Part 1 (1/2)

A Book of Discovery

by Margaret Bertha (M B) Synge

INTRODUCTION

”Hope went before them, and the world ide”

Such was the spirit in which the exploration of the world was accomplished It was the inspiration that carried ic 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 But

”The reward is in the doing, And the rapture of pursuing Is the prize”

”To travel hopefully,” says Stevenson, ”is a better thing than to arrive” This would explain the fact that this Book of Discovery has become a record of splendid endurance, of hardshi+ps bravely borne, of silent toil, of courage and resolution unequalled in the annals of mankind, of self-sacrifice unrivalled and faithful lives laid ungrudgingly down Of the many ent forth, the few only attained

It is of these few that this book tells

”All these,” says the poet in Ecclesiastes--”all these were honoured in their generation, and were the glory of their timestheir name liveth for evermore”

But while we read of those et those who failed to achieve

”Anybody ht have found it, but the Whisper came to Me”

Enthusias the best of crews there was always some one ould have turned back, but the world would never have been explored had it not been for those finer spirits who resolutely went on--even to the death

This is what carried Alexander the Great to the ”earth's ute,”

that drew Columbus across the trackless Atlantic, that nerved Vasco da Gaellan to face the dreaded straits now called by his na the ice-bound regions of the far North

”There is no land uninhabitable, nor sea unnavigable,” asserted the land set herself to take possession of her heritage in the North Such an heroic tereat, the sufferings intense

”Having eaten our shoes and saddles boiled with a feild herbs, we set out to reach the kingdoold,” says Orellana in 1540

”We ate biscuit, but in truth it was biscuit no longer, but a powder full of worreat was the want of food, that ere forced to eat the hides hich the mainyard was covered; but we had also to reat delicacy,”

related Magellan, as he led his little shi+p across the unknown Pacific

Again, there is Franklin returning froer with ”pieces of singed hide mixed with lichen,”

varied with ”the horns and bones of a dead deer fried with soers of the ere manifold

For the early explorers had no land hthouses to warn the strange ry 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 shi+ps the er, and surmounted obstacles unknown to modern civilisation

”Now strike your Sails ye jolly Mariners, For we be come into a quiet Rode”

For the ht-heartedness of the olden sailor, the shout of gladness hichnot how they would arrive, or what ht befall them by the ent forth in the smallest of wooden shi+ps, with the ers of unknown seas and unsuspected lands, to chance the angry storm and the hidden rock, to discover inhospitable shores and savage foes Founded on bitter experience is the old saying--