A History of Exploration for Real and Mythical Treasures in the Americas

For half a millennium, stories of vast treasures—El Dorado, Manoa, the Seven Cities of Cibola, the Lost Dutchman Mine—have been part of the lore of the Americas. Long before the Europeans set foot in the New World, myths and rumors of fabulous wealth in distant lands, such as the kingdom of Prester John, were told and retold so often that they were assumed to be true. When Spanish explorers first made contact with the Aztec and Inca civilizations, they found cultures that were literally dripping with gold. This evidence made it easy to believe the native stories of even greater wealth just beyond the horizon. In these uncharted lands, dreamers sought their fortunes: Francisco de Coronado ranged over the North American plains in search of the elusive Quivira; Gonzalo Pizarro, brother of the Incan conqueror, and Lope Aguirre, the “Wrath of God,” were both part of ill-fated expeditions in search of El Dorado; and Leonard Clark walked out of the Amazon after World War II with gold and claimed he had found that fabled kingdom.

In Cities of Gold: Legendary Kingdoms, Quixotic Quests, and Fantastic New World Wealth, Bill Yenne takes the reader from the rainforests and mountains of Peru, Paraguay, Brazil, and Guiana to the deserts and peaks of Mexico and the United States to tell the extraordinary, and often brutal story of how the search for mysterious New World riches fueled the exploration of an unknown hemisphere for hundreds of years. Even without finding the places they sought, during Spain’s “Siglo de Oro” in the sixteenth century, the Spanish plundered and mined thousands of tons of New World gold and silver and shipped it home where the reserves alone reached a staggering estimate of two trillion dollars. And it was not just the Spanish who were obsessed with gold: Sir Walter Raleigh made two government-backed voyages in search of Manoa, a golden city he was convinced was deep in Guiana. Discussing the many expeditions to find New World wealth and lost cities over a 500-year timeline, the author includes stories of lesser-known explorers and soldiers of fortune and their successes and failures. As he demonstrates, the desire for adventure and the insatiable lust for treasure motivated men and women in the past and continues to captivate fortune hunters today.

In 2009 the University of Utah Press and the Utah State Historical Society co-published three volumes of long out-of-print journals, letters, and other documents from John Wesley Powell’s expeditions down the Colorado River. We are proud to announce the fourth and final volume. Cleaving an Unknown World collects Powell’s journal (Smithsonian Journal of History, 1968); Jack Hillers’s diary and photographs, previously published as Photographed All the Best Scenery, edited by Don D. Fowler (University of Utah Press, 1972); original maps from Francis Marion Bishop (Utah Historical Quarterly, 1969); Frederick S. Dellenbaugh’s letters (Utah Historical Quarterly, 1969); and John C. Sumner’s journal from the first Powell expedition (Utah Historical Quarterly, 1969). Roy Webb’s foreword provides the context for these disparate pieces.

This beautifully illustrated book features Hillers’s photographs—long regarded as a remarkable and unique record of the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon. Cleaving an Unknown World belongs in the library of any reader interested in the exploration of the American West.
 

Conan Doyle’s time in the Arctic provided powerful fuel for his growing ambitions as a writer. With a ghost story set in the Arctic wastes that he wrote shortly after his return, he established himself as a promising young writer. A subsequent magazine article laying out possible routes to the North Pole won him the respect of Arctic explorers. And he would call upon his shipboard experiences many times in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, who was introduced in 1887’s A Study in Scarlet.

 

Out of sight for more than a century was a diary that Conan Doyle kept while aboard the whaler. Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure makes this account available for the first time in a beautiful facsimile edition that reproduces Conan Doyle’s notebook pages in his own elegant hand, accompanied by his copious illustrations. With humor and grace, Conan Doyle provides a vivid account of a long-vanished way of life at sea. His careful detailing of the experience of arctic whaling is equal parts fascinating and alarming, revealing the dark workings of the later days of the British whaling industry. In addition to the facsimile and annotated transcript of the diary, the volume contains photographs of the Hope, its captain, and a young Conan Doyle on deck with its officers; two nonfiction pieces by Doyle about his experiences; and two of his tales inspired by the journey.

 

To the end of his life, Conan Doyle would look back on this experience with awe: “You stand on the very brink of the unknown,” he declared, “and every duck that you shoot bears pebbles in its gizzard which come from a land which the maps know not. It was a strange and fascinating chapter of my life.” Only now can the legion of Conan Doyle fans read and enjoy that chapter.

In 1880 a young medical student named Arthur Conan Doyle embarked upon the “first real outstanding adventure” of his life, taking a berth as ship’s surgeon on an Arctic whaler, the Hope. The voyage took him to unknown regions, showered him with dramatic and unexpected experiences, and plunged him into dangerous work on the ice floes of the Arctic seas. He tested himself, overcame the hardships, and, as he wrote later, “came of age at 80 degrees north latitude.”

