Medalla de Honor, Asociación de Alcades de V Centenario (Spain), 2010

Amazon.com Bestseller

Barnes & Noble Bestseller

BookSense 76 Recommendation November-December 2003

New York Times “Notable Book”, 2004

Nominated for an “Audie” award for best nonfiction book recording (BBC), 2005

CNN Top 10 Adventure Reads, 2010

Delancey Place's Top 12 Books of the Decade, 2015

The Manual's 10 Best History Books, 2019

Optioned as a feature film by Jason Koornick Productions

Dramatic rights optioned by LD Entertainment

The Strait of Magellan

Ferdinand Magellan's daring circumnavigation of the globe in the sixteenth century was a three-year odyssey filled with sex, violence, and amazing adventure. Now in 

, prize-winning biographer and journalist Laurence Bergreen entwines a variety of candid, firsthand accounts, bringing to life this groundbreaking and majestic tale of discovery that changed both the way explorers would henceforth navigate the oceans and history itself.

NPR Talk of the Nation Interview

Douro Harvest Film Festival

El Mercurio Interview (Spanish)

Sábado Interview (Portuguese)

Diario de Noticias Interview (Portuguese)

Die Standaard Special Feature (Dutch)

Kristeligt Dagblad Review (Danish)

History Hit Podcast

Hardcover: William Morrow, 2003

Paperback: Perennial/HarperCollins, 2004

Brazil: Objetiva

China: New World Press

England: HarperCollins UK

Estonia: Tänapäev

Finland: John Nurminen Säätiö

France: Grasset

Greece: Psichogios

Holland: De Bezige Bij

Hungary: General Press

Italy: Garzanti Libri, HarperItalia

Korea: Hanamu

Poland: Rebis 

Portugal: Bertrand

Spain: Planeta

Turkey: Iskultur

Vietnam: Phuong Nam Book

Over the Edge of the World

Visit the Book Website

Audible #2 in All Categories

Selection of WSJ+ Book Club

New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

Amazon #1 Best Seller in its Category

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Behind the Scenes

Queen Elizabeth’s favorite pirate, Francis Drake, was a hot-tempered, red-haired rogue who plundered and pillaged his way to the ends of the earth. A brash hustler who beguiled the nearly insolvent young queen of England with promises of gold and silver, and tales of heroic quests in exotic lands. For Elizabeth, he made the impossible real.

The relationship between Drake and Elizabeth is the missing link in the rise of the British empire, and its importance has not been fully described or appreciated—until now.

BYU Constant Wonder Radio Interview

Q&A with Deborah Kalb

Author's Guild Member Spotlight

Ancient Origins Magazine

US Hardcover: Harper Collins

China: Grand China Communications

Estonia: Argo Kirjastus

Poland: Rebis

UK: HarperCollins UK

Amazon

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In Search of a Kingdom

JM Madeira Op-ed Best Books of 2017

Huffington Post 9 Great Books to Round out 2016

Kirkus Reviews 12 Books that Make you Happy to be Single

Nowadays, Giacomo Casanova signifies the archetypical Latin lover, and there’s a bit of Casanova in everyone. But to his eighteenth-century contemporaries, the name Casanova

meant something else – the Venetian adventurer, spy, duelist, gambler, escape artist, and the author of nearly one hundred novels, poems, and treatises. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Catherine the Great of Russia, Mozart, and Lorenzo da Ponte – the librettist for Mozart’s Don Giovanni and a flamboyant figure in his own right – all were friends and correspondents. To them, Giacomo Casanova personified the spirit of liberation and more than that, libertinism – unrestrained sexual pleasure. We think of Europe in the eighteenth century as the Age of Revolution 

or the Age of Enlightenment, but it’s also the Age of Casanova, the Venetian arriviste who incarnated its passions and pleasures. And we think of Casanova as a great narcissist, yet he played many other roles in society as he sought to find a place to match his exalted yet fragile self-image. He was a genuinely outrageous figure who also happened to be a literary, psychological, and mathematical genius; a master of self-invention and self-promotion; a dedicated card sharp, con artist, and escape artist who devised the French lottery (still in use today); and made himself into one of the first celebrities of the modern era.

Why are we still fascinated with this upstart more than two hundred years after his death? He was neither handsome, nor well-educated, nor well-born. He lacked position and power. Somehow, this impoverished bastard son of an actress made himself into the most celebrated libertine of all time and a major literary figure of his era. His was a life lived in letters no less than in the boudoir. Casanova is legendary for personifying an archetype of the endlessly romantic, promiscuous, seducing male, yet his lesser known but equally remarkable accomplishments in mathematics and literature received belated and partial recognition. He broke hearts from Venice to Paris to Prague, yet he avoided becoming a villain. Casanova exalted women even as he exploited them. He preferred to make love (the more romantic the better), not war, as he lived out his sexual and romantic fantasies.

