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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
Jules Verne's 'The Great Travels & Travellers (Illustrated Edition)' provides readers with a fascinating look into the world of exploration and adventure. Verne's unique literary style combines fiction with scientific accuracy, creating a sense of realism that captivates the reader. This book delves into the journeys of famous explorers throughout history, including Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus, highlighting their discoveries and the challenges they faced. The detailed illustrations complement the vivid descriptions, bringing the adventurous tales to life. Verne's attention to detail and thorough research make this book a valuable historical resource for those interested in the exploration of the unknown. Jules Verne, a French author known for his pioneering science fiction novels, drew inspiration from the advancements in technology and exploration during the 19th century. His passion for travel and discovery is evident in 'The Great Travels & Travellers,' as he brings to light the remarkable achievements of these courageous individuals. Verne's knack for storytelling and ability to blend fact with fiction make this book a captivating read for history enthusiasts and adventure lovers alike. I highly recommend 'The Great Travels & Travellers (Illustrated Edition)' to anyone interested in the fascinating world of exploration and discovery. Jules Verne's masterful storytelling and attention to detail make this book an engaging and informative read that will leave readers inspired by the incredible journeys of past explorers. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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The Great Travels & Travellers
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Great Travels & Travellers (Illustrated Edition) assembles Jules Verne’s sustained historical survey of discovery and adventure: The Exploration of the World, The Great Navigators of the 18thCentury, and The Great Explorers of 19thCentury. Written in the late nineteenth century, these works present an overarching chronicle of how distant regions entered the European imagination and the global record. Brought together here as a unified collection, they restore Verne’s panoramic intention: to trace, in orderly sequence, the widening outline of the known world. This volume invites readers to follow that enlargement through a continuous narrative, while benefiting from an illustrated reading experience befitting the subject’s visual richness.
Unlike Verne’s celebrated novels, the books gathered here are works of narrative nonfiction. They combine historical synthesis, biographical portraiture, and geographical description. Verne organizes his material as connected episodes, presenting the circumstances, aims, itineraries, and outcomes of expeditions across land and sea. The tone is instructive yet animated, joining the precision of a reference work to the momentum of travel writing. Though grounded in documented accounts, the texts remain literary constructions, designed to be read as coherent stories of inquiry and endurance. As a collection, they represent Verne’s most extensive engagement with history, geography, and the literature of exploration.
The Exploration of the World introduces the broad arc of discovery prior to the modern age, setting foundations for what follows. Verne surveys how routes were opened, maps were drawn, and horizons were adjusted as travelers encountered unfamiliar coasts, deserts, rivers, and mountain ranges. He tracks the gradual alignment between conjecture and observation, showing how early reports became fixed knowledge. The emphasis is on the stepwise accumulation of facts, and on the interplay between inherited ideas and fresh testimony. The result is a narrative of beginnings, where ambition and curiosity meet the practical challenges of travel, navigation, and survival.
The Great Navigators of the 18thCentury shifts the focus to the Enlightenment, a period marked by oceanic voyages and increasingly systematic inquiry. Verne outlines a world knit together by long expeditions, scientific instruments, and the coordinated efforts of crews tasked with measuring, charting, and naming. The narrative foregrounds maritime enterprise: the crossing of vast tracts of water, the labor of seamanship, and the patient work of establishing reliable coastal outlines. He underscores how exploration served both knowledge and policy, while keeping attention on the perils of weather, distance, and uncertain supplies that determined each venture’s fate.
The Great Explorers of 19thCentury traces expansion into interior regions and towards extreme latitudes, reflecting an era of technological change and heightened ambition. Verne records sustained attempts to reach remote plateaus, river systems, deserts, forests, and polar thresholds, noting the logistical complexity and multinational character of the efforts. The text emphasizes perseverance and method, describing how successive journeys tested routes, refined observations, and sometimes opened new corridors of movement. The nineteenth century’s breadth—its railways, steamships, and scientific institutions—forms a backdrop to individual endeavours that still depended on courage, endurance, and chance.
As narrative histories, these books integrate several text types. They offer biographical sketches of travellers, concise digests of prior literature, and episodic reconstructions of journeys. They incorporate geographical exposition and historical context to anchor each expedition in time and place. The illustrated format, long associated with these works, supports the didactic intent: images and maps assist orientation, clarify spatial relations, and underscore material details of vessels, routes, and landscapes. In this edition, the visual component complements Verne’s prose, encouraging a dual reading—by line and by figure—that mirrors the twin disciplines of narrative and cartography.
A unifying theme across the trilogy is the conversion of uncertainty into knowledge. Verne attends to the motives that propel travellers outward—curiosity, rivalry, commerce, science—and to the conditions that shape their success or failure. He depicts exploration as cumulative, where one report enables the next, and where errors, risks, and provisional conclusions possess their own instructive value. Underlying the stories is a meditation on the limits of endurance and the unforeseen character of discovery. The books celebrate ingenuity without minimizing hazard, presenting exploration as a human enterprise conducted within exacting natural and logistical constraints.
Stylistically, Verne’s hallmarks include clarity, cadence, and a disciplined accumulation of detail. He moves swiftly between summary and scene, pausing to define measures, distances, bearings, and chronologies that keep the reader oriented. The prose balances energy with order: episodes are arranged to build comprehension while preserving narrative interest. Technical matters—ships, instruments, routes—are introduced with care, but never for their own sake; they serve the unfolding of action and the establishment of fact. Throughout, Verne maintains an even, explanatory tone that aligns with the educational purpose of the project and enhances its enduring readability.
These histories also illuminate Verne’s larger literary project. Known for imaginative voyages, he here turns to documented ones, drawing on published reports to show how the world’s outline became legible to a broad readership. The same commitment to intelligibility that animates his fiction—an insistence on causes, mechanisms, and consequences—structures these chronicles of actual travel. Read alongside his novels, the trilogy reveals an author concerned not only with wonder but with the transmission of knowledge: how it is gathered, ordered, narrated, and shared across generations.
The lasting significance of this work lies in its perspective on exploration as both narrative and knowledge system. The books preserve a nineteenth-century view of discovery—its aspirations, methodologies, and blind spots—while providing a digest of what had, by then, entered common understanding. For readers today, they offer a double vantage: a record of journeys and a document of how those journeys were explained to the public. As such, they reward interest in the history of science, geography, and travel writing, and they invite reflection on how information about distant places becomes part of collective memory.
