James Cook’s first voyage circumnavigated the globe in the ship Endeavour, and gave scientific members of the expedition an opportunity to collect specimens from previously unexplored habitats.

"A lot of things started going wrong from the very beginning," historian Hampton Sides says of Cook's last voyage, which ended in the British... 'The Wide Wide Sea' revisits Capt. James Cook's fateful ...

“The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook” by Hampton Sides, Doubleday, 432 pages, $35. Hampton Sides is one of America’s foremost ...

History is an encyclopedia filled with the names of famous explorers. Those whose adventures sometimes make us wish we lived in their time, back when what we know today as historical wonders were new ...

In the late 1700s, a woman named Bridget Atkinson collected over a thousand seashells from all over the world without ever leaving her village in the rural English county of Cumberland. FRANCES ...

The end of the story is unexpected and sudden, coming about because of misunderstanding and mistake. Yet it was the right story to finish just as the new year was climbing into the sky. Now, firmly ...