Publisher's Synopsis
During the golden age of exploration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the intrepid travelers emerged from the jungles, deserts, and ice caps of the world's remotest locations, they were greeted by an awestruck public as though they had returned from the dead or other worlds. The Mammoth Book of Explorers recaptures the thrill of the unknown with first-hand accounts of expeditions across all seven continents. In Africa, there is Burton's search for the source of the Nile. In the Americas, Meriwether Lewis tells how he reunited Sacajawea with her tribe, and Alexander Mackenzie recounts the first overland crossing of the continent by the Canadian fur trader in 1793. At the globe's top and bottom, Robert Peary and Ernest Shackleton race for the poles. In addition to such triumphs of human endurance, there are the tragedies of Livingstone's last days in Africa, William John Wills's lonely death in the Australian outback, and Robert Scott's tragic final expedition in Antarctica. To round out this Mammoth collection, noted author John Keay has also chosen twentieth-century explorers who have carried on the dauntless tradition, including Hiram Bingham's account of the discovery of Machu Picchu, Thesiger on Arabia's Empty Quarter, Edmund Hillary on scaling the summit of Everest, and Harry St. John Bridger Philby on traversing the desert alone.