 

Conan Doyle’s time in the Arctic provided powerful fuel for his growing ambitions as a writer. With a ghost story set in the Arctic wastes that he wrote shortly after his return, he established himself as a promising young writer. A subsequent magazine article laying out possible routes to the North Pole won him the respect of Arctic explorers. And he would call upon his shipboard experiences many times in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, who was introduced in 1887’s A Study in Scarlet.

 

Out of sight for more than a century was a diary that Conan Doyle kept while aboard the whaler. Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure makes this account available for the first time. With humor and grace, Conan Doyle provides a vivid account of a long-vanished way of life at sea. His careful detailing of the experience of arctic whaling is equal parts fascinating and alarming, revealing the dark workings of the later days of the British whaling industry. In addition to the transcript of the diary, the e-book contains two nonfiction pieces by Doyle about his experiences; and two of his tales inspired by the journey.

 

To the end of his life, Conan Doyle would look back on this experience with awe: “You stand on the very brink of the unknown,” he declared, “and every duck that you shoot bears pebbles in its gizzard which come from a land which the maps know not. It was a strange and fascinating chapter of my life.” Only now can the legion of Conan Doyle fans read and enjoy that chapter.

Dazzled by the sight of the vast treasure of gold and silver being unloaded at Seville’s docks in 1537, a teenaged Pedro de Cieza de León vowed to join the Spanish effort in the New World, become an explorer, and write what would become the earliest historical account of the conquest of Peru. Available for the first time in English, this history of Peru is based largely on interviews with Cieza’s conquistador compatriates, as well as with Indian informants knowledgeable of the Incan past.
Alexandra Parma Cook and Noble David Cook present this recently discovered third book of a four-part chronicle that provides the most thorough and definitive record of the birth of modern Andean America. It describes with unparalleled detail the exploration of the Pacific coast of South America led by Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro, the imprisonment and death of the Inca Atahualpa, the Indian resistance, and the ultimate Spanish domination.
Students and scholars of Latin American history and conquest narratives will welcome the publication of this volume.

Early Encounters contains a selection of nineteen essays from the papers of prominent New England historian, antiquarian, and genealogist Warren Sears Nickerson (1880-1966). This extensive study of his own family ties to the Mayflower, and his exhaustive investigation of the first contacts between Europeans and Native Americans, in what is today New England, made him an unquestioned authority in both fields. 
     The research upon which the text of Early Encounters is based occurred between the 1920s and the 1950s. Each of Nickerson’s works included in this carefully edited volume is placed in its context by Delores Bird Carpenter; she provides the reader with a wealth of useful background information about each essay’s origin, as well as Nickerson’s reasons for undertaking the research. Material is arranged thematically: the arrival of the Mayflower; conflicts between Europeans and Native Americans; and other topics related to the history and legends of early European settlement on Cape Cod. Early Encounters is a thoughtfully researched, readable book that presents a rich and varied account of life in colonial New England.

Europeans Engaging the Atlantic offers innovative perspectives on historical European knowledge concerning the “New World” and on trade and commerce therewith. In so doing, it enhances our understanding of how, when, and why early modern Europeans made sense of the Atlantic world, and how they tried to connect with Atlantic trade and commerce. Featuring case studies that discuss these issues from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, this volume explores both the degree to which the Atlantic was (or was not) part of the European worldview—or just one part of a worldview with many centers of interest—and how European engagement with the Atlantic world evolved.

The confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers, now in Canyonlands National Park, near popular tourist destination Moab, still cannot be reached or viewed easily. Much of the surrounding region remained remote and rarely visited for decades after settlement of other parts of the West. The first U.S. government expedition to explore the canyon country and the Four Corners area was led by John Macomb of the army's topographical engineers.

The soldiers and scientists followed in part the Old Spanish Trail, whose location they documented and verified. Seeking to find the confluence of the Colorado and the Green and looking for alternative routes into Utah, which was of particular interest in the wake of the Utah War, they produced a substantial documentary record, most of which is published for the first time in this volume. Theirs is also the first detailed map of the region, and it is published in Exploring Desert Stone, as well.

This eye-opening perspective on Stanley’s expedition reveals new details about the Victorian explorer and his African crew on the brink of the colonial Scramble for Africa.

In 1871, Welsh American journalist Henry M. Stanley traveled to Zanzibar in search of the “missing” Scottish explorer and missionary David Livingstone. A year later, Stanley emerged to announce that he had “found” and met with Livingstone on Lake Tanganyika. His alleged utterance there, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” was one of the most famous phrases of the nineteenth century, and Stanley’s book, How I Found Livingstone, became an international bestseller.

In this fascinating volume Mathilde Leduc-Grimaldi and James L. Newman transcribe and annotate the entirety of Stanley’s documentation, making available for the first time in print a broader narrative of Stanley’s journey that includes never-before-seen primary source documents—worker contracts, vernacular plant names, maps, ruminations on life, lines of poetry, bills of lading—all scribbled in his field notebooks.

