The Critics: ‘Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration’

Writing a sweeping history of world exploration sounds like no easy feat. Doing it well sounds even tougher. But the critics are raving about Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s new book that attempts just that, Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration. The New York Times calls it a “brilliant and readable book,” adding that it’s “an illuminating and, at times, stirring examination of the divergence and convergence of cultures, a rich study of humankind’s restless spirit. As intimate as Alexander the Great’s deathbed wish and as vast as human migration, this book explains who we are as much as what we have done.”

The Washington Post is equally enthusiastic: “Despite its sprawl, ‘Pathfinders’ never rests on scope alone. The author eagerly seeks out a different kind of terra incognita—that of historical freshness.”

Among the author’s observations, the Post notes, is this, which might help explain the wild scribblings of a few contemporary travel writers:

Fernández-Armesto offers another fascinating insight—about how often explorers’ accounts were wildly inaccurate. The shock of being “isolated, thousands of miles from home, surrounded by unknown perils, baffled by an unfamiliar environment” regularly led to near-hallucinogenic breaks with reality, he argues. Columbus believed he’d discovered islands populated solely by Amazonian women or bald men.

Arriving in India, Vasco da Gama bizarrely believed Hinduism to be a form of Christianity. In 1670, John Lederer, a German physician wandering in the vicinity of present-day North Carolina, claimed “to have met Indians from California.”

Fernández-Armesto has an ideal resume for the project. The Tufts University professor is the editor of The Times Atlas of World Exploration and the author of such ambitiously titled books as “Civilizations” and “Food: A History.”

 

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