The purpose of gathering these titles into a single-author collection is to present Verne’s historical trilogy as an integrated whole. Read consecutively, the volumes trace a progression from formative attempts and maritime expansions to the far-ranging enterprises of the nineteenth century. The illustrated format restores an essential dimension of the reading experience, aiding orientation and emphasizing the material culture of travel. By uniting these narratives under one cover, the collection encourages methodical reading, cross-reference, and comparative reflection, allowing themes, techniques, and conclusions to resonate across centuries and chapters.
The Great Travels & Travellers (Illustrated Edition) invites readers to accompany explorers whose paths shaped the maps we inherit. It offers history told with the momentum of a journey, images that clarify the lay of land and sea, and a design that favors attentive reading. Approached for reference, it yields ordered facts; approached as literature, it offers a sustained story of inquiry and resolve. In bringing together The Exploration of the World, The Great Navigators of the 18thCentury, and The Great Explorers of 19thCentury, this collection restores the scope of Verne’s ambition and the enduring fascination of the world it describes.
Author Biography
Introduction
Jules Verne (1828–1905) emerged from nineteenth‑century France as a formative figure in modern popular literature, celebrated for fusing scientific curiosity with narrative drive. Best known for the Voyages extraordinaires cycle, he also produced rigorously researched historical syntheses of exploration that complemented his fiction. Among these, The Exploration of the World and its companion volumes The Great Navigators of the 18thCentury and The Great Explorers of 19thCentury distilled a vast array of travel accounts into accessible, instructive prose. Together they positioned Verne not only as an architect of early science fiction but as a lucid chronicler of the global ventures that shaped modern geographic understanding.
These works belong to Verne’s broader project of educating a wide readership while entertaining it, a goal shared by his publisher, Pierre‑Jules Hetzel. Compiling the achievements of navigators and overland explorers from the early modern era to the industrial age, the set framed exploration as a cumulative, international effort driven by science, technology, and disciplined observation. Their narrative poise—neither dry reference nor romantic legend—helped readers grasp how instruments, cartography, and institutional support made discovery possible. In doing so, Verne bridged his novelistic imagination with a documentary impulse grounded in verifiable sources and careful synthesis.
Education and Literary Influences
Verne grew up in the port city of Nantes, where ships, charts, and maritime talk formed an early backdrop to his imagination. Sent to Paris to study law, he completed legal training but began gravitating toward letters and the theater. The capital offered libraries, salons, scientific lectures, and periodicals that shaped his habits of research and exposition. This academic grounding, together with Parisian intellectual life, trained him to handle technical materials in clear prose. The method—read widely, verify details, translate complexity into narrative—later underpinned his non‑fictional surveys of exploration as surely as it sustained his celebrated novels.
He absorbed the era’s popular science culture: public lectures, scientific memoirs, and authoritative compendia by figures such as Alexander von Humboldt and François Arago, along with navigational histories and voyage narratives. Accounts of Cook’s Pacific expeditions, polar attempts, and transcontinental traverses supplied models for organizing information around goals, routes, instruments, and results. Early contributions to family magazines accustomed him to concise, educational storytelling. This constellation of influences—encyclopedic curiosity, respect for measurement, and a storyteller’s instinct—prepared Verne to make explorers’ logbooks legible to general readers without sacrificing factual substance.
A key apprenticeship in geographical writing came through editorial collaborations of the 1860s and 1870s, including work associated with an illustrated geography of France and its colonies. Immersion in atlases, gazetteers, and official expedition reports taught Verne to triangulate sources and attend to names, dates, and distances with unusual precision. By the time he undertook The Exploration of the World and its sequels, he possessed both the bibliographic discipline and the narrative economy to compress large archives into coherent chapters, presenting protagonists, tools, and terrains as moving parts of a single, comprehensible history of discovery.
Literary Career
Verne’s partnership with Hetzel shaped the Voyages extraordinaires into a recognizable brand: entertaining narratives backed by research, diagrams, and maps. As his fame grew through novels such as Five Weeks in a Balloon and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, he accrued credibility as a guide to science and geography for lay readers. This authority created a natural pathway to documentary synthesis. Rather than abandon storytelling, Verne redirected it toward historical narration, adopting a measured tone, an eye for causality, and a pedagogical rhythm that introduced concepts, tracked routes, and highlighted incremental advances in instrumentation, cartography, and logistics.
The Exploration of the World, published in the late 1870s and around 1880, aimed to survey the longue durée of discovery—ancient itineraries, early modern oceanic ventures, and the burst of nineteenth‑century expeditions. Verne organized chapters around individuals and campaigns, but the true protagonist was method: the chronometer, improved hulls, better sails and steam, triangulation, and the disciplined keeping of journals. Produced in the lavish illustrated style of Hetzel’s house, the volumes combined visual pedagogy with lucid prose. Translations soon circulated, extending Verne’s reputation as an educator as much as an entertainer.
The Great Navigators of the 18thCentury concentrated on the Enlightenment’s maritime achievements. Verne dwelt on the systematizing of observation at sea, the pursuit of accurate longitude, the charting of coasts and archipelagos, and the accumulation of comparative data in botany, ethnography, and meteorology. Figures like Bougainville, Cook, and La Pérouse appeared as exemplars of disciplined voyaging within national and imperial frameworks, yet Verne’s emphasis remained technological and procedural rather than triumphalist. He showed how ships became moving laboratories, and how navigational exactitude translated into safer routes, fuller maps, and a more reliable grasp of the planet.
The Great Explorers of 19thCentury traced exploration inland and poleward, following expeditions into Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Arctic. Verne highlighted the logistical complexity of long supply lines, the role of steam power and improved surveying, and the importance of river systems and passes in unlocking continental interiors. He attended to the search for the Northwest Passage and to quests for great sources and crossings, framing the century’s exploratory drama within a widening network of science, diplomacy, and communication. These chapters resonated with his fiction’s spirit of methodical adventure, but here the goal was synthesis, not speculation.
Beliefs and Advocacy
Verne’s public stance aligned with a nineteenth‑century ideal of progress through knowledge, tempered by a practical sense of risk and human limitation. A long‑serving municipal councillor in Amiens, he supported civic culture and education, positions consistent with his didactic literary program. In the exploration volumes he treated discovery as a collaborative enterprise involving institutions, instruments, and many hands, often acknowledging the dependence of European expeditions on local guides and accumulated geographic knowledge. While writing within Eurocentric frames common to his time, he favored accuracy over rhetoric, inviting readers to admire perseverance and method rather than conquest for its own sake.
Final Years & Legacy
Verne’s later decades mixed public service, travel, and sustained productivity. After a violent incident in the mid‑1880s that left lasting effects on his health, he continued to work methodically, refining his documentary voice alongside his fiction. He lived and wrote in Amiens, where he died in 1905. By then, The Exploration of the World, The Great Navigators of the 18thCentury, and The Great Explorers of 19thCentury had secured a place in the Hetzel catalogue and in translation markets, offering readers a reliable, lucid bridge between specialized expedition literature and general knowledge.
