Discoverers and Explorers

Before GPS and satellite imagery, the world's oceans were bottomless pits of terror. Sailors believed in sea serpents, topless mountains that drained the blood from your neck, and a sun that boiled the ocean itself. The world was flat, everyone knew that, and to sail too far meant falling off the edge into nothingness. Yet some men pushed anyway. This book traces the journeys of the explorers who stared down these fears, the ones who sailed into the unknown Atlantic, who pushed past the boundaries of medieval maps, who refused to let superstition anchor them to shore. From the first tentative voyages along unknown coastlines to the daring circumnavigations that reshaped humanity's understanding of the planet, these stories capture the raw nerve and extraordinary courage that drove men into the void. Shaw writes with a respect for his subjects that makes their achievements feel less like history and more like invention, the invention of the modern world, built on the backs of people willing to be terrified and go forward anyway.