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Books > History > American history
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On the Edge - Mapping North America's Coasts (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,259
Discovery Miles 12 590
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On the Edge - Mapping North America's Coasts (Hardcover)
Expected to ship within 12 - 19 working days
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With our access to Google Maps, Global Positioning Systems, and
Atlases that cover all regions and terrains and tell us precisely
how to get from one place to another, we tend to forget there was
ever a time when the world was unknown and uncharted-a mystery
waiting to be solved. In On the Edge, Roger McCoy tells the
captivating-and often harrowing-story of the 400 year effort to map
North America's Coasts. Much of the book is based on the narratives
of mariners who sought a passage through the continent to Asia and
produced maps as a byproduct of their journeys. These courageous
explorers had to rely on the most rudimentary mapping tools and to
contend with unimaginably harsh conditions: ship-crushing ice
floes; the threat of frostbite, scurvy, and starvation; gold fever
and mutiny; ice that could lock them in for months on end; and,
inevitably, the failure to find the elusive Northwest passage.
Telling the story from the explorers' perspective, McCoy allows
readers to see how maps of their voyages were made and why they
were so full of errors, as well as how they gradually acquired
greater accuracy, especially after the longitude problem was
solved. On the Edge tracks the dramatic voyages of John Cabot, John
Davis, Captain Cook, Henry Hudson, Martin Frobisher, John Franklin
(who nearly starved to death and become known in England as "the
man who ate his boots"), and others, concluding with Robert Peary,
Otto Sverdrup, and Vihjalmur Steffanson in the early twentieth
century. Drawing upon diaries, journals, and other primary
sources-and including a set of maps charting the progress of
exploration over time-On the Edge shows exactly how we came to know
the shape of our continent.
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