Man Proposes, God Disposes by Edwin Henry Landseer, 1864

more: Franklin’s Lost Expedition

Polar Ephemera
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was a polar frenzy.
Many advertisers used polar explorations to promote products.

- Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie -

blog: Minute Stories of Famous Explorers

scans from a vintage children’s book

Contour map of Madeira, showing Funchal

-Owen Stanley - Voyage of HMS Rattlesnake : Vol. I (Album)

HMS Rattlesnake was an Atholl-class 28-gun sixth-rate corvette of the Royal Navy launched in 1822. She made a historic voyage of discovery to the Cape York and Torres Strait areas of northern Australia.

Captain on the voyage to northern Australia and New Guinea was Owen Stanley. Also aboard were John Thomson as Surgeon, Thomas Henry Huxley as Assistant Surgeon (“surgeon’s mate”, but in practice marine naturalist), John MacGillivray as botanist and Oswald Brierly as artist.

• Narrative of the Voyage of HMS Rattlesnake, Volume 1 at Project Gutenberg
• Narrative of the Voyage of HMS Rattlesnake, Volume 2 at Project Gutenberg
• HMS Rattlesnake (1822) on wikipedia

fuckyeahmaps:

Pierre Desceliers, World Portolan, 1550

By emphasizing the strangeness of other parts of the globe, early maps helped reinforce the xenophobia of the day. People in our part of the world are normal, they say, but those elsewhere scarcely seem human. On this portolan, or navigational chart, drawn especially for King Henry II of France, the denizens of Africa get stranger and stranger the farther away they are from the coast.

At the heart of the unexplored continent we see two monstrous humanoids, one with no head, the other with six arms. The two figures seated to the left are drawn more realistically, but with the exaggerated red lips of racial caricature. The man with the club is happily trading a gold nugget for a worthless flower, demonstrating the beginnings of the European belief that Africans were naive, childlike people with no ability to manage their own affairs.

(via fuckyeahcartography)

Terra Australis Incognita

“Descriptio terræ subaustralis.” Copperplate map, with added color, 9 × 13 cm. From Petrus Bertius’s P. Bertii tabularum geographicarum contractarum (Amsterdam, 1616).

- Terra Australis -

takingtigermountain:

Robert Edwin Peary in a fur parka, aboard the Roosevelt, 1907

Peary’s steamer Roosevelt

(via heracliteanfire)

bigmapblog:

Map: Maps of Shackleton’s 1907-1909 Antarctic Expedition originally posted to the BIG Map Blog.

(via bigmapblog-blog)

bigmapblog:

Map: Map of English Dominions in North America (1759) originally posted to the BIG Map Blog.

(via bigmapblog-blog)

Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen; (16 July 1872 – c. 18 June 1928) was a Norwegian explorer of polar regions. He led the first Antarctic expedition to reach the South Pole between 1910 and 1912 and he was the first person to (undisputedly) reach both the North and South Poles.

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melancholiceuphoria:

Roald Amundsen. 

(via coldisthesea)

coldisthesea:

“Amundsen on board Fram in 1910 as the vessel makes her journey through the tropics, heading south to the Antarctic.”

(via coldisthesea)

oneblackline:

Peter de Krom, Untitled (Exploring the ‘Atlantikwall’ bunkers), 2011

(via oneblackline-deactivated2012021)

HMS Blossom (1806) was an 18-gun Cormorant-class sloop-of-war. She was built in 1806 and is best known for the 1825–1828 expedition under Captain Beechey to the Pacific Ocean. She explored as far north as Point Barrow, Alaska, the furthest point into the Arctic any non-Inuit had been at the time. She was finally broken up in 1848.

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moewie:

HMS Blossom off the Sandwich Islands, 1806

(via moewie)

msbehavoyeur:

The Apes ~ Memorable missions of the East India Company ~ Arnoldus Montanus, 1669  via