Books: Herodotus to Byrd

A HISTORY OF EXPLORATION—Sir Percy Sykes—Macmillan ($7). Who first went exploring purely in search of knowledge is unknown. Merchant-explorers more than three millennia before Christ were the Sumerians, whose high civilization glimmered before history’s dawn. Exploration was a by-product of trade and conquest for the Assyrians, the Minoans of Crete, the Phoenicians, the Greeks. Anaximander of Miletus (Sixth Century B. C.) drew up the earliest known map of the world, which he regarded as a cross-section of a great cylinder hanging from the heavens. A generation later Hecataeus wrote Periodos, the first known book of geography. Exploration as a science seems to have been set on foot in the Fifth Century by Herodotus, “Father of History,” who left copious travel memoirs and gave the Atlantic Ocean its name.

From those misty beginnings down to Admiral Byrd’s first Antarctic junket (“A splendidly equipped expedition”) the long tale of man’s investigation of his terres trial abode is unfolded in the 338 pages of A History of Exploration, by Brigadier General Sir Percy Molesworth Sykes, him self a distinguished traveler-soldier. The story lingers admiringly with such illustrious voyageurs as Leif the Viking, Marco Polo, Diaz and Vasco da Gama, Columbus and Magellan, Livingstone and Stanley. Doughty and Lawrence, Peary, Scott and Shackleton, but does not neglect a multitude of colorful, less familiar figures. There is Hsuan-tsang, the studious, well born Buddhist monk who, fortified by a dream, passed beyond the Great Wall in 629 A. D., set out across the grim Gobi, finding his way by the bones and droppings of camels. Troubled by mirages, once nearly dying of thirst when he dropped his waterskin, Hsuan made himself so popular everywhere he went that he had to go on a hunger strike before one Central Asian king would let him depart. An entire chapter is devoted to Ibn Battuta, sprig of a Tangerian family of judges who in the 14th Century visited every Moslem colony in the world. The sedately written narrative is spiced with many a quaint excerpt from the original chronicles, maps and reproductions of old engravings, tid bits of curious information. Sir Percy manifests the complacent chauvinism of the typical hardy, wayfaring Briton, speaks of “British thoroughness,”situations “saved by British coolness,” believes the British owe their love of adventure to Viking blood from the Normans. Thus although he gives the Dutchman Willem Janszoon credit for discovering Australia in 1605, he spends more time with James Cook who sailed intrepidly jp the east coast of the continent and won it for England. Yet he admires great explorers of any nationality, particularly Alexander the Great and Marco Polo. He las crossed the same fearful stretch of Persian desert where Marco found the water “so bitter that no one could possibly drink it; a single drop of it will purge a man violently.”

The Author. Percy Molesworth Sykes was bom 67 years ago, played racquets and ran a fast mile at Rugby and Sandhurst. He was gazetted in the 16th Lancers, was almost constantly in Persia and Baluchistan for 26 years after 1893 but went to the South African War, was wounded and decorated. He explored parts of central Persia, surveyed it for a telegraph line, established three consulates, was the first European to climb Tartan and Bazman volcanoes. When German agents and Turks were stirring up the country during the War, he took command of 3,000 untrained natives, handily restored order. Other books: A History of Persia, Through Deserts and Oases of Central Asia.