Verne’s legacy rests on a dual achievement: he helped invent a popular modern idiom for science‑oriented fiction, and he crafted durable syntheses of exploration history for non‑specialists. The three works in this collection endure as nineteenth‑century landmarks of geographical pedagogy—products of their time, yet still valued as clear narratives of how measurement, mapping, and institutional support opened routes across oceans and continents. They continue to inform teaching, translation, and scholarship on exploration and its representations, complementing his novels by anchoring them in a carefully assembled record of the real voyages that reshaped the world’s mental map.
Historical Context
Jules Verne’s historical surveys of exploration emerged late in a career already defined by instructive adventure fiction. Between approximately 1878 and 1880, under the title commonly rendered as The Exploration of the World and its companion volumes on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he gathered narratives of travel that mirrored the eras he had long dramatized in the Voyages extraordinaires. These works appeared with his publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, whose house favored educational, family-oriented books. Verne’s surveys coincide with the early French Third Republic and a European readership fascinated by science, travel, and empire. They encapsulate centuries of expeditions while reflecting nineteenth-century confidence in progress and systematic knowledge.
The nineteenth century saw a broad popular market for geography and travel writing in France and beyond. Learned societies—such as the Société de Géographie in Paris (founded 1821) and the Royal Geographical Society in London (1830)—stimulated public interest through lectures, medals, and journals. Newspapers and illustrated magazines regularly serialized expedition reports. Verne’s collection participates in this culture by translating scholarly and governmental voyages into accessible prose. His framing emphasizes observation, measurement, and corroborated testimony, aligning with a didactic tradition that cast explorers as disciplined witnesses to distant environments. The books offer readers a synthesis of published journals and institutional knowledge rather than private speculation or unpublished lore.
These volumes were issued as lavishly illustrated editions, a hallmark of Hetzel’s program. Engravings, maps, and portraits—often by house artists such as Léon Benett and Paul-Dominique Philippoteaux—provided visual scaffolding that complemented the text. Such images reflected a larger nineteenth-century print economy in which wood-engraving enabled detailed, reproducible scenes from expeditions otherwise known only through technical reports. The illustrations reinforced the works’ pedagogical aims: they located journeys on maps, depicted instruments and vessels, and visualized landscapes readers would not see firsthand. Verne’s prose thus functioned alongside images and captions to guide a general audience through a curated panorama of exploration.
The volume commonly titled The Exploration of the World surveys discovery as a longue durée process, spanning antiquity, the medieval period, and early modern breakthroughs. Verne’s narrative gathers classical and medieval itineraries alongside early Renaissance ventures, presenting them as stepping stones to global cartography. By assembling episodes across epochs, the book situates exploration within shifting religious, commercial, and scientific frameworks. Rather than a single story of European triumph, it registers the gradual accumulation of geographic knowledge through maritime circuits, overland caravans, court-sponsored missions, and the diffusion of texts—especially after the advent of movable-type printing in Europe in the mid-fifteenth century.
The early modern expansion associated with Iberian seafaring anchors the collection’s historical baseline. Portuguese navigation down the African coast, rounding the Cape of Good Hope by Bartolomeu Dias in 1488 and opening a sea route to India with Vasco da Gama in 1497–1499, reshaped Eurasian commerce. Spanish ventures initiated by Columbus in 1492 and the Magellan–Elcano circumnavigation of 1519–1522 demonstrated new oceanic possibilities. The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) codified competing claims. Verne presents these shifts as a matrix of state patronage, trade in spices and precious metals, and missionary projects, all mediated by improved charts and the circulation of nautical knowledge among pilots and cosmographers.
The scientific revolution altered navigation and cartography in ways reflected throughout the collection. Eighteenth-century advances included the marine chronometer—after John Harrison’s innovations in the mid-eighteenth century, with practical adoption increasing thereafter—which, combined with the sextant, enabled more precise longitude and latitude determinations. Natural history became integral to voyages, with botanists, astronomers, and artists sailing alongside naval officers. Verne uses such developments to explain why explorations yielded not only new routes but also taxonomies, star measurements, and hydrographic charts. Learned academies commissioned observations of phenomena such as transits of Venus, linking expeditions to international scientific cooperation amid imperial rivalries.
The Great Navigators of the 18th Century spotlights a period when exploration pursued science and strategy simultaneously. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville’s Pacific voyage (1766–1769), James Cook’s three expeditions (1768–1779), and Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse’s ill-fated mission (1785–1788) exemplify this synthesis. Cook’s work on mapping the Pacific, observing the 1769 transit of Venus, and testing nourishment and hygiene at sea intersected with British imperial aims. French expeditions sought comparable prestige, often collaborating with savants and artists. Verne’s treatment highlights the standardization of instruments, improved shipboard discipline, and the gathering of ethnographic observations alongside coastal surveys.
The late eighteenth century’s political convulsions also figure in the background of these narratives. The American War of Independence and subsequent French Revolution altered funding, personnel, and maritime priorities. Explorers such as George Vancouver (1791–1795) continued Pacific charting as naval powers recalibrated their interests. French-led undertakings during the Consulate and Empire, like Nicolas Baudin’s expedition to Australia (1800–1804), advanced science while navigating wartime constraints and encounters with British vessels. Verne situates such voyages within a Europe where revolutionary ideals, naval blockades, and shifting alliances affected logistics, publication of results, and the international exchange of specimens and maps.
In the nineteenth century, exploration became increasingly professionalized. Institutions standardized field methods, while rival empires integrated geographic intelligence into policy. Alexander von Humboldt’s American journey (1799–1804) shaped a model of data-rich travel, and Charles Darwin’s voyage on HMS Beagle (1831–1836) exemplified how circumnavigation served natural history and geology. Learned societies ran prize competitions, funded instruments, and disseminated proceedings. Verne’s The Great Explorers of the 19th Century reflects this ecosystem, presenting travels as parts of coordinated, cumulative research programs. The books underscore how journals, atlases, and specimen collections turned individual journeys into enduring reference works for science and navigation.
African exploration occupies a central place in nineteenth-century accounts. Building on earlier probes of the Niger and Sahara, Mungo Park’s late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century journeys preceded a wave of expeditions into east and central Africa. Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke’s expeditions (1857–1859) toward Lakes Tanganyika and Victoria, David Livingstone’s long travels in southern and central regions, and Henry Morton Stanley’s 1871 meeting with Livingstone at Ujiji illustrated intertwined motives—scientific mapping, commercial prospects, and missionary or anti-slavery commitments. Verne’s presentation reflects contemporary debates over the Nile’s sources and situates these expeditions within international print culture that followed each new report.