His desire knew no bounds; this was a man who claimed to seduce his own daughter and lured her into watching him make love to her mother. How did this nobody wind up consorting with the most beautiful women and the greatest minds of his day? How did he come to write the consummate erotic memoir? How did this least-loved, cast-off child become the most celebrated lover in history? This is the story I tell.

A figure straight out of a Henry Fielding novel: erotic, brilliant, impulsive, and desperate for recognition, Casanova was a self-destructive genius. This witty, roisterous biography exposes his astonishing life in rich, intimate detail. At the same time, it is a dazzling portrait of eighteenth-century Europe from serving girls to kings and courtiers. Esteemed biographer Laurence Bergreen brings a sensual world vividly alive in this irresistible book.

Interview with Simon & Schuster

Article for Aeon Magazine

New York Times Podcast

Washington Times Review

RadioWest Interview

US Hardcover: Simon & Schuster

Holland: Nieuw Amsterdam

Poland: Znak

Casanova

Editors' Choice, New York Times

Book-of-the-Month-Club BOMC2 Featured Selection

Military Book Club Featured Selection

History Book Club Featured Selection

A dramatic new biography of the world’s most iconic explorer. Columbus: The Four Voyages will change everything you thought you knew about Columbus.

In the first major biography of the iconic explorer in more than sixty years, Bergreen shows us the madness and genius that only those who traveled with him could have seen. Covering his four epic voyages, it’s the Columbus you didn’t learn about in school. Welcome to the voyages of a lifetime.

NY Post Op-Ed

Daily Beast Op-Ed

ABC Interview

Fox and Friends Interview

The John Batchelor Show

US Hardcover: Viking, 2011

 Brazil: Objetiva

 China: Grand China Publishing House

Indonesia: Elex Media Komputindo

Sweden: Leopard Förlag

Thailand: Gypsy Group

Vietnam: Omega

Columbus

Outside Magazine's "Greatest Adventure Bios Ever Written" – Ranked #3, November 2009

Book-of-the-Month Club Featured Selection November 2007

Conde Nast Traveler “New Classic” Travel Read, September 2007

Booklist Top 10 Biographies of 2007

Is broken—all that phantom-world so fair

Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread. . . .

She hid from her enemies amid a seductive array of islands, 118 in all. Damp, dark, cloistered, and crowded, she perched on rocks and silt. Fortifications and spectacular residences rose on foundations of pinewood piles and Istrian stone. In Marco Polo's Venice, few edifices—with the exception of one huge Byzantine basilica and other large churches—stood entirely straight; most structures seemed to rise uncertainly from the water.

Marco Polo came of age in a city of night edging toward dawn; it was opaque, secretive, and rife with transgressions and superstitions. Even those who had lived their entire lives in Venice became disoriented as they wandered down blind alleys that turned without warning from familiar to sinister. The whispers of conspiracy and the laughter of intimacy echoed through narrow passageways from invisible sources; behind dim windows, candles and torches flickered discreetly. In the evening, cobwebs of mist arose from the canals, imposing silence and isolation, obscuring the lanterns in the streets or in windows overlooking the gently heaving canals. Rats were everywhere—emerging from the canals, scurrying along the wharves and streets, gnawing at the city's fragile infrastructure, bringing the plague with them.

The narrow streets and passageways, some barely shoulder-width, took bewildering twists and turns until, without warning, they opened to the broad expanse of the Grand Canal, which divided one-half of the city from the other before running into the lagoon and, beyond that, the expanses of the Adriatic Sea.

In winter, the city hosted Carnival (literally, the playful "bidding farewell to meat" before Lent). Carnival became the occasion for orgies taking place just out of sight behind high courtyard walls and opaque curtains. Rumors of foul play ran rife amid the gaiety and sensuality of the Republic. Venetians bent on evil preferred quiet means of imposing death, such as poisoning or strangulation, and they usually got away with it.

In an uncertain world, thirteenth-century Venetians could feel certain of a few things. Two hundred years before Copernicus and three hundred before Galileo, it was an article of faith that the Sun revolved around the Earth, that the heavenly spheres were perfectly smooth, and that Creation occurred exactly 4,484 years before Rome was founded. Jerusalem was considered "the navel of the world." Entrances to Heaven and Hell existed, somewhere. The day, for most people, was subdivided into times for prayer: matins at midnight, lauds three hours later, prime at daybreak, terce at midmorning, sext at noon, none at midafternoon, vespers at sunset, and, at bedtime, compline. In the Age of Faith, science consisted largely but not entirely of spurious pursuits such as alchemy—the effort to transmute so-called base metals into gold—and astrology, which went hand in hand with astronomy.

