Volume 9, Number 1 · July 13, 1967
Excelsior!
By J.H. Plumb
Scott of the Antarctic
by Reginald Pound
Coward-McCann, 327 pp., $5.95
Peary, the Explorer and the Man
by John Edward Weems
Houghton Mifflin, 362 pp., $6.95
By the end of the nineteenth century not much of the globe remained unknown to the Western world. Even the elusive sources of the Nile had been tracked down in the Mountains of the Moon, and H. M. Stanley had hacked his way through the Iturri Forest in the darkest of Dark Africa. Green hells still remained unplotted in the vastness of the Amazonian basin, and a valley or two in the Himalayas were virgin soil—but the Western European's hunger for loot, power, and proselytization had drawn him into the uttermost ends of the earth. Protestant missionaries were busy with the naked Ona in Tierra del Fuego, killing them off with measles before they could get them baptized for God, and the Catholics were not daunted by being cooked in Polynesia. Gold had driven men like lemmings to the Yukon and the desert wastes of Australia; whales lured them into the boisterous seas of the Far North and Deep South. National pride, economic greed, hot-gospeling, and strategic fears urged and goaded men into the unknown. Individuals usually felt the urgency for expansion or conversion far more keenly than governments did, who loathed the expense of exploration and feared its implications. They, at least, were quite prepared to live with a non-Christian world.
Review, 1593 words
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