of the sea. It can be argued that any choice of six is bound to be 

 arbitrary and to raise the question : Why have others been omitted? 

 Our narrative begins with Pytheas, an outstanding traveler who 

 well represents the many unrecorded journeys of the classical world, 

 and he was a suitable forerunner of the scientific explorers of latter 

 days. In the eighteen hundred years that passed from the time of 

 Pytheas to the great age of discovery, little advance in sea explo- 

 ration was made, if we exclude the remarkable voyages of the 

 Vikings. In their long ships they traveled not only round the north 

 of Norway to the White Sea, but also to Iceland; and from Iceland, 

 Eric the Red traveled to Greenland. Later, his son Leif visited the 

 mainland of America in the vicinity of Labrador, Newfoundland, 

 and possibly penetrated even as far south as Virginia. 



Inspired by Prince Henry the Navigator, of Portugal, and by 

 national interests in colonizing new lands, European sea explorers 

 sailed the waters east round the Cape of Good Hope, and west 

 across the Atlantic. This period is well represented by Ferdinand 

 Magellan, the second explorer we meet in this chapter. His voyage 

 was the first circumnavigation of the globe and led to exploration 

 of much of the Pacific. 



Other explorers and travelers of many European nations con- 

 tinued during the following two hundred years to add to the charts, 

 until the time of James Cook. This English sea captain towers as a 

 giant among navigators and explorers, and his work filled in most 

 of the remaining gaps in man's knowledge of the Pacific, leaving 

 only the Arctic and the Antarctic still to be explored. And so we 

 come to James Clark Ross in the Antarctic and then to Fridtjof 

 Nansen of Arctic fame. Finally, to complete our narrative, we have 

 chosen the remarkable voyage under the North Pole of the Nautilus, 

 commanded by WilUam Anderson. 



In this twentieth-century vessel may lie' the key to the real 

 exploration of the sea that is yet to come. When I sailed in the 

 Nautilus not long ago, I was aware that I was as much in a new 

 element and in a new means of transport as a man traveling in a 

 spaceship to the stars. 



This engraving of a seventeentti-century 

 Dutcii sciiooi of navigation shiows a variety 

 of instruments ttien in use: globes, tiour- 

 glasses, cross-staffs, astrolabes, dividers, 

 compasses, and charts. 



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