Fifteen-year-old Jason embarks on a ten thousand-mile journey in 1897 in hopes of striking it rich after hearing the news that gold has been discovered in Canada's Yukon Territory.

"Victoria Blaisdell longs for independence and adventure, and she yearns to accompany her father as he sails west in search of real gold! But it is 1848, and Tory isn't even allowed to go to school, much less travel all the way from Rhode Island to California. Determined to take control of her own destiny, Tory stows away on the ship. Though San Francisco is frenzied and full of wild and dangerous men, Tory finds freedom and friendship there. Until...

When Cass promises a dying man that he will take the man's daughter with him to search for gold in the Yukon and share whatever gold found, Cass and Serena discover the hardship of the gold fields.

"It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to stake his claim in New Zealand's booming gold rush. On the stormy night of his arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of 12 local men who have met in secret to discuss a series of unexplained events: a wealthy man has vanished, a prostitute has tried to end her life, and an enormous cache of gold has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into a network of fates and fortunes...

Orphaned at birth, Eliza Sommers is raised in the British colony of Valparaíso, Chile, by the well-intentioned Victorian spinster Miss Rose and her more rigid brother Jeremy. Just as she meets and falls in love with the wildly inappropriate Joaquín Andieta, a lowly clerk who works for Jeremy, gold is discovered in the hills of northern California. By 1849, Chileans of every stripe have fallen prey to feverish dreams of wealth. Joaquín takes off...

"The sun went down behind the storm clouds, and stained them with its blood, then the rain fell upon the ship in torrents. Solid sheets of water hammered the wooden decks so hard that the din drowned the men's voices and blotted out their vision." They leave as brothers. They must return as men. Famed sailor Hal Courtney is now a man of land and family. But when the King orders him to sail to Madagascar and stop the pirates responsible for looting...

A novel of ambition and obsession centered on the race to discover Pluto in 1930, pitting an untrained Kansas farm boy against the greatest minds of Harvard at the run-down Lowell Observatory in Arizona.

The Call of the Wild, by Jack London, is one of America's best-known novels. In his Reader's Companion to this new edition, Daniel Dyer provides a wealth of annotations explaining the book's many "sourdough" expressions and geographical references in order to help the modern reader see what London saw. Dyer also identifies characters in the novel - human and canine alike - whom London had known, and he spices his annotations with Northern lore and...

"Leo is a hardened old sea dog who knows not to trust anyone but himself after four ocean voyages. But when he sets sail with Magellan on a journey to find a westward route to the Spice Islands, he develops new friendships as they experience hunger and thirst, storms and doldrums, and mutinies and hostile, violent encounters. Will they ever find safe passage?"--

Exhibiting wit and extraordinary insight, Caroline Alexander sheds fresh light on Sir Ernest Shackleton's well-documented 1914 expedition to Antarctica, in which no human life was lost. From actual journals kept by the explorers, she creates a marvelous diary of the expedition, written from the viewpoint of a world-weary cat. As the Endurance prepares to sail, the shipwright's curious tomcat hides deep within the hold. When crew members discover...