19th-century Explorer Quotes

To be aroused in the dark by five feet of cold, green snake gliding over one's face is unpleasant.

David Livingstone

The Eskimo, Ootah, had his own explanation. Said he: "The devil is asleep or having trouble with his wife, or we should never have come back so easily."

Particular care should be taken that every promise made to them [the Navajo and Mescalero Apache] should be observed to the letter. In this way I am confident that in a few years they would equal if not excel our peaceful and industrious Pueblos, and be a source of wealth to the Territory, instead of being as heretofore its dread and impoverishers.

Gradually, very gradually, we saw the great mountain sides and glaciers and aretes, now one fragment and now another through the floating rifts, until far higher in the sky than imagination had dared to suggest the white summit of Everest appeared.

If we strike a line to the N.W. from Sydney to Wellington Valley, we shall find that little change takes place in the geological features of the country.

At the end only two things really matter to a man, regardless of who he is; and they are the affection and understanding of his family. Anything and everything else he creates are insubstantial; they are ships given over to the mercy of the winds and tides of prejudice. but the family is an everlasting anchorage, a quiet harbor where a man's ships can be left to swing to the moorings of pride and loyalty.

Richard E. Byrd

Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard

I fear we have shot our bolt - but we have been to Pole and done the longest journey on record.

Robert Falcon Scott

No person who has not spent a period of his life in those 'stark and sullen solitudes that sentinel the Pole' will understand fully what trees and flowers, sun-flecked turf and running streams mean to the soul of a man

Ernest Shackleton