For more than five hundred years, explorers roamed the wilderness of North America, some in search of a route to the East or fabled cities of gold, others seeking the glossy pelts of the beaver or souls to convert. From the early voyages of Norse seafarers to the opening of the American, Canadian, and Alaskan frontiers and the grueling twentieth-century race to the North Pole, this great adventure is captured as never before in the lavishly illustrated Atlas of North American Exploration.

Written by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian William H. Goetzmann and exploration historian Glyndwr Williams, The Atlas of North American Exploration presents this bold drama through more than one hundred full-color maps employing state-of-the-art cartographic techniques. The routes of explorers Ponce de Leon, Henry Hudson, Hernando de Soto, Daniel Boone, Vitus Bering, Lewis and Clark, Admiral Peary, and dozens more are charted, showing the sites of encounters with native inhabitants or rival colonial powers, shipwrecks and uprisings, settlements and trading posts, and the death or disappearance of expeditions.