Voyagers: Being Legends and Romances of Atlantic Discovery

On the windswept edge of fifteenth-century Portugal, Prince Henry the Navigator gathers astronomers, cartographers, and dreamers around him, sparking an age of discovery that will redraw the boundaries of the known world. Pádraic Colum weaves together the legendary and the historical: the folklore tales sailors told of sea monsters and distant shores, the bold accounts of Portuguese explorers who ventured into the Atlantic's treacherous waters, and the romances of those who sought fortune and fame beyond Europe's horizon. This 1926 Newbery Honor Book resurrects the magic that once surrounded Atlantic exploration, when every voyage carried the weight of the unknown and every return brought tales stranger than any map could capture. Colum treats these legends not as mere fictions but as windows into how our ancestors understood their place in a vast and terrifying world. For readers who have ever stared at a horizon and wondered what lies beyond, this collection offers both adventure and the particular longing of an age when the world's edges had not yet been fully mapped.