ONS, EASTERN HALF.--This gives the Siberian coast
investigated by the Russians and Nordenskiold, as well as Nansen's
_Farthest North_.

CLIMBING THE NORTH POLE (prepared specially for this volume). Giving
in graphic form the names of the chief Arctic travellers and the
latitude N. reached from John Davis (1587) to Nansen (1895).

THE STORY OF

GEOGRAPHICAL DISCOVERY

INTRODUCTION

How was the world discovered? That is to say, how did a certain
set of men who lived round the Mediterranean Sea, and had acquired
the art of recording what each generation had learned, become
successively aware of the other parts of the globe? Every part of
the earth, so far as we know, has been inhabited by man during the
five or six thousand years in which Europeans have been storing up
their knowledge, and all that time the inhabitants of each part, of
course, were acquainted with that particular part: the Kamtschatkans
knew Kamtschatka, the Greenlanders, Greenland; the various tribes of
North American Indians knew, at any rate, that part of America over
which they wandered, long before Columbus, as we say, "discovered"
it.

Very often these savages not only know their own country, but can
express their knowledge in maps of very remarkable accuracy. Cortes
traversed over 1000 miles through Central America, guided only by
a calico map of a local cacique. An Eskimo named Kalliherey drew
out, from his own knowledge of the coast between Smith Channel
and Cape York, a map of it, varying only in minute details from
the Admiralty chart. A native of Tahiti, named Tupaia, drew out
for Cook a map of the Pacific, extending over forty-five degrees
of longitude (nearly 3000 miles), giving the relative size and
position of the main islands over that huge tract of ocean. Almost
all geographical discoveries by Europeans have, in like manner,
been brought about by means of guides, who necessarily knew the
country which their European masters wished to "discover."

What, therefore, we mean by the history of geographical discovery is
the gradual bringing to the knowledge of the nations of civilisation
surrounding the Mediterranean Sea the vast tracts of land extending
in all directions from it. There are mainly two divisions of this
history--the discovery of the Old World and that of the New, including
Australia under the latter term. Though we speak of geographical
discovery, it is really the discovery of new tribes of men that
we are