Tony Horwitz is a native of Washington, D.C., and a graduate of Brown University and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He worked for many years as a reporter, first in Indiana and then during a decade overseas in Australia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, mostly covering wars and conflicts as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. After returning to the States, he won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting and worked as a staff writer for The New Yorker before becoming a full-time author.

His books include Midnight Rising, A Voyage Long and Strange, Blue Latitudes, a national and New York Times bestseller about the Pacific voyages of Captain James Cook, Baghdad Without a Map, a national bestseller about the Middle East, and Confederates in the Attic, a national and New York Times bestseller about the Civil War.

Horwitz has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a visiting scholar at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. He lives with his wife, Geraldine Brooks, and their son, Nathaniel, on the island of Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts.

Prologue: The Distance Traveled
1. Pacific Northwest: One Week Before the Mast
2. Tahiti: Sic Transit Venus
3. To Bora-Bora: Sold a Pup
4. New Zealand: Warriors, Still
5. Botany Bay: In the Pure State of Nature
6. The Great Barrier Reef: Wrecked
7. Homeward Bound: The Hospital Ship
8. Savage Island: The Hunt for Red Bananas
9. Tonga: Where Time Begins, and Goes Back
10. North Yorkshire: A Plain, Zealous Man
11. London: Shipping Out, Again
12. Alaska: Outside Men
13. Hawaii: The Last Island
14. Kealakekua Bay: A Bad Day on Black Rock
Epilogue: A Period to His Labours

Notes on Sources
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index