M. B. Synge

“ It was a memorable day in the annals of discovery, 30th June 1587, when Davis reached this famous point on the coast of Greenland. "A bright blue sea extended to the horizon on the north and west, obstructed by no ice, but here and there a few majestic icebergs with peaks snowy shooting up into the sky." To the eastward were the granite mountains of Greenland, and beyond them the white line of the mightiest glacier in the world. Rising immediately above the tiny vessel was the beetling wall of Hope Sanderson, with its summit eight hundred and fifty feet above sea-level. ”

“ Was this, after all, the source of the Niger? Its low shores were surrounded with reedy marshes and clumps of white water-lilies, there were flocks of wild ducks and geese, birds with beautiful plumage were feeding on the margin of the lake, pelicans, cranes, immense white spoonbills, yellow-legged plover—all were dwelling undisturbed in this peaceful spot. And this most remarkable lake lay eight hundred feet above the Atlantic, between the watersheds of Nile, Niger, and Congo.
But Lake Tchad was not their goal; they must push on over new country where no European had been before. ”

“ All the world knew of the Phoenician seaports, Tyre and Sidon. They were as famous as Memphis and Thebes on the Nile, as magnificent as Nineveh on the Tigris and Babylon on the Euphrates. Men spoke of the "renowned city of Tyre," whose merchants were as princes, whose "traffickers" were among the honourable of the earth. "O thou that art situate at the entry of the sea," cries the poet again, when the greatness of Tyre was passing away, "which art a merchant of the people from many isles.... Thy borders are in the midst of the seas; thy builders have perfected thy beauty. ”

“ The careless glee with which they seized either sword or oar and waged war with the stormy seas for a scanty livelihood, raiding all the neighbouring coasts, had earned them the name of Vikings or creek men. Their black-sailed ships stood high out of the water, prow and stern ending in the head and tail of some strange animal, while their long beards, their loose shirts, and battleaxe made them conspicuous. "From the fury of the Northmen save us, Lord," prayed those who had come in contact with these Vikings.
In the ninth century they spring into fame as explorers by the discovery of Iceland. ”

“ This is what carried Alexander the Great to the "earth's utmost verge," that drew Columbus across the trackless Atlantic, that nerved Vasco da Gama to double the Stormy Cape, that induced Magellan to face the dreaded straits now called by his name, that made it possible for men to face without flinching the ice-bound regions of the far North.
"There is no land uninhabitable, nor sea unnavigable," asserted the men of the sixteenth century, when England set herself to take possession of her heritage in the North. Such an heroic temper could overcome all things. ”

“ Willoughby was blown across the sea to Nova Zembla.
The weather grew more and more Arctic, and he made his way over to a haven in Lapland where he decided to winter. He sent men to explore the country, but no signs of mankind could be found; there were bears and foxes and all manner of strange beasts, but never a human being. It must have been desperately dreary as the winter advanced, with ice and snow and freezing winds from the north. What this little handful of Englishmen did, how they endured the bitter winter on the desolate shores of Lapland, no man knows. ”

“ He is a traveller as well as a writer. He has journeyed as one eager for knowledge, with a "hungry heart" and a keen, observant eye. He tells us what he has seen with his eyes, what he has heard with his ears. He insists that the world is flat, he acknowledges that it is divided into two parts—Europe and Asia; but he can afford to laugh at those who draw maps of the world "without any sense to guide them," in which they make the whole world round as if drawn with a pair of compasses, with the ocean stream running round it, making Europe and Asia of equal size.
His first journey is to Egypt. ”

“ Pizarro's march to the heart of Peru with a mere handful of men was not unlike that of Cortes' expedition to Mexico. Both coveted the rich empire of unknown monarchs and dared all—to possess. Between Pizarro and his goal lay the stupendous mountain range of the Andes or South American Cordilleras, rock piled upon rock, their crests of everlasting snow glittering high in the heavens. Across these and over narrow mountain passes the troops had now to pass. So steep were the sides that the horsemen had to dismount and scramble up, leading their horses as best they might. ”

“ For the early explorers had no land map or ocean chart to guide them, there were no lighthouses to warn the strange mariner of dangerous coast and angry surf, no books of travel to relate the weird doings of fierce and inhospitable savages, no tinned foods to prevent the terrible scourge of sailors, scurvy. In their little wooden sailing ships the men of old faced every conceivable danger, and surmounted obstacles unknown to modern civilisation. ”

