The people who went first, and what the going cost, from a Venetian on the Silk Road to a pilot over the Pacific. One of these four did not come back.
4 books · about 4 hours end to end · £2.99 / $2.99 each · free with Kindle Unlimited
Exploration is usually told as a story of courage, which it is, and almost never as a story of blank space running out, which it also is. Marco Polo goes east when Europe knows nothing whatever about China, and comes home to be disbelieved. Columbus goes west with a wrong number for the size of the earth and dies still insisting he had reached Asia. Lewis and Clark walk into the last unmapped interior of a continent that is not empty and never was. Earhart goes last, when the coastlines are all drawn and the only frontier left is the air.
Chronological, and the shrinking is the argument. Each expedition has less unknown to work with than the one before it and takes correspondingly greater personal risk to find any. The books stand alone, but reading Polo before Columbus is worth doing, because Polo's east is the one Columbus went looking for. His own heavily annotated copy survives in Seville, though he only acquired it after the first crossing; what sent him west was the picture Polo had already put in Europe's head.
Four books, an hour each, roughly four hours. Two of these expeditions were catastrophic for the people already living where they arrived, and the books say so rather than skirting it. Earhart's disappearance is treated with the evidence available, without picking a favourite theory.
4 books, in the order that makes each one hit harder than it would alone.
01
Start here because Polo is the first European to describe China at length, and the one who put it in everybody else's head. He left Venice as a teenager, spent around seventeen years in the service of Kublai Khan, and was away twenty-four in total. The book was dictated to a romance writer while both were prisoners in Genoa, which is precisely why it was doubted for centuries and still is in parts.
Read the book02
Second, because Columbus sails on Polo's book and a badly wrong estimate of the earth's circumference. Every educated person already knew the world was round; the argument was distance, and his critics had the maths right. He made four voyages from 1492, governed Hispaniola so brutally that the Crown sent him home in chains in 1500, and went to his grave maintaining he had found Asia. The consequences for the Caribbean were annihilating.
Read the book03
Third, because this is exploration as state paperwork, and it is far more effective for it. Jefferson bought Louisiana in 1803 and sent the Corps of Discovery to walk it, some 8,000 miles out and back in two years and four months, with one death in the whole party. They mapped rivers, catalogued species, and depended on the Shoshone woman Sacagawea and on dozens of Native nations who could have stopped them and did not.
Read the book04
Finish here, because by 1937 the coastlines are drawn and the only unmapped route left runs over the ocean. First woman to fly the Atlantic solo, in 1932, in fifteen hours from Newfoundland to a field in Northern Ireland. Five years later she and Fred Noonan vanished heading for Howland Island, a target a mile and a half long in the open Pacific, with about 22,000 miles already behind them and 7,000 still to fly. No wreck has ever been confirmed.
Read the bookFour books, ending mid-Pacific in 1937 with nothing found. The obvious continuation is the Conquerors collection, which is the same appetite for other people's territory with an army attached instead of a ship.
The whole path, one book
Every book on this page in a single Kindle edition - 4 complete histories, one download, free with Kindle Unlimited or $6.99 to keep.
Get the Collection on AmazonThese are not academic books. You will not find footnotes to chase, family trees to memorise, or ten pages on the logistics of a treaty. Every book ends with a page of proper ones to go to next if you want that depth. If you want the story and the big picture in an hour, you are home.
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