People depended on wind, water, and animals for power. In Western Europe, coal had yet to be exploited as an energy source; paper money and the printing press also lay two hundred years in the future. The most advanced technology consisted of ships—considered a marvel of transport, though very dangerous—and devices capable of sawing wood, pressing olives, and tanning hides.

Throughout Europe, travel was exceedingly slow and hazardous. Crossing the English Channel was a dreaded undertaking; those who completed the ordeal would claim that the effort had impaired their health. Over land, people moved no faster than a horse could take them; the average land journey covered eight to ten miles a day, or under special circumstances, for brief durations, fifteen to twenty miles. Superstition led those who undertook such journeys to seek shelter at nightfall in primitive inns, infested with vermin, where two or three sojourners shared a single bed. It took five harrowing weeks to ride by cart from Paris to Venice.

But in Venice, conditions were very different. Tiny in size, yet global in outlook, Venice was entering the Late Middle Ages, a period of economic expansion, cultural achievement, and the lowering of barriers to commercial activity. Travel was not the exception, it was the norm. Everyone in Venice, it seemed, was a traveler and a merchant, or aspired to be. Across Europe, political power, formerly scattered among disorganized and crumbling empires reaching back to Roman times, had coalesced in well-armed and well-organized city-states, such as Venice. The growth in commerce among European city-states contributed to rapid advances in art, technology, exploration, and finance. The compass and clock, windmill and watermill—all vital to the smooth functioning of European economies—came into being, and great universities that survive to this day were being founded. As a result of all these advances, Venice—indeed, all of Europe as we know it—began to emerge.

Venice—seductive, Byzantine, and water-bound—was among the most important centers of commerce and culture in thirteenth-century Europe, a flourishing city-state that lived by trade. Her economy thrived thanks to her aggressive navy, which vigorously defended the city from repeated onslaughts by rapacious Genoese rivals and Arab marauders. Unlike other medieval cities, Venice had no walls or gates. They were not necessary. The lagoon and swamps protected Venice from invaders by land or by sea.

As the gateway to the riches of the East, Venice gave rise to a sophisticated merchant aristocracy, including the Polo family, known for frequent journeys to the East, especially Constantinople, in search of jewels, silks, and spices. Venice was highly structured, fiercely independent and commercial, and based on a unique combination of feudal obligation, and global outlook.

Because Venice was compact, hemmed in by the lagoon and by its enemies, the sense of common cause among its inhabitants was strong. "By virtually confining the Venetians to so restricted a space," says the historian John Julius Norwich, "it had created in them a unique spirit of cohesion and cooperation . . . not only at times of national crisis but also, and still more impressively, in the day-to-day handling of their affairs. Among Venice's rich merchant aristocracy everyone knew everyone else, and close acquaintance led to mutual trust of a kind that in other cities seldom extended far outside the family circle."

As a result, Venetians developed a reputation for efficient and thorough business administration—the most advanced in Europe. "A trading venture," Norwich says, "even one that involved immense initial outlay, several years' duration, and considerable risk, could be arranged on the Rialto in a matter of hours. It might take the form of a simple partnership between two merchants, or that of a large corporation of the kind needed to finance a full-sized fleet or trans-Asiatic caravan." Either way, Norwich concludes, "it would be founded on trust, and it would be inviolable."

The contractual underpinnings of a journey such as the one undertaken by the Polo family to China were a bit more formal than a mere handshake or oath. Marco Polo came of age in a city teeming with commerce. Venetian merchants had developed all sorts of strategies for dealing with the vagaries of their livelihood, global trade. In the absence of standard exchange rates, the many types of coins in use created a nightmare of conversion. The Byzantine Empire had its bezants, Arabic lands their drachmas, Florence its florins. Venice, relying on the ratio of gold to silver in a given coin to determine its true value, tried to accommodate them all. Merchants such as the Polos sought to circumvent the vexed system of coins, with its inevitable confusion and debasement, by trading in gems such as rubies and sapphires, and in pearls.

To meet these sophisticated and exotic financial needs, Venice developed the most advanced banking system in Western Europe. Banks of deposit on the Continent originated there. In 1156, the Republic of Venice became the first state since antiquity to raise a public loan. It also passed the first banking laws in Europe to regulate the nascent banking industry. As a result of these innovations, Venice offered the most advanced business practices in Europe.

Venice adapted Roman contracts to the needs of merchants trading with the East. Sophisticated sea-loan and sea-exchange contracts spelled out obligations between shipowners and merchants, and even offered insurance—mandatory in Venice beginning in 1253. The most widespread type of agreement among merchants was the commenda, or, in Venetian dialect, the collegantia, a contract based on ancient models. Loosely translated, the term meant "business venture," and it reflected prevailing customs of the trade rather than a set of consistent legal principles. Although these twelfth- and thirteenth-century contracts seem antiquated, they are startlingly modern in their calls for precise accounting. Contracts like these reflected and sustained a rudimentary form of capitalism long before the concept came into existence.