Finding Dr. Livingstone is a crucial resource for those interested in exploration and colonization in the Victorian era, the scientific knowledge of the time, and the peoples and conditions of Tanzania prior to its colonization by Germany.

Andre Penicaut, a carpenter, sailed with Iberville to the French province of Louisiana in 1699 and did not return to France until 1721. The book he began in the province and finished upon his return to France is an eyewitness account of the first years of the French colony, which stretched along the Gulf Coast from Florida to Texas and in the Mississippi Valley from the Balize to the Illinois country. As a ship carpenter, Penicaut was chosen as a member of several important expeditions: he accompanied Le Sueur up the Mississippi River in 1700 to present-day Minnesota, and he went with Juchereau de St. Denis on the first journey from Mobile to the Red River and overland to the Rio Grande, to open trade with the Spaniards in Mexico. Penicaut helped to build the first post in Louisiana, at Old Biloxi, and the second post on the Mobile River.

Penicaut was at his best when describing the lives and social customs of the Indians of the region. He saw them in realistic terms, showing no prejudice toward their native habits. Neither were his French colleagues cast in heroic or villainous molds—though their accomplishments must strike modern readers as truly epic.

When first published, Fleur de Lys and Calumet was a major stimulus to scholarship in the field. This new edition will be welcomed by a new generation of scholars and readers interested in the colonial history of the Deep South and the Mississippi Valley.

Borrowing from the old adage, we might say that to the victor belongs the history. One of the privileges gained in colonizing the New World was the power to tell the definitive stories of the struggle. The heroic texts depicting the discovery of territories, early encounters with indigenous peoples, and the ultimate subjection of land and  cultures to European nation-states all but erase the vanquished. In Forgotten Conquests, Gustavo Verdesio argues that these master narratives represent only one of many possible histories and suggests a way of reading them in order to discover the colonial subjects who did not produce documents.

Verdesio read the key texts relating to the struggles for possession of River Plate's northern shore -- present-day Uruguay. He probes them for traces of conflicts in meaning and the agency of Amerindians, gauchos, Africans, and women -- the subjected peoples that the texts try to silence. The narrators, speaking for their culture, assume the role of knowing subject, repressing all other voices, epistemologies, and acts of resistance. Verdesio's tasks are to listen for those that the Europeans represented as an unintelligible Other, to draw them into the foreground, and to decolonize their histories.

By unpacking these texts, Verdesio shows that from the European point of view, the colonial encounter draws the New World into historical time and ushers in a new concept of knowledge. For the first time, the historian's role is to discover, to interpret eyewitness testimonies and first-hand experience, to write 'a new history of admirable things.' Even in this reconstruction of historical truth, Old World ideology drives the narratives, whose chief purpose is to justify conquest. Forgotten Conquests lays bare the discursive strategies that generated the founding texts of Latin American history and engulfed its subjected peoples in silence for 500 years.

Foreword by Richard Dillon. Between 1842 and 1853, John C. Fremont led five expeditions across the trans-Mississippi West. While the success of his early journeys gained him acclaim as a national hero, his later missions ended in tragedy and ultimately a court-martial. Historian Ferol Egan focuses on Fremont’s explorations, providing a vivid portrait of a courageous man in an emerging young nation. 

One of the most persistent legends in the annals of New World exploration is that of the Land of Gold. This mythical site was located over vast areas of South America (and later, North America); the search for it drove some men mad with greed and, as often as not, to their untimely deaths.

In this history of quest and adventure, Robert Silverberg traces the fate of Old World explorers lured westward by the myth of El Dorado. From the German conquistadores licensed by the Spanish king to operate out of Venezuela, to the journeys of Gonzalo Pizarro in the Amazon basin, and to the nearly miraculous voyage of Francisco Orellana to the mouth of the Amazon River, encountering the warlike women who gave the river its name, violence and bloodshed accompanied the determined adventurers. Sir Walter Raleigh and a host of other explorers spent small fortunes and many lives trying to locate Manoa, a city that was rumored to be El Dorado—City of Gold. Celebrated science fiction author Robert Silverberg recreates these legendary quests in The Golden Dream: Seekers of El Dorado.

Golden Treasures of the San Juan contains fabulous stories of lost mines, bullion, and valuable prospects of one of the most beautiful mountain areas of the United States. Many of the stories are based on the personal adventures of author Cornelius.

When the Indian Mountain Lands (the San Juan) were ceded in 1874, the wild region was thrown open to prospectors seeking its gold and silver riches. Many prospects were valuable discoveries, yet were lost and became legendary mines. Further, the Spanish explorers had been through this area much earlier with their bullion, and their caches added to the legends of gold discovered or to be discovered. The authors of this book trace complete stories about these long-lost hoards.