Polar exploration provided another theater where technology and endurance intersected. British searches for the Northwest Passage culminated in John Franklin’s 1845 expedition and the extensive rescue missions that followed. Testimonies gathered by searchers, including John Rae’s 1854 report and Francis Leopold McClintock’s 1859 findings, reshaped understanding of the tragedy and Arctic routes. In the Eurasian north, Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld’s navigation of the Northeast Passage (1878–1879) demonstrated new strategic possibilities. Verne organizes such episodes to show how steam-assisted vessels, wintering techniques, and magnetic and meteorological observations turned high latitudes into laboratories for science as well as frontiers of national prestige.
Central and Inner Asia drew explorers into the imperial rivalry often termed the Great Game. British and Russian expeditions surveyed passes, rivers, and trade routes, linking reconnaissance to diplomacy and war. The Great Trigonometrical Survey of India (initiated in 1802 and advanced through the nineteenth century) produced measurements foundational for maps and geodesy. Trained local surveyors—“pundits,” including Nain Singh in the 1860s—extended knowledge of the Himalaya and Tibet under arduous conditions. Russian travelers such as Nikolay Przhevalsky undertook expeditions in the 1870s to regions of Xinjiang and Mongolia. Verne’s synthesis situates these journeys within broader contests over borders, transit, and cartographic authority.
Across the Pacific and in Oceania, exploration intersected with whaling, missionary activity, and growing colonial control. The nineteenth century saw intensified mapping of island groups, hydrographic charting of dangerous reefs, and scientific visits that cataloged flora and fauna. New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi (1840) marked British assertion of sovereignty, while France established a protectorate over Tahiti in 1842. In Australia, inland expeditions by figures such as Charles Sturt and the Burke and Wills party (1860–1861) attempted to bridge coastal settlements with arid interiors. Verne situates these efforts within maritime networks that connected ports, sealing grounds, and naval stations across the southern oceans.
Technological change undergirded the century’s expanding reach. Steamships with iron hulls and screw propellers reduced travel times and improved reliability against winds and currents. The global telegraph network, expanding rapidly by the 1860s, enabled dispatches from colonial ports to metropolitan newspapers, accelerating the circulation of exploration news. The Suez Canal’s opening in 1869 shortened routes between Europe and Asia. Advances in medicine—especially the wider use of quinine in the nineteenth century for malaria prophylaxis—altered the risks of tropical travel. Standardized survey instruments, photographic documentation, and improved printing techniques further tightened the link between field observation and public dissemination.
Verne’s method in these volumes is synthetic and documentary. He draws on published journals, official reports, and secondary histories to present coherent narratives anchored in dates, routes, and outcomes. The tone emphasizes disciplined inquiry and often praises perseverance, prudence, and exactitude—the virtues prized by scientific and naval institutions. While the prose carries the pedagogical clarity familiar from Verne’s fiction, it generally avoids fictional embellishment, letting quoted or paraphrased accounts structure episodes. His selection of subjects reflects a nineteenth-century emphasis on measurement, mapping, and comparative description as the means by which distant regions became legible to European readers.
At the same time, the collection bears marks of its milieu. It frequently centers European and Euro-American actors, a perspective typical of the sources it synthesizes. Missionary and abolitionist arguments appear alongside commercial and strategic rationales, reflecting the morally charged politics of the era. French national experience is not foregrounded to the exclusion of others, but the works resonate with contemporary French educational ideals. Published under the early Third Republic—whose school reforms in the 1880s promoted secular, civic instruction—the books suited curricula that valorized science, industriousness, and informed citizenship while offering models of disciplined inquiry applicable to a broad, youthful readership.
Within this framework, The Great Navigators of the 18th Century revisits Enlightenment voyages as laboratories of collaborative knowledge. Astronomers timed transits, artists sketched coastlines and material culture, and naturalists prepared herbaria, all under naval discipline. The Great Explorers of the 19th Century then tracks how explorers worked with consular officials, missionaries, local guides, and interpreters. Verne does not treat these auxiliaries as mere footnotes; he often acknowledges indigenous expertise, port pilots, and surveyors, even as the narrative’s structure remains centered on European institutions that validated results through journals, museums, and standardized cartographic conventions of the period.
Synopsis (Selection)
The Exploration of the World
A sweeping narrative of how distant regions were charted and connected across eras, this volume blends concise history with an engaging, story-driven pace. It highlights the motives, methods, and hazards of expeditions by land and sea, showing how curiosity, commerce, and science propelled increasingly ambitious journeys. Establishing themes of ingenuity, accumulating knowledge, and mapping the unknown, it sets the foundation for the more focused studies that follow.
The Great Navigators of the 18thCentury
Centered on eighteenth-century sea voyages, this volume examines the maritime campaigns that redrew world maps in vast oceanic theaters and high-latitude frontiers. It traces instruments, ships, and disciplined routines—alongside diplomatic stakes and cultural encounters—to illustrate Enlightenment ideals applied to navigation. The tone combines instructional precision with maritime adventure, showcasing Verne’s attention to technology and procedure amid the era’s rivalries and careful observation.
The Great Explorers of 19thCentury
Turning to the nineteenth century, this volume follows expeditions into continental interiors and extreme climates, expanding exploration beyond purely naval routes. It links new tools and infrastructures to more systematic, institutional science while emphasizing personal endurance and the logistical complexity of long campaigns. The result is a confident, forward-looking portrait that completes the collection’s arc and underscores recurring concerns with perseverance, risk, and the transforming power of knowledge.
The Great Travels & Travellers (Illustrated Edition)
The Exploration of the World
LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
FIRST PART.
Map of the World as known to the Ancients.
Approach to Constantinople. Anselmi Banduri Imperium orientale, tome II., p. 448. 2 vols. folio. Parisiis, 1711.
Map of the World according to Marco Polo's ideas. Vol. I., p. 134 of the edition of Marco Polo published in London by Colonel Yule, 2 vols. 8vo.
Plan of Pekin in 1290. Yule's edition. Vol. I., p. 332.
Portrait of Jean de Béthencourt. "The discovery and conquest of the Canaries." Page 1, 12mo. Paris, 1630.
Plan of Jerusalem. "Narrative of the journey beyond seas to the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem," by Antoine Régnant, p. 229, 4to. Lyons, 1573.
Prince Henry the Navigator. From a miniature engraved in "The Discoveries of Prince Henry the Navigator," by H. Major. 8vo. London, 1877.
Christopher Columbus. Taken from "Vitæ illustrium virorum," by Paul Jove. Folio. Basileæ, Perna.
