The sketchbook has been the one constant in explorers' kits for
centuries of adventure. Often private, they are records of immediate
experiences and discoveries, and in their pages we can see what the
explorers themselves encountered. This remarkable book showcases 70 such
sketchbooks, kept by intrepid men and women as they journeyed perilous
and unknown environments--frozen wastelands, high mountains, barren
deserts, and dense rainforests--with their senses wide open. Figures
such as Charles Darwin and Sir Edmund Hillary are joined here by
lesser-known explorers such as Adela Breton, who braved the jungles of
Mexico to make a record of Mayan monuments. Here are profiles,
expedition details, and the artwork of pioneering explorers and
mapmakers, botanists and artists, ecologists and anthropologists,
eccentrics and visionaries. Here is the art of discovery.