On this page: General Resources | Vasco de Gama | Magellan
general resources
📖 Explorers Who Got Lost by Diane Sansevere-Dreher. "During the fifteenth century, just about every explorer who sailed beyond the horizon to find new lands thought he knew where he was going. But in fact most got terribly lost and stumbled on places no one had heard of before." Learn about the key figures of the Age of Discovery—de Gama, Columbus, Cabot, Magellan, Verrazzano, Cartier, and Hudson—in this engagingly written chapter book. – Elementary • Middle
📖 Into the Unknown: How Great Explorers Found Their Way by Land, Sea, and Air by Stewart Ross. Ross traces 14 Historic Journeys of Discovery in this excellent book. In addition to Age of Discovery notables (Columbus, Magellan), we learn about Pitheas the Greek's journey to the Arctic Circle in the fourth century BC, the Viking discovery of Vinland, the travels of Chinese explorer Zheng He, and more recent explorations to Everest, the moon, and the deep sea. Highly recommended. – Elementary • Middle
📖 Ship by David Macaulay. This story is told in two parts: the first half focuses on a fictional modern-day excavation of an early 16th century caravel that sank at sea, while the second half takes us back to the ship's construction, by way of a fictional journal written by the merchant who commissioned the caravel. – Elementary • Middle
📖 The World Made New: Why the Age of Exploration Happened and How it Changed the World by Marc Aronson. In this in-depth picture book, Aronson places the European Age of Discovery into historical context, introduces some famous explorers of the Age (Cartier, Pizarro, Drake, Cortes, and others), and examines the global consequences of their expeditions. – Middle
🔗 Content Connection: US History – Explorers. Learn about European expeditions to the Americas.
🔗 Content Connection: Asia in the Middle Ages. Read about Marco Polo (Mongol Empire) and Zheng He (Ming China)
▶️ Early Modern Exploration series from Crash Course. This playlist includes 15th Century Mariners “in which John teaches you about the beginning of the so-called Age of Discovery.” Learn about Columbus, de Gama, and Zheng He. Then, in The Columbian Exchange learn “about the changes wrought by contact between the Old World and the New.” Finally in Captain Cook, John teaches “about the life and death of one of history's great explorers, Captain James Cook of the British Navy.” – Middle • High
vasco de gama
📖 A Long and Uncertain Journey: The 27,000-Mile Voyage of Vasco da Gama by Joan Elizabeth Goodman. Here is a beautifully illustrated, text-heavy picture book of the Portuguese explorer, Vasco da Gama. The narrative follows da Gama's historic journey around the southern tip of Africa and across the Indian Ocean to Calicut, India. Includes excerpts from the explorer's journal. – Middle
magellan
📖 Magellan's World by Stuart Waldman. Waldman tells the story of Ferdinand Magellan's quest to be the first person to circumnavigate the globe. The detailed text is greatly enhanced by the atmospheric illustrations, as well as a fold-out map. – Middle
