Sublime

One of the British men that Amundsen beat was Sir John Franklin, another polar hero, who died in his Northwest Passage attempt. Franklin, with his large, technologically advanced vessels HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, had packed what he believed to be his guarantor to the expedition’s success: canned food. It was a revolutionary packaging of fresh grub

he sailed from Gravesend on 25 March 1604.

Already heavily populated with exiles, Yakutsk was seeing an almost daily influx of new arrivals. They came from all over the Russian Empire, from Moscow, from the Crimea, from Poland. Many of them were well educated, and most did not know what they had done to earn their term of banishment—which, often as not, was for life. Seldom had they even be

first commander of an EIC vessel to set foot on Indian soil.

After nearly five years he had returned from one of the great scientific odysseys of all time. It was a journey that would capture the imagination of the age, but that has been strangely forgotten in our own time.

un nouveau type de marins : au pilote s’adjoint un « maître de l’astrologie », un spécialiste de la navigation, qui sait lire les portulans, calculer la déclinaison astrale et tracer les méridiens. Théorie et pratique s’unissent dans une collaboration féconde. Ainsi émerge peu à peu, systématiquement, une race de navigateurs et de découvreurs dont

The legacy was truly amazing. His work on fish, the initial research on glaciers, the impact of his writing on the Ice Age, the zest and glamour he brought to American culture at a critical moment, were all contributions of the first order. His beloved Museum of Comparative Zoology—the Agassiz Museum, or simply the Agassiz, as it came to be known i

It was Agassiz, at age thirty-three, who first presented to the world the