Imaginary view of Seville. Th. de Bry. Grands Voyages, pl. I., part IV.
Building of a caravel. Th. de Bry. Grands Voyages, Americæ, part IV., plate XIX.
Christopher Columbus on board his caravel. Th. de Bry. Grands Voyages, Americæ, part IV., plate VI.
Embarkation of Christopher Columbus. Th. de Bry. Grands Voyages, Americæ, part IV., plate VIII.
Map of the Antilles and the Gulf of Mexico. Th. de Bry. Grands Voyages, Americæ, part V.
Fishing for Pearl oysters. Th. de Bry. Grands Voyages, Americæ, part IV., plate XII.
Gold-mines in Cuba. Th. de Bry. Grands Voyages, Americæ, part V., plate I.
Vasco da Gama. From an engraving in the Cabinet des Estampes of the Bibl. Nat.
La Mina. "Histoire générale des Voyages," by the Abbé Prévost. Vol. III., p. 461, 4to. 20 vols. An X. 1746.
Map of the East Coast of Africa, from the Cape of Good Hope to the Cape del Gado. From the French map of the Eastern Ocean, published in 1740 by order of the Comte de Maurepas.
Map of Mozambique. Bibl. Nat. Estampes.
Interview with the Zamorin. "Hist. Gén. des Voyages," by Prévost. Vol. I., p. 39. 4to. An X. 20 vols. 1746.
View of Quiloa. From an engraving in the Cabinet des Estampes. Topography. (Africa).
Map of the Coasts of Persia, Guzerat, and Malabar. From the French Map of the Eastern Ocean, pub. in 1740 by order of the Comte de Maurepas.
The Island of Ormuz. "Hist. Gén. des Voyages." Prévost. Vol. II., p. 98.
SECOND PART.
Americus Vespucius. From an engraving in the Cabinet des Estampes of the Bibliothèque Nationale.
Indians devoured by dogs. Th. de Bry. Grands Voyages, Americæ, part IV., plate XXII.
Punishment of Indians. Page 17 of Las Casas' "Narratio regionum indicarum per Hispanos quosdam devastatarum," 4to. Francofurti, sumptibus Th. de Bry, 1698.
Portrait of F. Cortès. From an engraving after Velasquez in the Cabinet des Estampes of the Bibliothèque Nationale.
Plan of Mexico. From Clavigero and Bernal Diaz del Castillo. Jourdanet's translation, 2nd Edition.
Portrait of Pizarro. From an engraving in the Cabinet des Estampes of the Bib. Nat.
Map of Peru. From Garcilasso de la Vega. History of the Incas. 4to. Bernard, Amsterdam, 1738.
Atahualpa taken prisoner. Th. de Bry. Grands Voyages, Americæ, part VI., plate VII.
Assassination of Pizarro. Th. de Bry. Grands Voyages, Americæ, part VI., plate XV.
Magellan on board his caravel. Th. de Bry. Grands Voyages, Americæ, part IV., plate XV.
Map of the Coast of Brazil. From the map called Henry 2nd's. Bibl. Nat., Geographical collections.
The Ladrone Islands. Th. de Bry. Grands Voyages, Occidentalis Indiæ, pars VIII., p. 50.
Portrait of Sebastian Cabot. From a miniature engraved in "The remarkable Life, adventures, and discoveries of Sebastian Cabot," by Nicholls. 8vo. London, 1869.
Fragment of Cabot's map. Bibl. Nat., Geographical collections.
Map of Newfoundland and of the Mouth of the St. Lawrence. Lescarbot, "Histoire de la Nouvelle France." 12mo. Perier, Paris, 1617.
Portrait of Jacques Cartier. After Charlevoix. "History and general description of New France," translated by John Gilmary Shea, p. III. 6 vols. 4to. Shea, New York, 1866.
Barentz' ship fixed in the ice. Th. de Bry. Grands Voyages. Tertia pars Indiæ Orientales, plate XLIV.
Interior of Barentz' house. Th. de Bry. Grands Voyages. Tertia pars Indiæ Orientalis, plate XLVII.
Exterior view of Barentz' house. Th. de Bry. Grands Voyages. Tertia pars Indiæ Orientalis, plate XLVIII.
Map of Nova Zembla. Th. de Bry. Grands Voyages. Tertia pars Indiæ Orientalis, plate LIX.
A sea-lion hunt. Th. de Bry. Grands Voyages, Occidentalis Indiæ, pars VIII., p. 37.
A fight between the Dutch and the Spaniards. Th. de Bry. Grands Voyages, "Historiarum novi orbis;" part IX., book II., page 87.
Portrait of Raleigh. From an engraving in the Cabinet des Estampes of the Bibl. Nat.
Berreo seized by Raleigh. Th. de Bry. Grands Voyages. Occid. Indiæ, part VIII., p. 64.
Portrait of Chardin. "Voyages de M. le Chevalier Chardin en Perse." Vol. I. 10 vols. 12mo. Ferrand, Rouen, 1723.
Japanese Archer. From a Japanese print engraved by Yule, vol. II., p. 206.
Attack upon an Indian Town. "Voyages du Sieur de Champlain," p. 44. 12mo. Collet, Paris, 1727.
NAMES OF THE PRINCIPAL TRAVELLERS
OF WHOM THE HISTORY AND TRAVELS ARE RELATED IN THIS VOLUME.
FIRST PART.
SECOND PART.
PREFACE.
This narrative will comprehend not only all the explorations made in past ages, but also all the new discoveries which have of late years so greatly interested the scientific world. In order to give to this work—enlarged perforce by the recent labours of modern travellers,—all the accuracy possible, I have called in the aid of a man whom I with justice regard as one of the most competent geographers of the present day: M. Gabriel Marcel, attached to the Bibliothèque Nationale.
With the advantage of his acquaintance with several foreign languages which are unknown to me, we have been able to go to the fountain-head, and to derive all information from absolutely original documents. Our readers will, therefore, render to M. Marcel the credit due to him for his share in a work which will demonstrate what manner of men the great travellers have been, from the time of Hanno and Herodotus down to that of Livingstone and Stanley.
PART I.
CHAPTER I.
The first traveller of whom we have any account in history, is Hanno, who was sent by the Carthaginian senate to colonize some parts of the Western coast of Africa. The account of this expedition was written in the Carthaginian language and afterwards translated into Greek. It is known to us now by the name of the "Periplus of Hanno." At what period this explorer lived, historians are not agreed, but the most probable account assigns the date B.C. 505 to his exploration of the African coast.