A Governor and His Image in Baroque Brazil was first published in 1979. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.This seventeenth-century manuscript describes the life and death of Afonso Furtado, governor of Brazil from 1671 to 1675. The obscure author, Juan Lopes Sierra, was an eyewitness to many of the governor’s activities and was clearly a great admirer of Furtado, whom he calls in his text “Our Hero.” The manuscript is a useful cultural and historical document focusing on the governor’s administration and, especially, on his direction of military campaigns into the heart of Brazil to subdue hostile Indians and search for mineral wealth. The author’s descriptions of religious life in the capital city of Salvador and of the elaborate funeral arrangements for the governor reveal the attitudes and aspirations of the Brazilian colonial elite. Most important, perhaps, the document covers on of the least studied periods in Brazilian history, the years between the great century of sugar and the half-century of gold. Lopes Sierra wrote in Spanish, though his subject was Portuguese Brazil, and his manuscript is peppered with Portuguese/Spanish coinages and classical allusions. Ruth Jones has mastered the difficult task of translation and Stuart Schwartz provides a historical context and notes to the translation. The book is a publication from the James Ford Bell Library of the University of Minnesota.

Although John Wesley Powell and party are usually given credit for the first river descent through the Grand Canyon, the ghost of James White has haunted those claims. White was a Colorado prospector, who, almost two years before Powell's journey, washed up on a makeshift raft at Callville, Nevada. His claim to have entered the Colorado above the San Juan River with another man (soon drowned) as they fled from Indians was widely disseminated and believed for a time, but Powell and his successors on the river publically discounted it. Colorado River runners and historians have since debated whether White's passage through Grand Canyon even could have happened.

Hell or High Water is the first full account of White's story and how it became distorted and he disparaged over time. It is also a fascinating detective story, recounting how White's granddaughter, Eilean Adams, over decades and with the assistance of a couple of notable Colorado River historians who believed he could have done what he claimed, gradually uncovered the record of James White's adventure and put together a plausible narrative of how and why he ended up floating helplessly down a turbulent river, entrenched in massive cliffs, with nothing but a driftwood raft to carry him through.

A Classic in the History of Exploration, a Judicious Account of the Role of the Cabots in the Discovery of the New World
John Cabot, Giovanni Caboto in his native Italian, led an expedition to the New World in 1497 on behalf of King Henry VII of England. He is considered the first European to explore North America since the Viking voyages five hundred years earlier. Although Cabot’s exact landfall on his first voyage is not known—it could have been Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, or even Maine—his claim for England to this territory countered the Spanish and Portuguese explorations to the south, and changed world history. Cabot made three roundtrips between Bristol, England, and North America, and later, his son Sebastian, made two similar voyages. John and Sebastian Cabot: The Discovery of North America by historian Sir Charles Raymond Beazley was first published in 1898. Its enduring value in addition to its lucid, well-balanced and researched narrative is the author’s detailed history of prior voyages to the North American continent, including those from China and the Pacific Islands as well as those from the realms of mythology. The author also includes all extant references to the Cabots in historical documents.

Journal and Letter Book of Nicholas Buckeridge, 1651-1654 was first published in 1973. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.Nicholas Buckeridge was an employee of the East India Company from the 1640’s into the 1660’s, and his journal and letter book provide an account of English trade with India, Persia and East Africa in the mid-seventeenth century, a period for which few records of this kind have survived. Many logbooks and journals of the early years of the company have been preserved at the India office but materials for the general period of 1645 to 1660 are very scant. Buckeridge describes the places he visited, the problems of trading, the goods traded, and some of the prices obtained in the trading. The journal complements the early records of the Assada plantation venture of the East India Company and also provides a picture of the perilous life of a merchantman in his endeavors for the company. The editor, a former rare-book librarian at the University of Minnesota, provides a general introduction as well as brief introductions to each of the eighteen pieces from the letter book and journal. There are a facsimile reproduction of a page from the Buckeridge account and two maps. This is a publication from the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota.

An early Spanish explorer’s account of American Indians.

 

This volume mines the Pardo documents to reveal a wealth of information pertaining to Pardo’s routes, his encounters and interactions with native peoples, the social, hierarchical, and political structures of the Indians, and clues to the ethnic identities of Indians known previously only through archaeology. The new afterword reveals recent archaeological evidence of Pardo’s Fort San Juan--the earliest site of sustained interaction between Europeans and Indians--demonstrating the accuracy of Hudson’s route reconstructions.

 

This major contribution to contact period studies points to the Lasley Vore site in modern Oklahoma as the most likely first meeting place of Plains Indians and Europeans more than 300 years ago.

In 1718, Jean-Baptiste Bénard, Sieur de la Harpe, departed St. Malo in Brittany for the New World. La Harpe, a member of the French bourgeoisie, arrived at Dauphin Island on the Gulf coast to take up the entrepreneurial concession provided by the director of the French colony, Jean Baptiste LeMoyne de Bienville. La Harpe's charge was to open a trading post on the Red River just above a Caddoan village not far from present-day Texarkana. Following the establishment of this post, La Harpe ventured farther north to extend his trade market into the region occupied by the Wichita Indians. Here he encountered a Tawakoni village with an estimated 6,000 inhabitants, a number that swelled to 7,000 during the ten-day visit.

