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641e7e0
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the Ankh-Morpork Trespassers' Society was originally the Explorers' Society until Lord Vetinari forcibly insisted that most of the places 'discovered' by the society's members already had people in them, who were already trying to sell snakes to the newcomers.
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humour
funny
explorers
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Terry Pratchett |
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03ccc76
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Explorers like to pretend that they are a select breed of people with iron nerve and an ability to endure terrible hardship.
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explorers
hardship
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Tahir Shah |
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e6d6ba1
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Humboldt's early biographer, F.A. Schwarzenberg, subtitled his life of Humboldt What May Be Accomplished in a Lifetime. He summarised the areas of his subject's extraordinary curiosity as follows: '1) The knowledge of the Earth and its inhabitants. 2) The discovery of the higher laws of nature, which govern the universe, men, animals, plants, minerals. 3) The discovery of new forms of life. 4) The discovery of territories hitherto but imperfectly known, and their various productions. 5) The acquaintance with new species of the human race--- their manners, their language and the historical traces of their culture.' What may be accomplished in a lifetime---and seldom or never is.
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travel
philosophy
accomplish-the-impossible
alexander-von-humboldt
explorers
scientists
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Alain de Botton |
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e4c7878
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He penned a letter to the Company in London, a letter whose unfailing spirit would become legendary among the sailors of the East India Company. 'I cannot tell where you should looke for me.' he wrote, 'because I live at the devotion of the winds and seas.' (Written by/about Captain James Lancaster, on the ship Red Dragon, during a terrible storm, 1603)
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courage
james-lancaster
sailors
spice-islands
explorers
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Giles Milton |
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036e703
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Setting sail from Tidore, his next port of call was the island of Celebes, where he found himself royally entertained by the King of Butung.... This island unknown to the English but Middleton (Captain David Middleton) enjoyed his stay here and found the King a curious fellow who was only to keen to entertain his guests with banquets and sweetmeats. Some meals were novel affairs; the ship's purser found himself eating in a room whose interior decor consisted entirely of rotting human heads, dangling from the ceiling.
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spice-trade
explorers
islands
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Giles Milton |
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945765a
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"Although his log entries do not speak of America per se, a chart created by Admiral Zheng was used to make a detailed map of the world. A copy of this map, drawn in 1763, was found in a second-hand bookshop and was offered as evidence that Zheng's fleet was the first to discover America. At the age of 61, Admiral Zheng died aboard ship and befittingly was buried at sea.
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chinese-history
captain-hank-bracker
world-history
explorers
cuba
maps
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Captain Hank Bracker "The Exciting Story of Cuba" |
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7885886
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My broad conclusion is that an advanced global seafaring civilization existed during the Ice Age, that it mapped the earth as it looked then with stunning accuracy, and that it had solved the problem of longitude, which our own civilization failed to do until the invention of Harrison's marine chronometer in the late eighteenth century. As masters of celestial navigation, as explorers, as geographers, and as cartographers, therefore, this lost civilization of 12,800 years ago was not outstripped by Western science until less than 300 years ago at the peak of the Age of Discovery.
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explorers
lost-civilization
masters
navigation
seafaring
ice-age
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Graham Hancock |
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4c33934
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Look at Columbus, or Magellan: looking back, historians call you an explorer, but at the time, you're just lost.
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magellan
explorers
lost
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Sean Stewart |