Hanno left Carthage with a fleet of sixty vessels of fifty oars each, carrying 30,000 persons, and provisions for a long voyage. These emigrants, for so we may call them, were destined to people the new towns that the Carthaginians hoped to found on the west coast of Libya, or as we now call it, Africa.
The fleet successfully passed the Pillars of Hercules, the rocks of Gibraltar and Ceuta which command the Strait, and ventured on the Atlantic, taking a southerly course. Two days after passing the Straits, Hanno anchored on the coast, and laid the foundation of the town of Thumiaterion.
Then he put to sea again, and doubling the cape of Soloïs, made fresh discoveries, and advanced to the mouth of a large African river, where he found a tribe of wandering shepherds camping on the banks. He only waited to conclude a treaty of alliance with them, before continuing his voyage southward. He next reached the Island of Cerne, situated in a bay, and measuring five stadia in circumference, or as we should say at the present day, nearly 925 yards. According to Hanno's own account, this island should be placed, with regard to the Pillars of Hercules, at an equal distance to that which separates these Pillars from Carthage.
They set sail again, and Hanno reached the mouth of the river Chretes, which forms a sort of natural harbour, but as they endeavoured to explore this river, they were assailed with showers of stones from the native negro race, inhabiting the surrounding country, and driven back, and after this inhospitable reception they returned to Cerne. We must not omit to add that Hanno mentions finding large numbers of crocodiles and hippopotami in this river. Twelve days after this unsuccessful expedition, the fleet reached a mountainous region, where fragrant trees and shrubs abounded, and it then entered a vast gulf which terminated in a plain. This region appeared quite calm during the day, but after nightfall it was illumined by tongues of flame, which might have proceeded from fires lighted by the natives, or from the natural ignition of the dry grass when the rainy season was over.
In five days, Hanno doubled the Cape, known as the Hespera Keras, there, according to his own account, "he heard the sound of fifes, cymbals, and tambourines, and the clamour of a multitude of people." The soothsayers, who accompanied the party of Carthaginian explorers, counselled flight from this land of terrors, and, in obedience to their advice, they set sail again, still taking a southerly course. They arrived at a cape, which, stretching southwards, formed a gulf, called Notu Keras, and, according to M. D'Avezac, this gulf must have been the mouth of the river Ouro, which falls into the Atlantic almost within the Tropic of Cancer. At the lower end of this gulf, they found an island inhabited by a vast number of gorillas, which the Carthaginians mistook for hairy savages. They contrived to get possession of three female gorillas, but were obliged to kill them on account of their great ferocity.
This Notu Keras must have been the extreme limit reached by the Carthaginian explorers, and though some historians incline to the belief that they only went to Bojador, which is two degrees North of the tropics, it is more probable that the former account is the true one, and that Hanno, finding himself short of provisions, returned northwards to Carthage, where he had the account of his voyage engraved in the temple of Baal Moloch.
After Hanno, the most illustrious of ancient travellers, was Herodotus, who has been called the "Father of History," and who was the nephew of the poet Panyasis, whose poems ranked with those of Homer and Hesiod. It will serve our purpose better if we only speak of Herodotus as a traveller, not an historian, as we wish to follow him so far as possible through the countries that he traversed.
Herodotus was born at Halicarnassus, a town in Asia Minor, in the year B.C. 484. His family were rich, and having large commercial transactions they were able to encourage the taste for explorations which he showed. At this time there were many different opinions as to the shape of the earth: the Pythagorean school having even then begun to teach that it must be round, but Herodotus took no part in this discussion, which was of the deepest interest to learned men of that time, and, still young, he left home with a view of exploring with great care all the then known world, and especially those parts of it of which there were but few and uncertain data.
He left Halicarnassus in 464, being then twenty years of age, and probably directed his steps first to Egypt, visiting Memphis, Heliopolis, and Thebes. He seems to have specially turned his attention to the overflow of the banks of the Nile, and he gives an account of the different opinions held as to the source of this river, which the Egyptians worshipped as one of their deities. "When the Nile overflows its banks," he says, "you can see nothing but the towns rising out of the water, and they appear like the islands in the Ægean Sea." He tells of the religious ceremonies among the Egyptians, their sacrifices, their ardour in celebrating the feasts in honour of their goddess Isis, which took place principally at Busiris (whose ruins may still be seen near Bushir), and of the veneration paid to both wild and tame animals, which were looked upon almost as sacred, and to whom they even rendered funeral honours at their death. He depicts in the most faithful colours, the Nile crocodile, its form, habits, and the way in which it is caught, and the hippopotamus, the momot, the phoenix, the ibis, and the serpents that were consecrated to the god Jupiter. Nothing can be more life-like than his accounts of Egyptian customs, and the notices of their habits, their games, and their way of embalming the dead, in which the chemists of that period seem to have excelled. Then we have the history of the country from Menes, its first king, downwards to Herodotus' time, and he describes the building of the Pyramids under Cheops, the Labyrinth that was built a little above the Lake Moeris (of which the remains were discovered in A.D. 1799), Lake Moeris itself, whose origin he ascribes to the hand of man, and the two Pyramids which are situated a little above the lake. He seems to have admired many of the Egyptian temples, and especially that of Minerva at Sais, and of Vulcan and Isis at Memphis, and the colossal monolith that was three years in course of transportation from Elephantina to Sais, though 2000 men were employed on the gigantic work.
After having carefully inspected everything of interest in Egypt, Herodotus went into Lybia, little thinking that the continent he was exploring, extended thence to the tropic of Cancer. He made special inquiries in Lybia as to the number of its inhabitants, who were a simple nomadic race principally living near the sea-coast, and he speaks of the Ammonians, who possessed the celebrated temple of Jupiter Ammon, the remains of which have been discovered on the north-east side of the Lybian desert, about 300 miles from Cairo. Herodotus furnishes us with some very valuable information on Lybian customs; he describes their habits; speaks of the animals that infest the country, serpents of a prodigious size, lions, elephants, bears, asps, horned asses (probably the rhinoceros of the present day), and cynocephali, "animals with no heads, and whose eyes are placed on their chest," to use his own expression; foxes, hyenas, porcupines, wild zarus, panthers, etc. He winds up his description by saying that the only two aboriginal nations that inhabit this region are the Lybians and Ethiopians.
According to Herodotus the Ethiopians were at that time to be found above Elephantina, but commentators are induced to doubt if this learned explorer ever really visited Ethiopia, and if he did not, he may easily have learnt from the Egyptians the details that he gives of its capital, Meroe, of the worship of Jupiter and Bacchus, and the longevity of the natives. There can be no doubt, however, that he set sail for Tyre in Phoenicia, and that he was much struck with the beauty of the two magnificent temples of Hercules. He next visited Tarsus and took advantage of the information gathered on the spot, to write a short history of Phoenicia, Syria, and Palestine.