Despite years of ethnohistoric and archaeological research, no scholar had successfully established where this important meeting took place. Then in 1988, George Odell and his crew surveyed and excavated an area 13 miles south of Tulsa, along the Arkansas River, that revealed undeniable association of Native American habitation refuse with 18th-century European trade goods.

Odell here presents a full account of the presumed location of the Tawakoni village as revealed through the analysis of excavated materials from nine specialist collaborators. In a strikingly well-written narrative report, employing careful study and innovative analysis supported by appendixes containing the excavation data, Odell combines documentary history and archaeological evidence to pinpoint the probable site of the first European contact with North American Plains Indians.

From the intense and brooding Magellan and the glamorous and dashing Sir Francis Drake; to Thomas Cavendish, who set off to plunder Spain’s American gold and the Dutch circumnavigators, whose numbers included pirates as well as explorers and merchants,  Robert Silverberg  captures the adventures and seafaring exploits of a bygone era.

Over the course of a century, European circumnavigators in small ships charted the coast of the New World and explored the Pacific Ocean. Characterized by fierce nationalism, competitiveness, and bloodshed, The Longest Voyage: Circumnavigators in the Age of Discovery  captures the drama, danger, and personalities in the colorful story of the first voyages around the world. These accounts begin with Magellan’s unprecedented 1519–22 circumnavigation, providing an immediate, exciting, and intimate glimpse into that historic venture. The story includes frequent threats of mutiny; the nearly unendurable extremes of heat, cold, hunger, thirst, and fatigue; the fear, tedium, and moments of despair; the discoveries of exotic new peoples and strange new lands; and, finally, Magellan’s own dramatic death during a fanatical attempt to convert native Philippine islanders to Christianity.

Capturing the total context of political climate and historical change that made the Age of Discovery one of excitement and drama, Silverberg brings a motley crew of early ocean explorers vividly to life.

Long after the Aztecs and the Incas had become a fading memory, a Maya civilization still thrived in the interior of Central America. Lost Shores, Forgotten Peoples is the first collection and translation of important seventeenth-century narratives about Europeans travelling across the great “Ocean Sea” and encountering a people who had maintained an independent existence in the lowlands of Guatemala and Belize.
In these narratives—primary documents written by missionaries and conquistadors—vivid details of these little known Mayan cultures are revealed, answering how and why lowlanders were able to evade Spanish conquest while similar civilizations could not. Fascinating tales of the journey from Europe are included, involving unknown islands, lost pilots, life aboard a galleon fleet, political intrigue, cannibals, and breathtaking natural beauty. In short, these forgotten manuscripts—translations of the papers of the past—provide an unforgettable look at an understudied chapter in the age of exploration.
Lost Shores, Forgotten Peoples will appeal to archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians interested in Central America, the Maya, and the Spanish Conquest.

Merchants and Scholars was first published in 1965. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.This volume of essays, collected in memory of James Ford Bell, reflects in some measure the broad scope and rich diversity of the James Ford Bell Collection of the University of Minnesota Library. All ten of the essays are based on or related to materials in the Bell collection.Founded by the late Mr. Bell, who was a prominent figure in the modern economic history of Minnesota, the collection had its origins in his interest in the commercial penetration of North America. As the collection developed, it became apparent that it would not be possible to study the merchants and explorers who came to North America apart from their contemporaries who probed South America, Africa, and Asia. The scope of the collection thus was expanded until it became worldwide, including the works of philosophers, geographers, navigators, merchants, and others who provided European readers with the knowledge they needed to enlarge their sphere of commerce.In an introduction, John Parker, former curator of the collection, explains the significance of the concept of the Bell collection to an understanding of history. He makes it clear that we cannot understand the reality of a world laced together by the bonds of commerce until we have learned how these bonds developed.The essays, which cover a wide range of subjects, show the interdependence of men of adventure and their scholarly contemporaries. Essays by Thomas Goldstein and Elisabeth Hirsch show that the scientists and humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were deeply concerned with geographic thought and new discoveries. David Quinn and Ward Barrett discuss economic undertakings by merchants of the Old World in the New, while Burton Stein and Paul Bamford deal with historic problems of economy in Asia and the Mediterranean, respectively. John Webb, Frank Gillis, and Ernst Abbe relate economic enterprise and exploration to the development of the cartography of Russia and Hudson Bay. Helen Wallis and O.H.K. Spate concern themselves with English and French interests in the southern oceans. In its publication of these studies the Bell collection continues the tradition of cooperation between the merchant and the scholar.

