Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
many native peoples toward distant and centralized authority. They re-
mained inhabitants of a land, but were never allowed to become citizens
of a country.
Many of the crewmen had been given the choice between a pardon in the
guise of the voyage or death. The odds were not good either way. The width
of the Pacifi c Ocean was underestimated by 80 percent, and provisions
were stocked accordingly. Magellan left Spain to fi nd a passage through the
southern tip of South America to the Spice Islands. Of the 250 men who
departed on 20 September 1519, only 18 returned on 8 September 1522.
Logs and diaries reveal there was often little interest and less time to
contemplate nature, but even so some sights were impressive. During his
third voyage in 1498, Christopher Columbus recorded in the ship's log the
otherworldly beauty of the Orinoco:
I am convinced that it is the spot of the earthly paradise [Eden] whither no
man can go but by God's permission. . . . I think also that the water I have de-
scribed may proceed from it . . . for I have never either read or heard of fresh
water coming in so large a quantity . . . and if the water of which I speak
does not proceed from the earthly paradise, it still seems to be a still greater
wonder, for I do not believe that there is any river in the world so large or so
deep. (Quoted in Boorstin 1983, 242; see also Cohen 1992)
With further exploration, and the passage of time, the magnifi cence of
what had been discovered became more deeply appreciated—a sense of its
marvels beautifully captured in the closing paragraphs of Fitzgerald's
The
Great Gatsby
: “[F]or a transitory enchanted moment man must have held
his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic
contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last
time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
NORTH AMERICA (NORTH OF MEXICO)
The Arctic Region
The early nomadic hunters entered a landscape already familiar from their
wanderings in northern Asia (fi g. 2.2). Southward from Beringia, land was
exposed through and around the margins of the Laurentian-Cordilleran ice
sheet over a mile in height. The unglaciated lowland was mostly a fl at, tree-
less terrane of gravel and bogland, frozen into permafrost, with a few iso-
