Great Adventures and Explorations; From the Earliest Times to the Present, as told by the Explorers Themselves
Richard Edes Harrison (Maps) New York: The Dial Press, 1947. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. xii, 788 pages. Name and date in ink inside front cover. Cover has some wear and soiling. Slightly shaken. Some edge soiling. Illustrated endpapers. Includes Note on the Maps, Concerning the Use of Symbols in this Book. Maps. Introduction, Acknowledgments, and Index, as well as 18 chapters. Also includes 18 black and white illustrations, as well as a map of The Mediterranean Discovers the Arctic. The maps illustrating this book were designed primarily to place the various explorations in their proper world perspective. This was deemed more important to the reader than complete detail, some of which is necessarily sacrificed in the larger view. Accordingly, most of the maps are on the orthographic projection. This shows exactly a hemisphere, and proves a good visual impression of the globe. Vilhjalmur Stefansson (November 3, 1879 – August 26, 1962) was an Icelandic American Arctic explorer and ethnologist. Under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, he and Dr. R. M. Anderson undertook the ethnological survey of the Central Arctic coasts of the shores of North America from 1908 to 1912. In 1908, Stefansson made a decision that would affect the rest of his time in Alaska: he hired the Inuk guide Natkusiak, who would remain with him as his primary guide for the rest of his Alaska expeditions. At the time he met Natkusiak, the Inuk guide was working for Capt. George B. Leavitt, a Massachusetts whaling ship captain and friend of Stefansson's who sometimes brought him replenishments of supplies from the American Museum of Natural History. Late in life, through his affiliation with Dartmouth College (he was Director of Polar Studies), he became a major figure in the establishment of the US Army's Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) in Hanover, New Hampshire. CRREL-supported research, often conducted in winter on the forbidding summit of Mount Washington, was key to developing matériel and doctrine to support alpine conflict. Stefansson joined the Explorers Club in 1908, four years after its founding. He later served as Club President twice: 1919–1922 and 1937–1939. This book contains the great stories of explorations and tells them in the words of the discoverers themselves, their companions, or their contemporaries. The great tales which we are able to present are those of rediscovery. We can tell how the Greeks discovered the British Isles with the British already in them; how North Europeans discovered North America with the Indians there to meet them; how the Spaniards discovered the Pacific Ocean when the Chinese had already maintained on its shores a great empire through long ages; how modern navigators discovered islands a thousand miles from the nearest inhabited land to find living there the descendants of Stone Age navigators who had been the real discoverers. In our book you find some of history's big success stories, with merit finally and justly awarded, as in the case of the indomitable twenty-three-year struggle of Peary which led to his demonstrating that Greenland is an island, instead of being larger than Australia and thus a continent. This book, as the story of how man came to know his world, had endeavored to secure historical continuity by leading from one major narrative to the next through summaries of less important ones that belong in between, and by occasional passages of interpretations which seek to give the reader needed perspective. In a way, the book is an outline history of the world, told by its chief discoverers from Pytheas to Peary. Condition: Good.
Keywords: Exploration, Balboa, Amazon, Northwest Passage, North Pole, South Pole, Northeast Passage, Barents, James Cook, Greenland, Brendan, Hudson's Bay, Magellan, Thule, Hugh Willoughby
[Book #82325]
Price: $45.00