Mission in the Marianas was first published in 1975. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.The source of this translation is a pamphlet published in Madrid in about 1671 about the culture of the people of the Marianas Islands and a report of the second year of the Jesuit mission there. It was compiled by Jesuit Andrés de Ledesma from letters written by Father Diego Luis de Sanvítores and his companions at the mission. As Professor Barrett writes in his commentary: “Its pages ring and echo with the rhetoric of the missionaries who with single-minded devotion both followed and preceded the sword in the Spanish Empire. It was the fervid zeal of Diego Luis de Sanvítores that altered so greatly the lives of the people of the Marianas and led to his celebrated martyrdom there in 1672.” This is a publication from the James Ford Bell Library of the University of Minnesota.

For years, schoolchildren heard the story of Jean Nicolet’s arrival in Wisconsin. But the popularized image of the hapless explorer landing with billowing robe and guns blazing, supposedly believing himself to have found a passage to China, is based on scant evidence—a false narrative perpetuated by fanciful artists’ renditions and repetition. 

In more recent decades, historians have pieced together a story that is not only more likely but more complicated and interesting. Patrick Jung synthesizes the research about Nicolet and his superior Samuel de Champlain, whose diplomatic goals in the region are crucial to understanding this much misunderstood journey across the Great Lakes. Additionally, historical details about Franco-Indian relations and the search for the Northwest Passage provide a framework for understanding Nicolet’s famed mission.

First published in 1961, The Natural History of the Lewis and Clark Expedition was the first work to discuss in detail the contributions to America's natural history made by the Corps of Discovery (1804-1806), or the Lewis and Clark Expedition, as it is popularly known. Raymond Darwin Burroughs tallied the quantity of game killed and consumed during the course of the expedition.
     This paperback edition of Burroughs' work contains the entire original text, as well as a new introduction by Lewis and Clark scholar Robert Carriker. The major contribution of The Natural History of the Lewis and Clark Expedition was to organize and catalog the disparate discussions of animal and plant life that are scattered throughout the original journals by expedition members. These observations are presented in the explorers' words along with Burroughs's expert commentary.

On their journey westward, Lewis and Clark demonstrated an amazing ability to identify the new plants and animals they encountered, and their observations enriched science’s understanding of the trans-Mississippi West. Others have written about their discoveries and have faithfully cataloged their findings; now a twenty-first-century biologist reexamines some of those discoveries in the light of modern science to show for the first time their lasting biological significance.

            The Natural World of Lewis and Clark interprets the expedition’s findings from a modern perspective to show how advances such as DNA research, modern understanding of proteins, and the latest laboratory methods shed new light on them. David Dalton recounts the expedition’s observations and, in clear, readily accessible terms, relates them to principles of ecology, genetics, physiology, and even animal behavior.

            Writing in informal language with a bit of wry humor, Dalton invites readers to imagine the West that Lewis and Clark found, revealing the dynamic features of nature and the dramatic changes that earlier peoples brought about. He explains surprising facts, ranging from why Indians used cottonwood bark as winter feed for horses to why the explorers experienced gastric distress with some foods, and even why the Expedition’s dog would have been well-advised to avoid a diet of salmon.

Dalton introduces the tools and techniques of today’s science in a way that won’t intimidate nonspecialist readers. Throughout the book he expertly balances botanical and zoological information, with coverage ranging from the extinction of large animals in North America a few thousand years ago to the expected effects of invasive species and climate change in the coming centuries.

            Enhanced with unusual and informative illustrations—not only nature photography but also historical images—this book will fascinate any reader with an interest in the natural history of the American West as well as broader issues in conservation and ecology. The Natural World of Lewis and Clark tells the story behind the story of this remarkable expedition and shows that its legacy extended not only across a continent but also into our own time.

John Wesley Powell’s 1869 expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers and through the Grand Canyon continues to be one of the most celebrated adventures in American history, ranking with the Lewis and Clark expedition and the Apollo landings on the moon. For nearly twenty years Lago has researched the Powell expedition from new angles, traveled to thirteen states, and looked into archives and other sources no one else has searched. He has come up with many important new documents that change and expand our basic understanding of the expedition by looking into Powell’s crewmembers, some of whom have been almost entirely ignored by Powell historians. Historians tended to assume that Powell was the whole story and that his crewmembers were irrelevant. More seriously, because several crew members made critical comments about Powell and his leadership, historians who admired Powell were eager to ignore and discredit them.
 
Lago offers a feast of new and important material about the river trip, and it will significantly rewrite the story of Powell’s famous expedition. This book is not only a major work on the Powell expedition, but on the history of American exploration of the West.

In Rhumb Lines and Map Wars, Mark Monmonier offers an insightful, richly illustrated account of the controversies surrounding Flemish cartographer Gerard Mercator's legacy. He takes us back to 1569, when Mercator announced a clever method of portraying the earth on a flat surface, creating the first projection to take into account the earth's roundness. As Monmonier shows, mariners benefited most from Mercator's projection, which allowed for easy navigation of the high seas with rhumb lines—clear-cut routes with a constant compass bearing—for true direction. But the projection's popularity among nineteenth-century sailors led to its overuse—often in inappropriate, non-navigational ways—for wall maps, world atlases, and geopolitical propaganda.

