Off the Edge of the Map Quotes

“When Ferdinand Magellan attempted his circumnavigation of the globe in the sixteenth century, he had to assure his nervous, uneducated mariners that they would not in fact fall off the edge of the earth.”
― Michael Rank, Off the Edge of the Map: Marco Polo, Captain Cook, and 9 Other Travelers and Explorers That Pushed the Boundaries of the Known World

“the Public must not expect from me the elegance of a fine writer, or the plausibility of a professed book-maker; but will, I hope, consider me as a plain man,”
― Michael Rank, Off the Edge of the Map: Marco Polo, Captain Cook, and 9 Other Travelers and Explorers That Pushed the Boundaries of the Known World

“Even the tombs of Christian saints received visitors, due to the practice of posthumously declaring the saint to have actually been a Muslim in his earthly life.”
― Michael Rank, Off the Edge of the Map: Marco Polo, Captain Cook, and 9 Other Travelers and Explorers That Pushed the Boundaries of the Known World

“Christianity for most of its history was equally spread across Europe, Asia, and Africa. It only became predominantly European in the fourteenth century, not because the continent had any special affinity for the religion, but by default: Europe was the only location in which the religion was not destroyed.”
― Michael Rank, Off the Edge of the Map: Marco Polo, Captain Cook, and 9 Other Travelers and Explorers That Pushed the Boundaries of the Known World

“We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live.”
― Michael Rank, Off the Edge of the Map: Marco Polo, Captain Cook, and 9 Other Travelers and Explorers That Pushed the Boundaries of the Known World

“Genghis and his immediate descendants killed upwards of 40 million people, causing millions of acres of farmland to go untended and return to the wild. This massive destruction caused global carbon levels to plummet and the first and only case of man-made global cooling.”
― Michael Rank, Off the Edge of the Map: Marco Polo, Captain Cook, and 9 Other Travelers and Explorers That Pushed the Boundaries of the Known World

“He spoke 29 languages, including Greek, Arabic, Persian, Icelandic, Turkish, Swahili, Hindi, and a host of other European, Asian, and African tongues.”
― Michael Rank, Off the Edge of the Map: Marco Polo, Captain Cook, and 9 Other Travelers and Explorers That Pushed the Boundaries of the Known World

“Richard Francis Burton was a British consul, Orientalist, explorer, best known today for translating the Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra into English. He was the most educated explorer of the Victorian age, a time when only men of rough disposition set out to discover foreign lands, in stark contrast to the landed gentry, who were uninterested in international travel, unless it was in the comfort of a steamship to go administer a colony for the sake of the Crown or as a military officer deployed to extend the global landholdings of the British Empire. He”
― Michael Rank, Off the Edge of the Map: Marco Polo, Captain Cook, and 9 Other Travelers and Explorers That Pushed the Boundaries of the Known World

“In August 1519, Magellan disembarked with a crew of 280 men among the five ships of his fleet: the Concepción, the San Antonio, the Santiago, the Victoria, and the flagship Trinidad. Four of the ships were three- or four-masted sailing ships called carracks; the Trinidad was a caravel. Each vessel held massive stores of supplies to last the men for weeks and months at sea, with plans to resupply in stops along the Canary Islands, Cape Verde, and South American port towns. No shipping clerk could have guessed how much they dangerously underestimated the needs of the voyage.”
― Michael Rank, Off the Edge of the Map: Marco Polo, Captain Cook, and 9 Other Travelers and Explorers That Pushed the Boundaries of the Known World

“The 21-year-old set off for his journey the year before he died in 1324. Yet even though he traveled three times as far as Polo, crossing Africa, Asia, and China, Ibn Battuta has not received the same recognition. His memoirs, the Rihla (The Journey) was not translated into European languages until the nineteenth century and was unknown to Westerners except for the occasional Oriental scholar. Its full title is A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Traveling. Despite its lofty appellation, his work lives up”
― Michael Rank, Off the Edge of the Map: Marco Polo, Captain Cook, and 9 Other Travelers and Explorers That Pushed the Boundaries of the Known World

“Abu Abdullah Ibn Battuta came from a prominent family of judges who studied thick tomes of Islamic law and wrote legally binding opinions on how to live out the law in daily life.”
― Michael Rank, Off the Edge of the Map: Marco Polo, Captain Cook, and 9 Other Travelers and Explorers That Pushed the Boundaries of the Known World

“Bar Sauma strengthened diplomatic and political channels in his attempts to build an East-West military alliance, and his efforts reopened the lines of communication throughout the post-Roman world at a time when the Crusades had compromised the resources of the Europe’s leading monarchies. His efforts also opened up new communication and trade channels between European and Middle East/Asian states.”
― Michael Rank, Off the Edge of the Map: Marco Polo, Captain Cook, and 9 Other Travelers and Explorers That Pushed the Boundaries of the Known World

“Memory of the elderly monk survived in the accounts of some of the greatest leaders in medieval Europe, along with lengthy accounts in the Vatican archives, but he was soon forgotten in the West and in his homeland of China.”
― Michael Rank, Off the Edge of the Map: Marco Polo, Captain Cook, and 9 Other Travelers and Explorers That Pushed the Boundaries of the Known World