MetaFilter posts tagged with exploration and travel

One Way Ticket

william_boot — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 11:22:52 -0800

In the next few weeks, NASA will present President Obama with options for the near-term future of human spaceflight. A manned flight to Mars is one possibility. But if we do send astronauts to Mars, do we really need to bring them home again?

How to be a 19th-early 20th century British explorer

stbalbach — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 05:51:27 -0800

Hints to Travellers served as the Royal Geographical Societies unofficial bible, used by late 19th and early 20th century British explorers such as Shackleton, Scott, Richard Burton, Col. Perry Fawcett and other legends who carried it into the field as a practical state of the art manual of gentlemanly exploration. Indiana Jones no doubt has his own copy too. Don't leave home without it! Hints to Travellers, co-authored by Francis Galton, was for the serious explorer. A more general audience might have owned Art of Travel, also by Galton. Sir Francis Galton was a "half-cousin of Charles Darwin, an English Victorian polymath, anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician."

Views from the 18th and Early 19th Centuries

nickyskye — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 12:16:24 -0800

Some really beautiful, unusual visuals and reading: The Art of the Pochoir Book. The University of Cincinatti Rare Book archive has some cool stuff, like Leviathan: Watercolors of Whales from William Jardine’s The Naturalist’s Library l 4 pages of a newspaper called The Colored Citizen from November 7th 1863 (awesome to read knowing Obama is elected) l Travel and Exploration in the 18th and Early 19th Centuries: A View of the World through the Art of the Explorers. More Pochoir (hand-colored) prints. And more from the NYPL. And more from LiveAuctioneers. About Pochoirs.

"It began for me with my first kuruma-ride out of the European quarter..."

languagehat — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 06:46:31 -0800

Explorion is a goldmine of travel accounts, from Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation and Bartram's Travels Through North &South Carolina, Georgia, East &West Florida,the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws to the Journals of Lewis and Clark and Washinton Irving's Astoria; Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains and Dickens's Pictures from Italy and Lafcadio Hearn's Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan (from which I took the post title) to... well, find your own favorites. There's an astonishing amount of stuff there. "Of course you will act according to your own plans, and do what you think best—but FIND LIVINGSTONE!"

Long Riders Guild

signal — Tue, 03 Dec 2002 13:53:27 -0800

The Long Riders' Guild is an association of equestrian explorers who have ridden more than 1,000 continuous miles on a single equestrian journey.