In the third volume in his award-winning Exploration Trilogy, Goetzmann tells the story of three centuries of Europeans exploring the Pacific and Northwest, Americans setting out across their own immense continent, and Americans exploring the oceans, Japan, and the poles. Spanning the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, the Second Great Age of Discovery reflected Enlightenment ideals of science and progress. Explorers gathered information that transformed natural history and botany into systematic inquiries, placed geography and cartography on their modern footing, and launched the sciences of geology and oceanography.