Because it distorts the proportionate size of countries, the Mercator map was criticized for inflating Europe and North America in a promotion of colonialism. In 1974, German historian Arno Peters proffered his own map, on which countries were ostensibly drawn in true proportion to one another. In the ensuing "map wars" of the 1970s and 1980s, these dueling projections vied for public support—with varying degrees of success.

Widely acclaimed for his accessible, intelligent books on maps and mapping, Monmonier here examines the uses and limitations of one of cartography's most significant innovations. With informed skepticism, he offers insightful interpretations of why well-intentioned clerics and development advocates rallied around the Peters projection, which flagrantly distorted the shape of Third World nations; why journalists covering the controversy ignored alternative world maps and other key issues; and how a few postmodern writers defended the Peters worldview with a self-serving overstatement of the power of maps. Rhumb Lines and Map Wars is vintage Monmonier: historically rich, beautifully written, and fully engaged with the issues of our time.

The 1859 exploration of the Great Basin by army topographical engineer James Simpson opened up one of the West's most important transportation and communication corridors, a vital link between the Pacific Coast and the rest of the nation. It became the route of the Pony Express and the Overland Mail and Stage, the line of the Pacific telegraph, a major wagon road for freighters and emigrants, and, later, the first transcontinental auto road, the Lincoln Highway, now Highway 50.

No one has accurately tracked or mapped Simpson's original route, until now. Jesse Petersen shows in words, maps, and photos exactly where the explorer went. Sharing his detective-like reasoning as he walked or drove the entire trail west and Simpson's variant route returning east, Petersen takes readers on a mountain and desert trek through some of America's most remote and striking landscapes.

Lloyd E. Berry and Robert O. Crummey offer edited accounts of six English voyagers and their experiences in Muscovy Russia between 1553 and 1600. With modernized spelling and presentation, these accounts are accompanied by a glossary of Russian terms, introductions of their authors, and annotations that help put the travelers’ narratives into perspective.

The myths of settlement of the Great Plains usually conjure up images of Anglo-American pioneers moving into a sea of grass, opposed by Native peoples. Such myths leave out the considerable influence of Spain. Spain and the Plains corrects this error, revealing the Plains as a northern frontier of New Spain, a frontier antedating the northern European presence in North America, and a frontier where Spanish and Native peoples met, clashed, and blended.

Spain and the Plains introduces and documents Spanish exploration of and migration to the Plains, examines the myths that shaped Spanish exploration and the pragmatic realities of exploration and settlement, and documents racism and misrepresentation that Hispanic groups encountered in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contributors show how early explorers, shaped by the intellectual context of the Renaissance, sought mythical locales: the fountain of youth, the straits of Anian, and the city of Quivira. They describe how exploration shifted to emphasize military and economic gains in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Essays portray the diaspora of Spanish settlers and reconstruct daily life in their settlements on the Plains.

This unique collection paints a clear picture of a crucial but often misrepresented and neglected era in American and Spanish history.

The editors, all authors of previous books, are affiliated with the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where Frances W. Kaye is a professor of English, John R. Wunder is a professor of history and journalism, and Ralph H. Vigil is a professor emeritus of history and ethnic studies. Contributors include Félix D. Almaráz Jr., Thomas E. Chávez, Frances W. Kaye, Russell M. Magnaghi, Ralph H. Vigil, Waldo R. Wedel, and John R. Wunder.

Reveals the transformation that occurred in Indian communities during the Spanish conquest of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico from 1492 to 1550

In Surviving Spanish Conquest: Indian Fight, Flight, and Cultural Transformation in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, Karen F. Anderson-Córdova draws on archaeological, historical, and ethnohistorical sources to elucidate the impacts of sixteenth-century Spanish conquest and colonization on indigenous peoples in the Greater Antilles. Moving beyond the conventional narratives of the quick demise of the native populations because of forced labor and the spread of Old World diseases, this book shows the complexity of the initial exchange between the Old and New Worlds and examines the myriad ways the indigenous peoples responded to Spanish colonization.
 
Focusing on Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, the first Caribbean islands to be conquered and colonized by the Spanish, Anderson-Córdova explains Indian sociocultural transformation within the context of two specific processes, out-migration and in-migration, highlighting how population shifts contributed to the diversification of peoples. For example, as the growing presence of “foreign” Indians from other areas of the Caribbean complicated the variety of responses by Indian groups, her investigation reveals that Indians who were subjected to slavery, or the “encomienda system,” accommodated and absorbed many Spanish customs, yet resumed their own rituals when allowed to return to their villages. Other Indians fled in response to the arrival of the Spanish.
 
The culmination of years of research, Surviving Spanish Conquest deftly incorporates archaeological investigations at contact sites copious use of archival materials, and anthropological assessments of the contact period in the Caribbean. Ultimately, understanding the processes of Indian-Spanish interaction in the Caribbean enhances comprehension of colonization in many other parts of the world. Anderson-Córdova concludes with a discussion regarding the resurgence of interest in the Taíno people and their culture, especially of individuals who self-identify as Taíno. This volume provides a wealth of insight to historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and those interested in early cultures in contact.

