nrivalled and faithful lives laid
ungrudgingly down. Of the many who went forth, the few only attained.
It is of these few that this book tells.

"All these," says the poet in Ecclesiastes--"all these were honoured
in their generation, and were the glory of their times ... their name
liveth for evermore."

But while we read of those master-spirits who succeeded, let us never
forget those who failed to achieve.

"Anybody might have found it, but the Whisper came to Me."

Enthusiasm too was the secret of their success. Among the best of crews
there was always some one who would have turned back, but the world
would never have been explored had it not been for those finer spirits
who resolutely went on--even to the death.

This is what carried Alexander the Great to the "earth's utmost verge,"
that drew Columbus across the trackless Atlantic, that nerved Vasco
da Gama to double the Stormy Cape, that induced Magellan to face the
dreaded straits now called by his name, that made it possible for men
to face without flinching the ice-bound regions of the far North.

"There is no land uninhabitable, nor sea unnavigable," asserted the
men of the sixteenth century, when England set herself to take
possession of her heritage in the North. Such an heroic temper could
overcome all things. But the cost was great, the sufferings intense.

"Having eaten our shoes and saddles boiled with a few wild herbs, we
set out to reach the kingdom of gold," says Orellana in 1540.

"We ate biscuit, but in truth it was biscuit no longer, but a powder
full of worms,--so great was the want of food, that we were forced
to eat the hides with which the mainyard was covered; but we had also
to make use of sawdust for food, and rats became a great delicacy,"
related Magellan, as he led his little ship across the unknown Pacific.

Again, there is Franklin returning from the Arctic coast, and stilling
the pangs of hunger with "pieces of singed hide mixed with lichen,"
varied with "the horns and bones of a dead deer fried with some old
shoes."

The dangers of the way were manifold.

For the early explorers had no land map or ocean chart to guide them,
there were no lighthouses to warn the strange mariner of dangerous
coast and angry surf, no books of travel to relate the weird doings
of fierce and inhospitable savages, no tinned foods to prevent the
terrible scourge of sailors, scurvy. In their little wooden sailing
ships the men of old faced