Book Thoughts: Off the Edge of the Map

Off the Edge of the Map: Marco Polo, Captain Cook, and 9 Other Travelers and Explorers That Pushed the Boundaries of the Known World by Michael Rank

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book provides short biographies and stories related to eleven explorers, from a Chinese Monk named Rabbam Bar Sauma to Neil Armstrong and the landing on the moon. In between, Rank gives us profiles of some of the famous names in history (at least in Western Civ) from Marco Polo and Magellen, to lesser known names (again, at least in my education in Western Civ) Zheng He (a Chinese Admiral) and Bar Sauma. The book, though sometimes a little disjointed, is not a difficult read, and will appeal to someone just interested in the surface about these explorers.

Part of Rank's "thesis", so to speak in writing this, I think, is to show the courage of the explorers. In his introduction and occasionally throughout, he points out that sometimes our perception of certain individuals (such as the conquistador Cortes or English Captain Cook), have been shaped, and perhaps even warped by our modern sensibilities, so to speak. There is no denying that sometimes, what many of these explorers did, particularly ones during the famed "age of exploration," was atrocious. But what there is also no denying is that these explorers showed amazing courage in the face of certain obstacles. Magellan sailed around the world; Cook traversed around the Pacific so many times its daunting just to realize how many miles he sailed.

The most interesting part of the book for me was reading about the explorers I had never heard of, or have forgotten hearing about. Particularly the Chinese Admiral Zheng He and Ibn Battuta, a North African scholar. Battuta, traveling right after Marco Polo's death, essentially, traveled three times as many miles as Polo, almost exclusively over land. In the middle of the 14th Century. It is astonishing. Zheng He even more so. He commanded ships in the 15th Century that were larger than football fields; so large that each ship (and he was in charge of over 60 in his fleet) that the combined fleets of Columbus and da Gama would have fit on a single deck of one of Zheng He's vessels. He took this fleet, which also included over a hundred small boats, all throughout the Indiana Ocean and even to parts of Africa on some voyages.

Everything considered, while the book isn't earth shattering or provides any great detail, it does a good job of presenting cursory information about these explorers in a readable fashion, and does get across the author's points that, regardless of the other events in these explorer's lives, their acts of exploration should be considered acts of courage.



View all my reviews