“ From the towering mountains that guarded the entry, tempests of wind and snow swept down upon the "daring intruders." As they made their way through the rough and winding waters, they imagined with all the other geographers of their time that the unknown land to the south was one great continent leading beyond the boundaries of the world. Fires lit by the natives on this southern coast added terror to the wild scene. ”

“ Picking up several Eskimo families and about two hundred and fifty dogs, they steamed on northwards.
"Imagine," says Peary—"imagine about three hundred and fifty miles of almost solid ice, ice of all shapes and sizes, mountainous ice, flat ice, ragged and tortured ice; then imagine a little black ship, solid, sturdy, compact, strong, and resistant, and on this little ship are sixty-nine human beings, who have gone out into the crazy, ice-tortured channel between Baffin Bay and the Polar sea—gone out to prove the reality of a dream in the pursuit of which men have frozen and starved and died." ”

“ The ships were sailing slowly past the desolate shores amid these high icebergs when suddenly several natives appeared on the ice. Now Ross had brought an Eskimo with him named Sacheuse.
"Come on!" cried Sacheuse to the astonished natives.
"No—no—go away!" they cried. "Go away; we can kill you!"
"What great creatures are these?" they asked, pointing to the ships. "Do they come from the sun or the moon? Do they give us light by night or by day?" ”

“ The slave trade was the great, in fact the only, attraction to Africa at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In pursuit of this, men would penetrate quite a long way into the interior, but through the long centuries few explorers had travelled to the Dark Continent.
Towards the end of the century we suddenly get one man—a young Scottish giant, named James Bruce, thirsting for exploration for its own sake. He cared not for slaves or gold or ivory. He just wanted to discover the source of the Nile, over which a great mystery had hung since the days of Herodotus. ”

“ We have already heard of the Chukches from Behring—the Chukches whom no man had yet vanquished, for when Siberia was conquered by a Kossack chief in 1579, the Chukches in this outlying north-eastern corner of the Old World, savage, courageous, resolute, kept the conquerors at bay. For the last six weeks the explorers had not seen a human being on that wild and desolate stretch of coast, so they were glad enough to see the little Chukches with their coal-black hair and eyes, their large mouths and flat noses. ”

“ Such was the spirit in which the exploration of the world was accomplished. It was the inspiration that carried men of old far beyond the sunrise into those magic and silent seas whereon no boat had ever sailed. It is the incentive of those to-day with the wander-thirst in their souls, who travel and suffer in the travelling, though there are fewer prizes left to win. ”

“ At last, led by native guides, Balboa and his men struggled up the side of a high mountain. When near the top he bade his men stop. He alone must be the first to see the great sight that no European had yet beheld. With "transports of delight" he gained the top and, "silent upon a peak in Darien," he looked down on the boundless ocean, bathed in tropical sunshine. Falling on his knees, he thanked God for his discovery of the Southern Sea. ”

“ We have traversed seas and lands, and know them better than do the inhabitants themselves. We are standing now almost on the earth's utmost verge, and yet you are preparing to go in quest of an India unknown even to the Indians themselves. You would fain root out, from their hidden recesses and dens, a race of men that herd with snakes and wild beasts, so that you may traverse as a conqueror more regions than the sun surveys. But while your courage will be ever growing, our vigour is fast waning to its end. ”

“ These pilgrims tramped to and fro clad in simple tunics over a monkish dress of undyed wool, bound round the waist by a strong cord, all their worldly goods on their backs and a staff in their hands. The hermit instinct was growing, and men were sailing away to lonely islands where God might be better served apart from the haunts of men. Perhaps it was this instinct that inspired St. Brandon to sail away across the trackless ocean in search of the Island of Saints reported in the western seas. ”

“ Strange tales as usual reached Portugal about these newly found lands. Here lived men with "spurs on their ankles like cocks," hogs with horns, hens that laid their eggs nine feet under ground, rivers with living fish, yet so hot that they took the skin off any man that bathed in their waters, poisonous crabs, oysters with shells so large that they served as fonts for baptizing children.
Truly these mysterious Spice Islands held more attractions for the Portuguese explorers than did the New World of Columbus and Vespucci. ”

“ Where is the dawn of geography—the knowledge of our earth? What was it like before the first explorers made their way into distant lands? Every day that passes we are gaining fresh knowledge of the dim and silent past.
Every day men are patiently digging in the old heaps that were once the sites of busy cities, and, as a result of their unwearying toil, they are revealing to us the life-stories of those who dwelt therein; they are disclosing secrets writ on weather-worn stones and tablets, bricks and cylinders, never before even guessed at. ”

