Publisher's Synopsis
Fourteen 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