For Venetians, the world was startlingly modern in another way: it was "flat," that is to say, globally connected across boundaries and borders, both natural and artificial. They saw the world as a network of endlessly changing trade routes and opportunities extending over land and sea. By ship or caravan, Venetian merchants traveled to the four corners of the world in search of valuable spices, gems, and fabrics. Through their enterprise, minerals, salt, wax, drugs, camphor, gum arabic, myrrh, sandalwood, cinnamon, nutmeg, grapes, figs, pomegranates, fabrics (especially silk), hides, weapons, ivory, wool, ostrich and parrot feathers, pearls, iron, copper, gold dust, gold bars, silver bars, and Asian slaves all poured into Venice via complex trade routes from Africa, the Middle East, and Western Europe.

Even more exotic items flowed into the city aboard foreign galleys. Huge marble columns, pedestals, panels, and blocks piled up on the docks, having been taken from some ruined temple or civic edifice in Constantinopole, or another Greek or Egyptian city. These remnants of antiquity, the very headstones of dead or moribund civilizations, would wind up in an obscure corner of the Piazza San Marco, or on the façade of some ostentatious palazzo inhabited by a duke or a wealthy merchant of Venice.

The variety of goods moved Shakespeare to observe, through the character Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, that "the trade and profit of the city / Consisteth of all nations." Venetian trade was synonymous with globalization—another embryonic concept of the era. To extend their reach, Venetians formed partnerships with distant governments and merchants that cut across racial and religious divisions. Arabs, Jews, Turks, Greeks, and eventually the Mongols became trading partners with Venice even when they seemed to be political enemies. The Polos were not the first merchants to travel from Venice to Asia, but thanks to Marco Polo's exploits, they became the most celebrated.

Wherever Venetians went, they announced themselves with their distinctive accent and dialect, veneto. This tongue, like other Romance languages, was based on Latin, and it incorporated vocabulary, syntax, and pronunciation from other languages-some German and Spanish (in the form of the Castilian s, pronounced "th"), and some Croatian. There was even a little French thrown into the mix. There are lots of x's and z's in veneto, but almost no l's. Lord Byron, who claimed to have enjoyed two hundred women in Venice in as many consecutive evenings, called veneto a "sweet bastard Latin." To further complicate matters, veneto had numerous variants. The Polos of Venice would have strained to understand the dialect spoken elsewhere in the area by the inhabitants of Padua, Treviso, or Verona.

Some distinctive words in Marco Polo's world have leapt from veneto to English. Venetians of Polo's day bade each other ciao—or, to be more precise, s ciavo or s ciao vostro—which means, literally, "I am your slave." (The word came into the Venetian language from Croatian.) Gondola is another Venetian word, although it is not clear when the long, elegant, black vessel itself came into use. It is likely that in Marco Polo's day, a wide variety of small craft, including sailboats, rowboats, and galleys, jostled one another in the city's winding canals.

And "arsenal," or a place where weapons are manufactured and stored, entered the Venetian language by way of the Arabic term dar al sina'ah, meaning "workshop." When Europeans of Marco Polo's era employed this word, they meant the Arsenal in Venice, renowned as a center of shipbuilding. Here shipwrights operated an early assembly line devoted to turning out galleys at a furious rate from standardized, prefabricated components such as keels and masts. A Spanish visitor named Pero Tafur described the precisely choreographed activity devoted to launching the galleys: "out came a galley towed by a boat, and from the windows they came out to them, from one the cordage, from another the bread, from another the arms, and from another the ballistas and mortars, and so from all sides everything that was required. And when the galley had reached the end of the street all the men required were on board, together with the complement of oars, and she was equipped from end to end."

Tafur counted the launching of ten "fully-armed" galleys within a six-hour span: one new warship every thirty-six minutes. No wonder that the speed with which the Arsenal of Venice could turn a bare keel into fully rigged craft was admired throughout Europe. And commanders could have their galleys in any color they wanted—as long as it was black.

The Venetian manner, then as now, was correspondingly brusque, efficient, and commercial. It took a Venetian to possess the practical knowledge, the sophistication, and the confidence to finance large expeditions or caravans to the East, to deal profitably with Muslim and Orthodox Christian adversaries, and to manage complex partnerships. Venetian laws enforced the smooth operation of business. A merchant returning to Venice was legally required to present his partners with his accounts within one month, and to divide the profits forthwith. As a further incentive to trade, taxation in Venice was among the lowest in Europe, and merchants kept nearly all the profit they made.

