover better the character of its sustaining civilization.
When I was first attracted to exploration history, I was mostly interested in the 19th and 20th centuries, but wanting to understand its pedigree, I searched back to the great voyages of the Renaissance and kept running into books by Parry. He’s everywhere, and always insightful.
His most widely read book is The Age of Reconnaissance: Discovery, Exploration, and Settlement, 1450-1650. But despite its clunky title, Establishment is my favorite because it distills the whole story – its events, its technology, its intellectual foundations – into almost crystalline form. A wonderful place to begin, or to return to and consolidate whatever else you’ve learned.
Morison is an old-school historian, and I wanted a person-centered narrative in a grand manner to complement Parry’s concentrated matrix of information. Morison delivers.
The Great Explorers recounts the early exploration of the Americas, focusing on key figures (Morison had previously written a 2-volume biography of Columbus). The book boils down his somewhat windy and digressive two volumes on the exploration of North and South America. He’s a proud sailor and works information on ships, tides, currents, shoals, and the like into the text and judges explorers – all of them on ships – by their seamanship. His older style of rhetoric and personal voice make a pleasant change from most of today’s writings.
This is an abridgement of Samuel Morison's magnum opus, The European Discovery of America, in which he describes the early voyages that led to the discovery of the New World. All the acclaimed Morison touches are here - the meticulous research and authoritative scholarship, along with the personal and compelling narrative style that gives the reader the feeling of having been there. Morison, of course, has been there, and The Great Explorers is enriched with photographs and maps he made while personally retracing the great voyages.
A few days out of high school, I found myself on a forest fire crew at the North Rim of Grand Canyon, and returned for 15 seasons. The more I pondered the Canyon, the more I wanted to learn about why this strange landscape was valued, which led me to William Goetzmann, who became my grad school advisor.
New Lands, New Men is the third and final volume of a trilogy Goetzmann wrote on the theme. (His second book, Exploration and Empire, won a Pulitzer.) It’s a bit looser, willing to play with the material, and full of the quirky as well as the renown. Its organizing concept that exploration rekindled in the 18th century (with a significant input from modern science) is a major innovation in a field usually devoted to stirring tales of individual adventure and discovery.
In New Lands, New Men, the third volume in his award-winning Exploration Trilogy, one of America’s leading historians tells the dramatic story of three centuries of exploration that witnessed Europeans exploring the Pacific and Northwest, Americans setting out across their own immense continent, and finally, Americans exploring new worlds: the oceans, Japan, the polar regions.
Spanning the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, the Second Great Age of Discovery was marked by the Enlightenment’s ideals of science and progress. Explorers from James Cook to George Catlin, from Charles Wilkes to Matthew Maury, trained as scientists intent on precise observation and gathered…
The current era of exploration began after World War II, announced by the International Geophysical Year. With Antarctica as a pivot, exploration moved down to the world’s ocean depths and out to interplanetary space. Space got the most attention – it was visible and had a literature that ice and abyss couldn’t match.
With vigor, clarity, and a lively tempo, This New Ocean narrates the space race in both its manned and robotic expressions, its American and Soviet versions, its technology, and its politics. Burrows is an enthusiast, but not an ideologue or a blinkered astrofuturist. A good survey and introduction, This New Ocean makes a lively read.
It was all part of man's greatest adventure--landing men on the Moon and sending a rover to Mars, finally seeing the edge of the universe and the birth of stars, and launching planetary explorers across the solar system to Neptune and beyond.
The ancient dream of breaking gravity's hold and taking to space became a reality only because of the intense cold-war rivalry between the superpowers, with towering geniuses like Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolyov shelving dreams of space travel and instead developing rockets for ballistic missiles and space spectaculars. Now that Russian archives are open and thousands of…
For a while space and the deep oceans were a matched set of explorations – even Arthur C. Clarke wrote parallel novels about space and sea - then they diverged. What space promised, however, the oceans delivered – new maps of the solid Earth, a new geology, new biotas, and life forms.
No comprehensive survey of all that exploration yet exists. But Robert Ballard’s Eternal Darkness gives access to what happened and some of the critical discoveries, even if it grants attention to the sunken Titanic as well as to black smokers. Deep sea discovery doesn’t have a grand narrative akin to the space race to the Moon or Voyager’s mission to the outer planets; instead, it has biographies like that for the submersible Alvin and pioneers like Ballard. A readable introduction, with some thoughtful conclusions.
Until a few decades ago, the ocean depths were almost as mysterious and inaccessible as outer space. Oceans cover two-thirds of the earth's surface with an average depth of more than two miles--yet humans had never ventured more than a few hundred feet below the waves. One of the great scientific and archaeological feats of our time has been finally to cast light on the "eternal darkness" of the deep sea. This is the story of that achievement, told by the man who has done more than any other to make it possible: Robert Ballard. Ballard discovered the wreck of…
The Hunt for the Peggy C is best described as Casablanca meets Das Boot. It is about an American smuggler who struggles to rescue a Jewish family on his rusty cargo ship, outraging his mutinous crew of misfits and provoking a hair-raising chase by a brutal Nazi U-boat captain bent on revenge.
During the nerve-wracking 3,000-mile escape, Rogers falls in love with the family’s eldest daughter, Miriam, a sweet medical student with a militant streak. Everything seems hopeless when Jake is badly wounded, and Miriam must prove she’s as tough as her rhetoric to put down a mutiny by some of Jake’s fed-up crew–just as the U-boat closes in for the kill.
The Hunt for the Peggy C: A World War II Maritime Thriller
John Winn Miller's THE HUNT FOR THE PEGGY C, a semifinalist in the Clive Cussler Adventure Writers Competition, captures the breathless suspense of early World War II in the North Atlantic. Captain Jake Rogers, experienced in running his tramp steamer through U-boat-infested waters to transport vital supplies and contraband to the highest bidder, takes on his most dangerous cargo yet after witnessing the oppression of Jews in Amsterdam: a Jewish family fleeing Nazi persecution.
The normally aloof Rogers finds himself drawn in by the family's warmth and faith, but he can't afford to let his guard down when Oberleutnant Viktor…
