A triumph of historical detective work, Crossing the Continent is the remarkable, never-before-told story of the first black explorer and adventurer in America, Esteban Dorantes. An African slave, Dorantes led an eight-year journey from Florida to California in the early sixteenth century--three hundred years before Lewis and Clark ventured west. An extraordinary true-life saga of courage, trials, and discovery that the Philadelphia Inquirer calls, "an adventure story more thrilling than Defoe or Melville could have imagined," Crossing the Continent breaks new...