Just about everyone in Venice engaged in commerce. Widows and orphans invested in merchant activity, and any young man without means could describe himself as a "merchant" simply by launching himself in business. Although the risks were great, riches beyond imagining lured the adventurous, the willing, and the foolish. Fortunes were made and lost overnight, and Venetian family fortunes were built on the success of a single trade expedition to Constantinople.

As the first European to travel extensively throughout Asia, Marco Polo was the earliest bridge between East and West. His famous journeys took him across the boundaries of the known world, along the dangerous Silk Road, and into the court of Kublai Kahn, where he won the trust of the most feared and reviled leader of his day. Polo introduced the cultural riches of China to Europe, spawning centuries of Western fascination with Asia.

Authors @ Google Lecture

Cambridge Forum Lecture

WNYC Interview

AirTalk, California Public Radio

Vijesti Interview

Variety Magazine Article

Mongolian Music: Khuumi Durvun Turul

Mongolian Music: Suutei Burkhan

A Word from the Author

Bergreen Reads Marco Polo

Hardcover: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007

Trade Paperback: Vintage, 2008

England: Quercus Publishing

Brazil: Editora Objetiva

China: Grand China Publishing Company

Hungary: General Press Kiado

Indonesia: Elex Media

Poland: Rebis Spolka

Portugal: Oficina do Livro Sociedad

Russia: AST Publishers

Serbia: Laguna Publishing House

Marco Polo

Barnesandnoble.com “Best Science & Nature Books 2000”

Optioned by Grand Productions, Inc. (Gary Randall) as a TNT Miniseries

It’s 6:15 in the morning when Jim Garvin, a planetary geologist who works for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, meets me at Iceland’s Keflavik Airport. As arranged, he’s flown in from Baltimore, and I’ve come from New York. Jim is forty-one, talks in torrents, and is plainly Type A, endowed with the passion and restlessness of an old-fashioned genius. Although he has two small children, he puts in eighty-hour work weeks. He is intense. There is no such thing as a short conversation with Garvin. His replies to simple questions have a way of digressing into hour-long ruminations on the nature and origins of the universe, but he gets away with it mostly because he is unfailingly polite. Once he launches into a monologue, he gestures emphatically, as if visualizing and touching everything he describes. He is fit and compact, with black hair, handsome Irish features, and a perpetually worried voice. He looks clean-cut, at least compared to other scientists, and his skin is slightly irritated in patches, as though he’s been vigorously applying after shave lotion. A friend once told me it is often hard to get Jim Garvin’s attention, but once you do, it can be overwhelming. Now I have his attention.

After we retrieve our bags, Jim sets out to find Oscar, the pilot of the plane we’ve hired to take us from Keflavik to the island of Heimaey, off the southern coast of Iceland, where we are to rendezvous with the Iceland Coast Guard, weather permitting. Oscar, when we catch up with him, looks too young to drive a car, let alone pilot a plane. We cram ourselves into his single-engine Aerospatiale, a lightweight aircraft of French design. The co-pilot’s seat I occupy is so cramped that my knees interfere with the controls. We are battling fatigue, Jim and I. We have been up all night, and the inside of my mouth tastes like kerosene from the Aerospatiale’s tank.

We have come all this way because geologists studying Mars have designated Iceland a Mars analogue. In 1976, when the Viking Lander returned color images of the Red Planet, scientists realized that Mars bears a striking resemblance to the landscape sliding below Oscar’s little airplane. Iceland is, in many places, an arctic desert devoid of vegetation and untouched by humanity. These days, NASA-supported scientists regularly visit to study this volcano-ridden island to compared it to its distant relative, Mars. The theory is that by studying Iceland, scientists can better understand the workings of the Red Planet. Iceland is only twenty million years old, a geological babe, and thus relatively unweathered, a primeval landscape. The absence of trees on the Icelandic landscape is a blessing, revealing the island’s geological makeup. Mars is similarly bare. Iceland festers with active and dormant volcanoes – just as Mars does. The resemblance makes it possible to work out significant aspects of the geologic history of both places by comparing the two.

Mars is oddly reminiscent of Earth in other ways; it is considered “semi-habitable.” The atmosphere is only one percent as dense as ours, but breathable air could be extracted from it. The Martian day, or “sol,” lasts about as long as a day on Earth; a Martian year consists of 687 Earth days. Like Earth, Mars has its seasons, but they last twice as long. And Martian weather conditions are anything but monotonous or predictable. In 1997, when Pathfinder landed on Mars, its tiny weather station gathered data on the local Martian weather, which NASA posted on the Internet. The reports showed that temperatures range from 600 Fahrenheit at noon to -1000 F at night. Travelers’ advisory: because of the much lower atmospheric pressure on Mars, surface temperatures differ drastically from air temperatures. If you were standing on the surface in midday, your feet would be warm and snug, but the fluids in your head would freeze. Mars’ atmosphere has fog, wind, and red dust, lending pink tints to a sky accented by two small, misshapen moons, Phobos (“fear”) and Deimos (“terror”).

