Expeditions & Discoveries

The story begins in 1629, when the pride of the Dutch East India Company, the Batavia, is on its maiden voyage en route from Amsterdam to the Dutch East Indies, laden down with the greatest treasure to leave Holland....

The name Captain James Cook is one of the most recognisable in Australian history - an almost mythic figure who is often discussed, celebrated, reviled and debated....

In August of 1914, the British ship Endurance set sail for the South Atlantic. In October 1915, still half a continent away from its intended base, the ship was trapped, then crushed in the ice

More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed radically different suites of plants and animals....

Douglas Mawson, born in 1882 and knighted in 1914, was Australia’s greatest Antarctic explorer.

In 1768 Captain James Cook and his crew set out on a small British naval vessel in search of a missing continent....

Apollo is the behind-the-scenes story of an epic achievement. Based on exhaustive research that included many exclusive interviews, Apollo tells how America went from a standing start to a landing on the moon at a speed that now seems impossible....

Meriwether Lewis and his partner, William Clark, endured incredible hardships and witnessed astounding sights on their 1803 cross-country trip to unexplored West....

Anyone who has heard of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air or has seen a recent photo of climbers standing in line to get to the top of Everest may think they have a sense of what the world’s highest mountain is like....

The Plant Hunter's Atlas is a volume telling some of the most extraordinary tales of horticultural discovery and exploring the characters behind the stories....

The original recounting of the events from Sir Francis Drake himself. Listen to Drake's piratical raid on the Spanish Main and the various battle and adventures therein....

For lovers of history, nature, and adventure, the stunning true story of Theodore Roosevelt’s sons and their 1929 Himalayan expedition to prove the existence of the beishung, the panda bear, to the western world, from the New York Times bestselling author of Rise of the Rocket Girls.

An inspiring selection of hand-picked adventures, chosen by Ed Stafford. For those who don’t mind a bit of discomfort in order to experience the wilder side of our amazing planet.

Fans of Sapiens will love this “fascinating forensic inquiry into human origins” (Kirkus), where a renowned paleontologist takes listeners behind the scenes of one of the most groundbreaking investigations into the origins of humankind....

The mesmerizing, larger-than-life tale of an eccentric adventurer who traversed some of the greatest frontiers of the twentieth century, from uncharted Arctic wastelands to the underground resistance networks of World War II....

Tom Crean was the farmer’s son from Kerry who sailed on three major expeditions to the unknown Antarctic over a century ago. He served with both Captain Robert Scott and Sir Ernest Shackleton, spent longer on the ice than either and outlived them both....

This gripping story of courage and achievement is the account of Robert Falcon Scott's last fateful expedition to the Antarctic, as told by surviving expedition member Apsley Cherry-Garrard....

In February 1959, a group of nine experienced hikers in the Russian Ural Mountains died mysteriously on an elevation known as Dead Mountain....

Between 1606 and 1688, while the British had their hands full with the Gunpowder Plot and the English Civil War, it was highly skilled Dutch seafarers who mapped the land masses....

Finding and identifying a pirate ship is the hardest thing to do under the sea. But two men—John Chatterton and John Mattera—are willing to risk everything to find the Golden Fleece, the ship of the infamous pirate Joseph Bannister....

From tales of chivalrous knights to the barbarity of trial by ordeal, no era has been a greater source of awe, horror, and wonder than the Middle Ages....

In AD 793 Norse warriors struck the English isle of Lindisfarne and laid waste to it....

In 1519 Magellan and his fleet of five ships set sail from Seville, Spain, to discover a water route to the fabled Spice Islands in Indonesia, where the most sought-after commodities flourished....

Ejnar Mikkelsen was devoted to Arctic exploration. In 1910 he decided to search for the diaries of the ill-fated Mylius-Erichsen expedition, which had set out to prove that Robert Peary’s outline of the East Greenland coast was a myth, erroneous and presumably self-serving....

Inspired by Wondery’s hit podcast Against the Odds—learn how to survive whatever nature can throw at you through gut-twisting true stories of survival on the brink.