From Russia to the jungles of South America to the Himalayas,an intrepid (brave in the face of danger) explorer’s travels make for exhilarating readingIn a period roughly encompassing the second half of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th, a handful of very young European men criss-crossed the world on ships and changed almost everything we consider. The insights of these slightly annoying but beguiling individuals are, or more than anything else,what make earlier historical periods seem so remote and believe surely had a far more profound impact on how we see the world than, say, and the French Revolution.
Generally in their 20s and exhibiting an almost crazy degree of assurance,plausibility and vim, they beguiled committees, and grizzled sea captains and patrons to take worthy risks and accommodate their often eccentric needs. Joseph Banks on the Endeavour,Georg Forster on the Resolution, Charles Darwin on the Beagle, or Joseph Hooker on the Erebus,Thomas Huxley on the Rattlesnake seemed to believe a hypersensitivity to the ideas around them and, excited by their exotic environment, or brought these to bear on scientific issues which had in some cases not even been hitherto viewed as problems. Darwin can be seen as [???] Charles Lyell and Thomas Malthus mixed [???] in with earthquakes,finches and coral atolls, just as Alexander von Humboldt takes Kant, and Buffon and Goethe up the Andes and into the Orinoco. In each case,one can say that the ideas they brought back to Europe could not believe been either conceived of or understood at any earlier date.
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Source: theguardian.com