Mars resembles Earth in other ways. Its polar ice caps wax and wane seasonally. There are clouds. There is ample geologic evidence that rivers once flowed freely on its surface. The stage has long been set for life to appear there. Yet the Earth teems with life, while Mars appears barren, at least on the surface. Why? No one really knows, yet the answers may lurk in the perplexing differences between the two planets.

The Earth’s surface consists of overlapping, often ill-fitting plates covering its molten interior. They form a crust like an eggshell, thin and brittle. They bump and grind against each other; occasionally they pull apart, as they are doing now in Iceland, giving rise to earthquakes and volcanoes and mountain ridges lurking beneath the oceans. Iceland sits right on the spine of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a segment of the Mid-Ocean Ridge, which is the longest mountain range on Earth, extending 40,000 miles, or one-and-a-half times around the planet. Iceland’s unique placement means that half of it belongs, in a geological sense, to the European continent, and half to the American. And the two halves are pulling apart at the rate of one centimeter a year. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but when this movement occurs over the course of ten or twelve million years, it eventually becomes a very big deal. Iceland could break apart and be absorbed by other, larger land masses. Or if it surges in volcanic activity, it could enlarge itself, adding enough real estate to accommodate many more hardy souls. For now, a seam runs right through Iceland, clearly marked in some places by a narrow chasm and in others by small streams and little cracks. If you jump across one of the cracks, you jump from one continent to another.

At this moment, no one knows for certain if Mars has or had plates similar to Earth’s, or, if the Red Planet did have them, how they operated. If Mars never had crustal plates, their absence poses interesting questions about how it developed without them. And if it did, we see no direct evidence of them – not yet, at any rate. The geologic processes associated with crustal plates would have affected the way life did, or did not, develop on Mars.

“Nothing you see here is more than ten thousand years old,” Jim shouts over the whine of the engine, as we pass over the Reykjanes Peninsula region of southwest Iceland, “and some of it is only five thousand years old, or less.” Jim lives by the geological clock, which extends billions of years, all the way back to the formation of the universe. The universe is an old, old place, perhaps 15 billion years old, possibly more, and the planets of our Solar System are old, too, something on the order of 4.7 billion years. When you measure time in billions of years, you dismiss a million years as a hiccup. A span of five or ten thousand years is insignificant. The concept of a year, the time it takes for the Earth to complete a revolution around the Sun, scarcely seems an adequate yardstick for measuring the development of the Universe and the planets. Iceland’s arriviste status in the geological scheme of things is rare and intriguing; the place teems with clues about the formation of Earth, of Mars, and of the entire Solar System. To understand the Red Planet, even partially, is to understand something about the nature of the universe, to catch glimpses of our distant past and our future, to extend perception to a scale much larger than ordinary human comprehension, to harness the imagination to the intellect, and the intellect to the stars.

These days, planetary scientists like Jim regard the geology of Mars as crucial for understanding Earth and the other rocky planets in the Solar System – Venus and Mercury (and the moon, as well). Jim reminded me that the geologic prizes on Mars are rich. Although it is forty percent smaller than Earth, Mars’ peaks and valleys are far more extreme. The continental United States could fit nicely into one of its canyons. Its volcanoes are awesome. The largest, Olympus Mons, is more than 90,000 feet high. It would tower over Mt. Everest, and it’s large enough to occupy the state of Arizona. It is one hundred times larger than the biggest volcano on Earth; in fact, Olympus Mons is the largest mountain in the entire Solar System. Mars is a planet of geological superlatives.

Oscar levels off the Aerospatiale at 2,000 feet. Beneath us, the primeval landscape – gray and brown and black, rocky and dusty and nearly treeless – extends toward the horizon. Is this what it would be like to fly over the scarred surface of Mars? Eventually, we cross a beach, and the island of Heimaey, our stopover point, lies ahead, gradually gathering substance in the blue mist. It is a remarkably tranquil day, so calm that a limp windsock on the ground barely swivels as we veer toward the island’s tiny runway, a strip of asphalt running uphill between two volcanic peaks. Ever since leaving New York, I’ve been placing my life in the hands of complete strangers, and now, sitting beside Oscar as he casually maneuvers his small aircraft, I wonder if I’ve finally gone too far.

Oscar orders me to contract so he can freely guide us to a safe landing. The plane taxis to a standstill. We are almost there.