“ King of all Asia, he sat on the throne of the Persian kings under a golden canopy in the palace of Persepolis.
So far the whole expedition was over country known, if imperfectly, to the Greeks. Now we have to follow the conquering hero more closely as he leads us into an unknown land away to the east, known as "the farthest region of the inhabited world towards the east, beyond which lies the endless sandy desert void of inhabitants." And all the while the great land of India lay beyond, and beyond again was China, and away far over the ocean sea lay America—and they knew it not. ”

“ By my troth, we had long ago fled from Asia could fables have been able to scare us. We are not standing on the threshold of our enterprise, but at the very close. We have already reached the sunrise and the ocean, and unless your sloth and cowardice prevent, we shall thence return in triumph to our native land, having conquered the earth to its remotest bounds. I beseech you that ye desert not your king just at the very moment when he is approaching the limits of the inhabited world. ”

“ He met a quantity of drift ice about the northern part of the island and called it Ice-land, the name it has borne ever since. But amid the Arctic ice he spent a desolate winter; the island seemed full of lofty mountains covered with eternal snow. His companions, however, were delighted with the climate and the soil.
"Milk drops from every plant and butter from every twig," they said; "this was a land where men might live free from the tyranny of kings." Free, indeed, for the island was totally uninhabited. ”

“ On the twenty-third day of their voyage they entered a great lake. Crossing to the southern shore, they found to their bitter grief that shoals and sandbanks made it impossible for them to reach the sea. They found that the Murray flowed into Encounter Bay, but thither they could not pass. The thunder of the surf upon the shore brought no hope to the tired explorers. They had no alternative but to turn back and retrace their way. Terrible was the task that lay before them. On half-rations and with hostile natives to encounter they must fight their way against wind and stream. ”

“ The whole expanse of air and sea was swept by a south-west wind, which, deriving strength from the mountainous regions of Germany, its deep rivers and boundless tract of clouded atmosphere, and rendered still harsher by the rigour of the neighbouring north, tore away the ships, scattered and drove them into the open ocean or upon islands dangerous from precipitous rocks or hidden sandbanks. ”

“ The kingdom beyond the Hydaspes was now Alexander's. Ordering a great fleet of rafts and boats to be built for his proposed voyage to the mouth of the Indus, he pushed on to complete the conquest of the Five Stream Land, or the Punjab—the last province of the great Persian Empire. This was India—all that was known at this time. The India of the Ganges valley was beyond the knowledge of the Western world—the Ganges itself unknown to the Persians. And Alexander saw no reason to change his mind.
"The great sea surrounds the whole earth," he stoutly maintained. ”

“ The conqueror of Mexico now comes upon the scene—young, bold, devout, unscrupulous, "a respectable gentleman of good birth"—Hernando Cortes. Great was the enthusiasm in Cuba to join the new expedition to the long-lost lands of the Great Khan; men sold their lands to buy horses and arms, pork was salted, armour was made, and at last Cortes, a plume of feathers and a gold medal in his cap, erected on board his ship a velvet flag with the royal arms embroidered in gold and the words: "Brothers, follow the cross in faith, for under its guidance we shall conquer." ”

“ Christmas came and went. The New Year of 1894 dawned with the thermometer 36 degrees below zero. By February the Fram had drifted to the 80th degree of latitude. "High festival in honour of the 80th degree," writes Nansen. "Hurrah! Well sailed! The wind is whistling among the hummocks, the snow flies rustling through the air, ice and sky are melted into one, but we are going north at full speed, and are in the wildest of gay spirits. If we go on at this rate we shall be at the Pole in fifty months." ”

“ There, like a sea of quicksilver, lay far beneath us the grand expanse of water, a boundless sea-horizon on the south and south-west, glittering in the noonday sun, while at sixty miles' distance, blue mountains rose from the lake to a height of about seven thousand feet above its level. ”

“ Old and charming as is the story of the Argonauts, it is made up of travellers' tales, probably told to the Greeks by the Phoenicians of their adventures on unknown seas.
The wanderings of Ulysses by the old Greek poet Homer shows us that, though they seldom ventured beyond the Mediterranean Sea, yet the Greeks were dimly conscious of an outer world beyond the recognised limits. They still dreamt that the earth was flat, and that the ocean stream flowed for ever round and round it. There were no maps or charts to guide the intrepid mariners who embarked on unknown waters. ”