Ocean State Libraries

"The outstanding new Fargo adventure from the #1 New York Times-bestselling author. Baffin Island: Husband-and-wife team Sami and Remi Fargo are on a climate-control expedition in the Arctic, when to their astonishment they discover a Viking ship in the ice, perfectly preserved--and filled with pre-Columbian artifacts from Mexico. How can that be? As they plunge into their research, tantalizing clues about a link between the Vikings and the legendary...

"Bound for Antarctica, where polar explorer Ernest Shackleton planned to cross on foot the last uncharted continent, the Endurance set sail from England in August 1914. In January 1915, after battling its way for six weeks through a thousand miles of pack ice and now only a day's sail short of its destination, the Endurance became locked in an island of ice. For ten months the ice-moored Endurance drifted northwest before it was finally crushed. But...

"From the author of 1491--the best-selling study of the pre-Columbian Americas--a deeply engaging new history that explores the most momentous biological event since the death of the dinosaurs. More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed totally different suites of plants and animals. Columbus's voyages brought them back together--and marked the beginning...

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. Since Robert Falcon Scott's expedition to the South Pole in 1910-1912, controversy has raged about the correct interpretation of and explanation for the tragedy. Some writers have drawn a picture of Scott as a bumbling incompetent, whose lack of experience and preparation condemned his men to their deaths. Aspley Cherry-Garrard's account The Worst Journey in the World...

"A blend of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and Simon Winchester's Pacific, a thrilling intellectual detective story that looks deep into the past to uncover who first settled the islands of the remote Pacific, where they came from, how they got there, and how we know. For more than a millennium, Polynesians have occupied the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean, a vast triangle stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island. Until...

Discusses both hypothetical and historical voyages of discovery to America by the Phoenicians, Saint Brendan of Ireland, the Vikings, and such later European navigators as Columbus, Cabot, and Magellan.

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. 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. These later voyages were even more adventurous, violent, and ambiguous,...

"From the New York Times bestselling author of RIVER OF DOUBT and DESTINY OF THE REPUBLIC, the stirring story of one of the great feats of exploration of all time, and its complicated legacy The Nile River is the longest in the world. Its fertile floodplain allowed for rise to the great civilization of ancient Egypt, but for millennia the location of its headwaters was shrouded in mystery. Pharaonic and Roman attempts to find it were stymied by a...

A visually stunning journey to the end of the world with the hardy and devoted people who live there year-round. The research stations scattered throughout the continent host a close-knit international population of scientists, technicians and craftsmen. Isolated from the rest of the world, enduring months of unending darkness followed by periods when the sun never sets, Antarctic residents experience firsthand the beauty and brutality of the most...