Jim hasn’t managed to coax NASA into funding this leg of the journey – which comes to about $300. As we slap down our plastic to pay the bill, Jim cites NASA’s “faster, better, cheaper” way of doing business to explain why we must pay the airfare to conduct scientific research. Dan Goldin, NASA’s mercurial Administrator, instituted the policy when he took over the agency in 1992. NASA, like any federal bureaucracy, has indulged in its share of waste and redundancy, and Goldin, coming out of private industry, wanted to trim the bureaucratic flab and refocus NASA. Essentially, he wanted to do more with less. He increased the number of planetary missions under the “faster-cheaper-better” regimen; instead of one expensive mission, the agency would send two, or even four cheap ones, and the returns would be correspondingly greater. And they were! But planetary exploration at any price is an exceedingly risky business, and more missions has also meant more failures. In the grip of “faster-better-cheaper,” NASA didn’t realize that the American public would fasten onto the failures of its recent missions to the Red Planet – Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander – and forget the successful ones. The notion that NASA was exploring the planets on the cheap and occasionally bungled the job alarmed the media, and it alarmed Congress – how could this have happened? – yet it was Congress who, year by year, imposed the budget cuts on NASA that led the agency to adopt “faster-cheaper-better.” The result is NASA Lite.

The cuts have been playing havoc with Jim’s work life. For weeks, the Iceland expedition has been in doubt because of the fragile health of the reconnaissance plane, a modified P-3. This is a large four-engine turbo-prop originally meant to fly low over the ocean to detect submarines lurking below the surface. NASA adapted this aircraft for remote sensing: measuring geological, oceanographic, and atmospheric features with instruments used in conjunction with satellites. But NASA’s P-3 is a thirty-year-old rust bucket, and it has seen hard use. Jim has reminisced about the crew’s Technicolor yawns as the plane followed the rolling terrain at a low altitude, like an airborne roller coaster. He has described the spider web cracks that developed in the windshield during an Iceland mission in May 1996. The windshield threatened to crack wide open, jeopardizing the mission. One pilot gave an order to don emergency gear, but the other pilot disagreed, and besides, they had no emergency gear or crash helmets or parachutes. To make matters worse, they were carrying too much fuel to land, and the Icelandic government prohibits dumping fuel into the Atlantic. They had to fly for hours at slow speed, burning fuel, until they could land safely and legally. More recently, the plane developed a chronic fuel leak and lost an engine in flight over Greenland. The accumulated weight of these stories worried me. Even Jim, who does this kind of thing for a living, was anxious. I checked out the P-3 with my friend Peter, a commercial pilot who has flown all over the world in dicey equipment. Peter explained that, worst case scenario, if an engine or two quit, the plane could coast more or less gently to the ground, unlike a helicopter, which would sink like a stone. I was not completely reassured.

NASA keeps the rust bucket aloft, despite everything, “to facilitate cost-effective essential remote sensing that has inexorably been rewriting textbooks associated with atmospheric science, climate change, and the lay of the land,” as Jim puts it. In other words, this rust bucket is changing the way scientists think about how our planet works.

Despite the significance of its science missions and the public dismay when they go wrong, relentless budget cutting continues to afflict NASA. The agency now receives less than 14 billion dollars a year, less than one percent of the overall federal budget, and each year its budget shrinks a little more. The unkindest cuts of all affect people, not hardware. Dan Goldin earns about $150,000 a year, and scientists like Jim Garvin, who hold one or more advanced degrees and are often among the leading figures in their fields, earn less, something equivalent to a college professor’s salary. Unlike academics, they work six or seven days a week, year round, without sabbaticals. And NASA has stringent rules governing outside income from consulting or lecturing, so moonlighting is out of the question, even if the NASA scientists had time for such activities, which they don’t. Willingly or not, Jim and his colleagues must emulate the example of Louis Agassiz, the famous naturalist, who stated, “I cannot afford to waste my time making money.”

Why do they do it? Why do these driven scientists, who could be earning several times more than their current salaries in private industry, stick with stingy old NASA? Why do they remain oblivious to imploring spouses and former colleagues who have gone to seek their fortunes in private industry? The most these NASA scientists can reasonably hope for is recognition from their peers, if they make a major discovery. They’ll have an easier time getting grants, lots of impressive plaques to hang on the wall, and that’s about it. Despite the influence of their ideas on the course of science and exploration, obscurity is often their lot. Who can name the members of the team that in 1996 announced possible evidence of fossilized life in a Martian meteorite – a discovery that, if correct, will stand as one of the most significant breakthroughs of all time? Who can name any NASA-supported scientist, for that matter, with the possible exception of Carl Sagan? And who, outside of the scientific community, is aware of Sagan’s actual role in NASA’s exploration of space?

