The lives and travels of great explorers
The French naval officer and explorer Antoine Bruni d’Entrecasteaux was born at Aix-en-Provence in 1739. He enlisted in the French Navy in 1754; but he must have shown promise to his superiors, for they granted him an officer’s commission two years later.
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Every man should periodically make an intense sojourn. The destination matters less than the journey itself, for it is the act of discovery that soothes the turbulent soul. I recently returned from a 10-day trip to Europe, during which I visited Amsterdam, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. I wanted to summarize my impressions here. You have heard and read, no doubt, an endless number of travel accounts by countless authors. Much of what I say may already be known to you. But there is still some value, I think, in hearing these things from a voice with a different inflection.
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The curious mind may be puzzled by the apparent paucity of commercial and cultural contacts between the Roman and Chinese empires. That these two mighty states seem to have had such meager intercourse with each other, for so many centuries, is one of the oddities of antique history.
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The outline of the story that follows appeared in Edward R. Snow’s volume The Fury of the Seas, which was published in 1964. Snow relates that he first became aware of its details in 1934. His book is now long out of print, so it will be a pleasure for us to retell it here.
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The name Jacob August Riis is an obscure one today, known only perhaps to scholars of American journalism and photography. He was a Danish-American journalist, and he lived from 1849 to May 26, 1914. He produced excellent work in his day; his photographs of the New York slums were influential in helping promote social reforms that eased the lives of the urban poor. His 1890 volume How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among The Tenements Of New York constitutes an important record of the squalid conditions of the Gilded Age’s downtrodden.
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By the close of the fifteenth century, the maritime enterprise of Portugal had established a reliable network of trading routes from the Iberian peninsula to the Indian Ocean. These routes were won at great cost; we note the results of the budding Age of Exploration, but forget the fearsome human toll that this Age exacted. Shipwreck, loss at sea, loss of life on land, loss of property: any one of these misfortunes—or a combination of them—could befall the intrepid explorer or trader at any time.
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The ability to survive is dependent on both a strong physical constitution and an unshakeable determination. While both of these ingredients are necessary, experience has shown that the will to live easily surpasses physical robustness in relative importance. He whose actions are in accordance with his nature, truly lives. Sir Thomas Browne was entirely correct when he said in his essay Religio Medici:
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In January of 1841 the twenty-two-year-old Herman Melville shipped aboard the whaler Acushnet for a multi-year cruise. He had many motivations for doing this. There was, in the first place, a desire to see the world and test himself against its challenges; then there was a need to escape the stultifying confines and restrictions of a nineteenth-century “proper” American household; and finally, a longing to cleanse himself of his father’s failures, disgrace, and early death.
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In 1902 Jack London resolved to travel seven thousand miles from California to England. His stated purpose was to lose himself in the docks and slums of London’s squalid East End, and see what he might learn from the experience. One might reasonably ask why he would do this, when numerous examples of urban misery could be observed in the cities of his own country, such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, or any of a dozen others. But the idea was actually presented to him by his British publisher after the release of London’s first book in England.
Sidonius Apollinaris, who died in 489 A.D., was a diplomat, literary figure, and ecclesiastical official of fifth-century Gaul. He was also a letter-writer of impressive fecundity and erudition; and his powers of memory were so great, we are told, that he was able to recite long liturgies from memory and deliver orations without notes or preparation. One of his letters (II.10), written to a friend named Hesperius, contains the following noteworthy sentence:
Quintus Curtius 
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