We next find that he went southward to Arabia, and he calls it the Ethiopia of Asia, for he thought the southern parts of Arabia were the limits of human habitation. He tells us of the remarkable way in which the Arabs kept any vow that they might have made; that their two deities were Uranius and Bacchus, and of the abundant growth of myrrh, cinnamon and other spices, and he gives a very interesting account of their culture and preparation.
We cannot be quite sure which country he next visited, as he calls it both Assyria and Babylonia, but he gives a most minute account of the splendid city of Babylon (which was the home of the monarchs of that country, after the destruction of Nineveh), and whose ruins are now only in scattered heaps on either side of the Euphrates, which flowed a broad, deep, rapid river, dividing the city into two parts. On one side of the river the fortified palace of the king stood, and on the other the temple of Jupiter Belus, which may have been built on the site of the Tower of Babel. Herodotus next speaks of the two queens, Semiramis and Nitocris, telling us of all the means taken by the latter to increase the prosperity and safety of her capital, and passing on to speak of the natural products of the country, the wheat, barley, millet, sesame, the vine, fig-tree and palm-tree. He winds up with a description of the costume of the Babylonians, and their customs, especially that of celebrating their marriages by the public crier.
After exploring Babylonia he went to Persia, and as the express purpose of his travels was to collect all the information he could relating to the lengthy wars that had taken place between the Persians and Grecians, he was most anxious to visit the spots where the battles had been fought. He sets out by remarking upon the custom prevalent in Persia, of not clothing their deities in any human form, nor erecting temples nor altars where they might be worshipped, but contenting themselves with adoring them on the tops of the mountains. He notes their domestic habits, their disdain of animal food, their taste for delicacies, their passion for wine, and their custom of transacting business of the utmost importance when they had been drinking to excess; their curiosity as to the habits of other nations, their love of pleasure, their warlike qualities, their anxiety for the education of their children, their respect for the lives of all their fellow-creatures, even of their slaves, their horror both of debt and lying, and their repugnance to the disease of leprosy which they thought proved that the sufferer "had sinned in some way against the sun." The India of Herodotus, according to M. Vivien de St. Martin, only consisted of that part of the country that is watered by the five rivers of the Punjaub, adjoining Afghanistan, and this was the region where the young traveller turned his steps on leaving Persia. He thought that the population of India was larger than that of any other country, and he divided it into two classes, the first having settled habitations, the second leading a nomadic life. Those who lived in the eastern part of the country killed their sick and aged people, and ate them, while those in the north, who were a finer, braver, and more industrious race, employed themselves in collecting the auriferous sands. India was then the most easterly extremity of the inhabited world, as he thought, and he observes, "that the two extremities of the world seem to have shared nature's best gifts, as Greece enjoyed the most agreeable temperature possible," and that was his idea of the western limits of the world.
Media is the next country visited by this indefatigable traveller, and he gives the history of the Medes, the nation which was the first to shake off the Assyrian yoke. They founded the great city of Ecbatana, and surrounded it with seven concentric walls. They became a separate nation in the reign of Deioces. After crossing the mountains that separate Media from Colchis, the Greek traveller entered the country, made famous by the valour of Jason, and studied its manners and customs with the care and attention that were among his most striking characteristics.
Herodotus seems to have been well acquainted with the geography of the Caspian Sea, for he speaks of it as a Sea "quite by itself" and having no communication with any other. He considered that it was bounded on the west by the Caucasian Mountains and on the east by a great plain inhabited by the Massagetæ, who, both Arian and Diodorus Siculus think, may have been Scythians. These Massagetæ worshipped the Sun as their only deity, and sacrificed horses in its honour. He speaks here of two large rivers, one of which, the Araxes, would be the Volga, and the other, that he calls the Ista, must be the Danube. The traveller then went into Scythia, and he thought that the Scythians were the different tribes inhabiting the country that lay between the Danube and the Don, in fact a considerable portion of European Russia. He found the barbarous custom of putting out the eyes of their prisoners was practised among them, and he notices that they only wandered from place to place without caring to cultivate their land. Herodotus relates many of the fables that make the origin of the Scythian nation so obscure, and in which Hercules plays a prominent part. He adds a list of the different tribes that composed the Scythian nation, but he does not seem to have visited the country lying to the north of the Euxine, or Black Sea. He gives a minute description of the habits of these people, and expresses his admiration for the Pontus Euxinus. The dimensions that he gives of the Black Sea, the Bosphorus, of the Propontis, the Palus Mæotis and of the Ægean Sea, are almost exactly the same as those given by geographers of the present day. He also names the large rivers that flow into these seas. The Ister or Danube, the Borysthenes or Dnieper, the Tanais, or Don; and he finishes by relating how the alliance, and afterwards the union between the Scythians and Amazons took place, which explains the reason why the young women of that country are not allowed to marry before they have killed an enemy and established their character for valour.
After a short stay in Thrace, during which he was convinced that the Getæ were the bravest portion of this race, Herodotus arrived in Greece, which was to be the termination of his travels, to the country where he hoped to collect the only documents still wanting to complete his history, and he visited all the spots that had become illustrious by the great battles fought between the Greeks and Persians. He gives a minute description of the Pass of Thermopylæ, and of his visit to the plain of Marathon, the battlefield of Platæa, and his return to Asia Minor, whence he passed along the coast on which the Greeks had established several colonies. Herodotus can only have been twenty-eight years of age when he returned to Halicarnassus in Caria, for it was in B.C. 456 that he read the history of his travels at the Olympic Games. His country was at that time oppressed by Lygdamis, and he was exiled to Samos; but though he soon after rose in arms to overthrow the tyrant, the ingratitude of his fellow-citizens obliged him to return into exile. In 444 he took part in the games at the Pantheon, and there he read his completed work, which was received with enthusiasm, and towards the end of his life he retired to Thurium in Italy, where he died, B.C. 406, leaving behind him the reputation of being the greatest traveller and the most celebrated historian of antiquity.
After Herodotus we must pass over a century and a half, and only note, in passing, the Physician Ctesias, a contemporary of Xenophon, who published the account of a voyage to India that he really never made; and we shall come in chronological order to Pytheas, who was at once a traveller, geographer, and historian, one of the most celebrated men of his time. It was about the year B.C. 340 that Pytheas set out from the columns of Hercules with a single vessel, but instead of taking a southerly course like his Carthaginian predecessors, he went northwards, passing by the coasts of Iberia and Gaul to the furthest points which now form the Cape of Finisterre, and then he entered the English Channel and came upon the English coast—the British Isles—of which he was to be the first explorer. He disembarked at various points on the coast and made friends with the simple, honest, sober, industrious inhabitants, who traded largely in tin.