Sagan’s success as a popularizer of the Cosmos obscures his real achievements as a scientist, thinker, and writer. A productive scientist and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, he frequently appeared on the Tonight Show; he didn’t fit into neat categories. He was cursed with charisma. An astronomer by training, he gave a convincing impression of being at home with a number of disciplines ranging from mathematics to history. His fascination with space offered reassurance rather than terror of the unknown. He developed a benign, Jeffersonian vision of the universe as the last frontier, the ultimate, infinite West, where humanity would be able to seek refuge after fouling this planet and possibly destroying itself in the process. Sagan’s outer space, like Thomas Jefferson’s West, offered sufficient scope to alleviate humanity’s ills. He was pessimistic about the future of mankind if we were confined to Earth for too long. It seemed to him a near certainty that, sooner or later, we would blow ourselves up. The only escape from his Malthusian nihilism was the vastness of space and the promise of distant planets, where humankind could start anew. This vision of space as the new frontier had influenced NASA from its inception, imparting a sense of purpose, and it inspired younger scientists by giving them a larger context for their research. In the midst of bureaucratic setbacks and budget battles, Sagan knew what was at stake in the exploration of space: over the short term, enlightenment, over the long term, the survival of humanity.

Throughout his career, he cultivated a special fascination with Mars. For him, it was a touchstone of all heavenly bodies and possibly the salvation of humanity. He wrote about it for scientists and for general readers, artfully mixing speculation and scientific fact. He prodded NASA to explore. He participated in the 1976 Viking experiments. And he held out hope for life on Mars. As early as 1966, when the conventional wisdom in the scientific community, chastened by the barren photographs resulting from the Mariner missions, held the chance of life on Mars to be zero, Sagan, almost alone among prominent scientists, speculated that such a phenomenon might still be possible. Despite his belief in the possibility of extraterrestrial life, Sagan kept one foot firmly planted on scientific terra firma. He insisted that extraordinary conclusions, such as evidence of life on Mars, require extraordinary proof, and as far as he was concerned, the tantalizing hints that life might exist on Mars did not meet that high standard.

Sagan influenced a generation of younger scientists, who have their hands on the levers of the future and who fervently believe that now is their time to change scientific thinking about the nature of the universe and our place in it. They stick with their work for many reasons: because they can’t do without it; because NASA gives them the means to do what they’ve yearned for since they were children growing up in the heyday of the Space Race, watching John Glenn go into orbit; because NASA will let them send something of their own design – a part of them – into space; because NASA has the rockets and the launch facilities and the infrastructure to get it done; because NASA will validate their work in the eyes of the scientific community and the world. Because, when it comes to planetary exploration, NASA is the only game in town.

Earth is a lot like mars

Voyage to Mars is the story of a group of visionary Mars scientists and what drives their passionate search for life in the universe. Bergreen takes us inside the minds of the world’s last great explorers as they change our understanding of the nature of the universe and ourselves.

NASA 50th Anniversary Keynote Speech

Big Picture Science Podcast

NASA Mars Exploration Program

Bergreen Names Mars

Mars Weather Report

Hardcover: Riverhead Books, 2000

 Paperback: Riverhead Books, 2001

England Hardcover: Harper Collins England

Paperback: Harper Collins

Voyage to Mars

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Laurence
Bergreen is an
award-winning
biographer,
historian,
and chronicler
of exploration.

A view from Bergreen's personal bookshelf of all the languages and translations of his books over the years.

Books for Miles!

The Chinese edition of Columbus: The Four Voyages will be published by Grand China Publishing Company this November.

Columbus Published in China

Bergreen's History Hit interview with Prof Susannah Lipscomb about Over the Edge of the World is now available on Apple podcasts.

The Chinese edition of Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu will be published by Grand China Publishing Company this November.

Young Adult Books

Laurence
Bergreen is an
award-winning
biographer,
historian,
and chronicler
of exploration.

Recent Publications

Over the Edge of the World

In Search of a Kingdom

Casanova

Columbus

Marco Polo

Voyage to Mars

Speaking Engagements

New York

Online

Tampa

Books for Miles!

Columbus Published in China

History Hit Podcast

Marco Polo Published in China

Just Published in Poland

Young Adult Books

LaurenceBergreen is anaward-winningbiographer,historian,and chroniclerof exploration.

Recent Publications

Over the Edge of the World

In Search of a Kingdom

Casanova

Columbus

Marco Polo

Voyage to Mars

Speaking Engagements

New York

Online

Tampa

Books for Miles!

Columbus Published in China

History Hit Podcast

Marco Polo Published in China

Just Published in Poland

Laurence
Bergreen is an
award-winning
biographer,
historian,
and chronicler
of exploration.