This book consists of 14 eyewitness, and often eye-opening, accounts of pioneering journeys undertaken by explorers, adventurers and conquerors, stretching across almost 600 years. Many of them had an immense impact on the world, helping to shape its future. Some also left death and destruction, slavery and exploitation in their wake, particularly for those whose land, people and treasures were the objects of desire. The accounts are contemporaneous, written by people who were there at the time history was made, such as the stories of the Spanish conquistador who helped slaughter the Aztecs in the mid-16th century,  the physician who was at Columbus’s side on his second voyage west in 1493, a Dutch woman who rebelled against the conventions of her age to launch two expeditions in search of the source of the Nile in the 1860s, and the African-American Polar explorer who was one of two men to first reach the North Pole in 1909. These are their chronicles, in their own words, written at the time or shortly after their journeys occurred.

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