Pytheas ventured still further north, and went beyond the Orcades Islands to the furthest point of Scotland, and he must have reached a very high latitude, for during the summer the night only lasted two hours. After six days further sailing, he came to lands which he calls Thule, probably the Jutland or Norway of the present day, beyond which he could not pass, for he says, "there was neither land, sea, nor air there." He retraced his course, and changing it slightly, he came to the mouth of the Rhine, to the country of the Ostians, and, further inland, to Germany. Thence he visited the mouth of the Tanais, that is supposed to be the Elbe or the Oder, and he retuned to Marseilles, just a year after leaving his native town. Pytheas, besides being such a brave sailor, was a remarkably scientific man: he was the first to discover the influence that the moon exercises on the tides, and to notice that the polar star is not situated at the exact spot at which the axis of the globe is supposed to be. Some years after the time of Pytheas, about B.C. 326 a Greek traveller made his name famous. This was Nearchus, a native of Crete, one of Alexander's admirals, and he was charged to visit all the coast of Asia from the mouth of the Indus to that of the Euphrates. When Alexander first resolved that this expedition should take place, which had for its object the opening up of a communication between India and Egypt, he was at the upper part of the Indus. He furnished Nearchus with a fleet of thirty-three galleys, of some vessels with two decks, and a great number of transport ships, and 2000 men. Nearchus came down the Indus in about four months, escorted on either bank of the river by Alexander's armies, and after spending seven months in exploring the Delta, he set sail and followed the west line of what we call Beloochistan in the present day.
He put to sea on the second of October, a month before the winter storms had taken a direction that was favourable to his purpose, so that the commencement of his voyage was disastrous, and in forty days he had scarcely made eighty miles in a westerly direction. He touched first at Stura and at Corestis, which do not seem to answer to any of the now-existing villages on the coast; then at the Island of Crocala, which forms the bay of Caranthia. Beaten back by contrary winds, after doubling the cape of Monze, the fleet took refuge in a natural harbour that its commander thought that he could fortify as a defence against the attacks of the barbarous natives, who, even at the present day, keep up their character as pirates.
After spending twenty-four days in this harbour, Nearchus put to sea again on the 3rd of November. Severe gales often obliged him to keep very near the coast, and when this was the case he was obliged to take all possible precautions to defend himself from the attacks of the ferocious Beloochees, who are described by eastern historians "as a barbarous nation, with long dishevelled hair, and long flowing beards, who are more like bears or satyrs than human beings." Up to this time, however, no serious disaster had happened to the fleet, but on the 10th of November in a heavy gale two galleys and a ship sank. Nearchus then anchored at Crocala, and there he was met by a ship laden with corn that Alexander had sent out to him, and he was able to supply each vessel with provisions for ten days.
After many disasters and a skirmish with some of the natives, Nearchus reached the extreme point of the land of the Orites, which is marked in modern geography by Cape Morant. Here, he states in his narrative that the rays of the sun at mid-day are vertical, and therefore there are no shadows of any kind; but this is surely a mistake, for at this time in the Southern hemisphere the sun is in the Tropic of Capricorn; and, beyond this, his vessels were always some degrees distant from the Tropic of Cancer, therefore even in the height of summer this phenomenon could not have taken place, and we know that his voyage was in winter.
Circumstances seemed now rather more in his favour; for the time of the eastern monsoon was over, when he sailed along the coast which is inhabited by a tribe called Ichthyophagi, who subsist solely on fish, and from the failure of all vegetation are obliged to feed even their sheep upon the same food. The fleet was now becoming very short of provisions; so after doubling Cape Posmi Nearchus took a pilot from those shores on board his own vessel, and with the wind in their favour they made rapid progress, finding the country less bare as they advanced, a few scattered trees and shrubs being visible from the shore. They reached a little town, of the name of which we have no record, and as they were almost without food Nearchus surprised and took possession of it, the inhabitants making but little resistance. Canasida, or Churbar as we call it, was their next resting-place, and at the present day the ruins of a town are still visible in the bay. But their corn was now entirely exhausted, and though they tried successively at Canate, Trois, and Dagasira for further supplies, it was all in vain, these miserable little towns not being able to furnish more than enough for their own consumption. The fleet had neither corn nor meat, and they could not make up their minds to feed upon the tortoises that abound in that part of the coast.
Just as they entered the Persian Gulf they encountered an immense number of whales, and the sailors were so terrified by their size and number, that they wished to fly; it was not without much difficulty that Nearchus at last prevailed upon them to advance boldly, and they soon scattered their formidable enemies.
Having changed their westerly course for a north-easterly one, they soon came upon fertile shores, and their eyes were refreshed by the sight of corn-fields and pasture-lands, interspersed with all kinds of fruit-trees except the olive. They put into Badis or Jask, and after leaving it and passing Maceta or Mussendon, they came in sight of the Persian Gulf, to which Nearchus, following the geography of the Arabs, gave the misnomer of the Red Sea.
They sailed up the gulf, and after one halt reached Harmozia, which has since given its name to the little island of Ormuz. There he learnt that Alexander's army was only five days' march from him, and he disembarked at once, and hastened to meet it. No news of the fleet having reached the army for twenty-one weeks, they had given up all hope of seeing it again, and great was Alexander's joy when Nearchus appeared before him, though the hardships he had endured had altered him almost beyond recognition. Alexander ordered games to be celebrated and sacrifices offered up to the gods; then Nearchus returned to Harmozia, as he wished to go as far as Susa with the fleet, and set sail again, having invoked Jupiter the Deliverer.
He touched at some of the neighbouring islands, probably those of Arek and Kismis, and soon afterwards the vessels ran aground, but the advancing tide floated them again, and after passing Bestion, they arrived at the island of Keish, that is sacred to Mercury and Venus. This was the boundary-line between Karmania and Persia. As they advanced along the Persian coast, they visited different places, Gillam, Indarabia, Shevou, &c., and at the last-named was found a quantity of wheat which Alexander had sent for the use of the explorers.
Some days after this they came to the mouth of the river Araxes, that separates Persia from Susiana, and thence they reached a large lake situated in the country now called Dorghestan, and finally anchored near the village of Degela, at the source of the Euphrates, having accomplished their project of visiting all the coast lying between the Euphrates and Indus. Nearchus returned a second time to Alexander, who rewarded him magnificently, and placed him in command of his fleet. Alexander's wish, that the whole of the Arabian coast should be explored as far as the Red Sea, was never fulfilled, as he died before the expedition was arranged.