This translation of an eyewitness account by a major participant offers valuable information about all three attempts to establish a French colony on the south Atlantic coast of North America.

Rene Laudonniere's account of the three attempts by France to colonize what is now the United States is uniquely valuable because
he played a major role in each of the ventures—first, in 1562, as second in command during the founding of the ill-fated Charlesport, then as commander for the establishment of Fort Caroline on Florida's St. Johns River in 1564, and finally as the one to welcome French reinforcements the following year. It was also Laudonniere's destiny to witness the tragic fall of Fort Caroline to Spanish claims one month later.

Laudonniere wrote his chronicle, L'histoire Notable de la Floride, in 1565 following the fall of Fort Caroline as he recuperated in England. Much more than an account of his feelings and adventures, Laudonniere's history reveals him to be an exceedingly able and accurate geographer with a highly developed interest in anthropology.

The first English translation was published by Richard Hakluyt in 1587. Charles E. Bennett's graceful and accurate rendering in modern English was first published in 1975 by the University Press of Florida. Besides the account, thoroughly annotated and with present-day names identifying sites visited by the Frenchman, this volume includes a valuable introductory essay. The appendices to the volume are four noteworthy documents, the last of which—a guide to plants of 16th-century Florida—will be of exceptional interest to naturalists, gardeners, and students of folklore. The account itself will fascinate professional historians and anthropologists as well as general readers interested in the exciting and often moving
events of early European settlement in the New World.

Rene Laudonniere was a French adventurer and explorer of the 16th century who wrote L'histoire Notable de la Floride. Charles E. Bennett is a historian and former Florida congressman. He was coauthor of the Moss-Bennett legislation and was instrumental in the establishment of the Fort Caroline National Memorial and the Timucuan Ecological and Historical Preserve. Jerald T. Milanich is Curator in Archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

A personal account of Commodore Perry’s landmark expedition to Japan and life in the antebellum navy
 
George B. Gideon Jr. served as second assistant engineer aboard the  USS Powhatan from 1852 to 1856. From his position on the steam  frigate, Gideon traveled to Singapore, Labuan, Borneo, Hong Kong, and many other Asian lands. During his time at sea, Gideon penned dozens of letters to his wife, Lide, back home in Philadelphia. Recently  discovered in the attic of his great-great-grandniece, were fifty-one letters penned by Gideon providing thorough and insightful commentary  throughout the voyage.

Through these correspondences, Gideon laboriously documents the details of his daily life on board, from the food they ate to the technical aspects of his work, as well as observations concerning the historical events unfolding around him, such as Chinese piracy, the Taiping Rebellion, the Crimean War, and the devastation of Shimoda.  To My Dearest Wife, Lide: Letters from George B. Gideon Jr. during  Commodore Perry’s Expedition to Japan, 1853–1855 is a rare first-person account of the landmark American naval expedition to Japan to establish commercial relations between the two countries. Gideon’s letters have been meticulously transcribed and annotated by the editors and are an invaluable primary historical source.

Gideon’s letters are candid and revealing, delving into the rampant dysfunction in the navy of the 1850s—sickness and disease, alcohol abuse, and poor leadership, among other challenges. Gideon also unabashedly shares his own cynical views of the navy’s role in supporting American economic interests in Japan. This firsthand account of the political mission of the Perry expedition is a unique contribution to naval and military history and gives readers a better view of life aboard a navy ship.

In recent years, journalists and environmentalists have pointed urgently to the melting Arctic as a leading indicator of the growing effects of climate change. While climate change has unleashed profound transformations in the region, most commentators distort these changes by calling them unprecedented. In reality, the landscapes of the North American Arctic—as well as relations among scientists, Inuit, and federal governments— are products of the region’s colonial past. And even as policy analysts, activists, and scholars alike clamor about the future of our world’s northern rim, too few truly understand its history.
 
In Unfreezing the Arctic, Andrew Stuhl brings a fresh perspective to this defining challenge of our time. With a compelling narrative voice, Stuhl weaves together a wealth of distinct episodes into a transnational history of the North American Arctic, proving that a richer understanding of its social and environmental transformation can come only from studying the region’s past. Drawing on historical records and extensive ethnographic fieldwork, as well as time spent living in the Northwest Territories, he closely examines the long-running interplay of scientific exploration, colonial control, the testimony and experiences of Inuit residents, and multinational investments in natural resources. A rich and timely portrait, Unfreezing the Arctic offers a comprehensive look at scientific activity across the long twentieth century. It will be welcomed by anyone interested in political, economic, environmental, and social histories of transboundary regions the world over.


The author intends to donate all royalties from this book to the Alaska Youth for Environmental Action (AYEA) and East Three School's On the Land Program.