The journey took a terrible toll on its participants: of nearly three hundred men who set out, fewer than twenty came home. But it was both an exceptional feat of navigation and a symbolic landmark in human progress all the same. The earth, whose shape and nature had been a matter of speculation and mystery since the beginning of recorded history, was now subject to man’s full purview. And although many places remained unknown and unexplored by westerners—including the Australasian continent, much of central Africa, the Amazon rainforest, the American interior, Antarctica, and the Himalayan
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