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Discoveries and sea novels
Context on this page, sea travels and pirates stories next

The best introduction to the changes in history brought up by new ideas and the resolution of technical challenges still is The Discoverers by Daniel J. Boorstin (essential book). The book is fascinating and reads like a novel. It sorely needs a sequel: it would be great to have somebody writing just as well about the most recent discoveries (from around 1900 to now) but I have not found a book as wonderful as Boorstin's yet.

I do think that any adult interested in history and any kid interested in pirates and travel stories should learn a little bit about the history of maps. Nowadays, GPS tells you where to go, you don't even have to learn how to read a map any more, but at the time of Christopher Columbus, it was a different ball game. There is of course, no map without a bit of math: you can verify that with your kids if you try to draw the road from house to school,then to church and back. It is pretty hard to draw it correctly. The bigger the surface you want to represent, the more difficult, because now you got to flatten the curvature of the earth. It is like flattening the skin of an orange. I found 2 exciting books on the subject, but there are much more out there. Flattening the Earth: Two Thousand Years of Map Projections by John P. Snyder . A book on maps that anybody can understand, what about that! Plus it is practical, useful, and has just enough math equations to help you go from one projection to another, which is the only way to "understand" projections. It does not have too much math, so it is readable and quite enough if your destiny is not with cartography. I am born very close to the birthplace of Mercator, so I always admired that he had made on his maps Belgium appear big and the rest of the world (allegedly like Brazil) smaller than it should. This became an international political controversy with the famous Peters maps. You need to read about this, it is so much fun! I like the book Rhumb Lines and Map Wars: A Social History of the Mercator Projection by Mark Monmonier . You will find out that Mercator was not so wrong, after all. You can still visit his printer's house, the Plantin house, and see his printing press in Antwerp.
Once you were at sea, of course, there was no way to get your bearings unless you looked at the stars. Anybody who likes sailing will have a great time with this:
Latitude Hooks and Azimuth Rings: How to Build and Use 18 Traditional Navigational Instruments by Dennis Fisher and
The Lo-Tech Navigator by Tony Crowley
If, as I hope, The Discoverers have whet your appetite for the conquest of time, here is a great book: Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel (essential book) . When I was at sea in the seventies, long before general access to satellites, only one person on board had access to the chronometer and it was treated with religious respect. At sea, if the clock helps you determine your position, a mistake of one minute can be a matter of life and death.

Now to adventure and discoveries:

Women of Discovery: A Celebration of Intrepid Women Who Explored the World by Milbry Polk and Mary Tiegreen
I have not read this yet, but I have been waiting a long time for such a book.
Marco Polo was born in 1254 and traveled to China. To people of my generation, he looked like Gary Cooper!
Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu by Laurence Bergreen
Tracking Marco Polo by Tim Severin
Gutenberg was born in 1400, Columbus in 1451, Vespucci in 1454, Vaco de Gama in 1460, Magellan in 1480 Jacques Cartier in 1491
To America and Around the World: The Logs of Christopher Columbus and of Ferdinand Magellan by Adolph Caso
Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe by Laurence Bergreen
The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama by Sanjay Subrahmanyam We are all so proud of these discoveries of the world, that we tend to forget that "being discovered" was not to the taste of the local populations, so it is refreshing to see things from an Indian point of view.
The Voyages of Jacques Cartier by Ramsay Cook

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