The books in this section are usually hardcover and in decent condition, though we'll sometimes offer hard-to-find books in lesser condition at a reduced price. Though we often put images of the book with their original dust jackets, the copies here won't always (or even often) have them. If that is important to you, please call ahead or say so in the order comments!
European kings in the sixteenth century dreamed of finding spices and gold in a mythical land mass in the Southern Hemisphere called Terra Australis Incognita, or Unknown South Land. The search for it was only part of the great exploration by white men of the vast ten-thousand-mile watery expanse that Magellan so incorrectly named Pacific. Primitive canoe wanderers had already found homes in Australia, Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia, but now came Portuguese explorers seeking the Indies, Spaniards in great galleons that were floating treasure-houses of plunder, British privateers, and seamen from all over Europe.
Mendaña, who found the Solomons; bold Francis Drake; the Dutch Tasman, who blazed a sea trail to Australia; Selkirk, the original Robinson Crusoe; Captain Bligh of Bounty fame; and Captain Cook, perhaps the greatest of them all—these are just a few of the names emblazoned across the canvas of this thrilling saga. Here are the shipwrecks and castaways, the cannibals, the coral reefs and lush islands of breadfruit and coconut, the mutineers and Yankee whalers, in an all-inclusive adventure story of epic proportions that is still being written today.
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