Explorers Hand In Hand

GREAT ADVENTURES AND EXPLORATIONS (788 pp.)--edited by Vilhjalmur Stefansson, maps designed by Richard Edes Harrison--Dial ($5).

Fireside globe-trotters are likely to find boundless pleasure in this collection which Editor-Explorer Stefansson calls "an outline history of the world, told by its chief discoverers from Pytheas (Greek discoverer of Iceland and ancient Britain) to Peary (who discovered the North Pole)."

Readers who fear a mere hashing-over of the better-known voyages will be pleasantly surprised; for in addition to giving these masterpieces their proud place ("the supreme discovery," says Stefansson, ". . . is the finding of a continent"), Stefansson has included such little-known explorations as those of the Chinese on the fringes of North America in the 5th Century A.D. and the roamings of Polynesian boatmen.

"In a sense," says Stefansson, "the very greatest stories of geographic discovery were never written. . . . The great tales which we are able to present are those of re-discovery." The Greeks who "discovered" Britain (about the 4th Century B.C.) found it already inhabited, and there were Indians to receive the first explorers on the American continent. Antarctica alone, says Stefansson, is "the one continent whose true human discoverers are known"--and at a period of civilization when such men as Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen could be aware of, and set down, the most vital details of their discoveries.

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