Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 6, 2025
An ordinary appetite for the marvelous could swallow stories of chimeras dire, and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders; but nothing short of the profligate capacity of a Columbus could digest such a proposition as that the earth was round and could be circumnavigated.
She had accomplished the greatest achievement in the history of the human race. She had circumnavigated the earth. The San Vittoria, sailing westward, had come back to her starting-point. Henceforth the theological doctrine of the flatness of the earth was irretrievably overthrown.
We followed the coast-line of our island a long while, keeping a sufficiently wide berth for fear of the shoals. When we had half circumnavigated it there lay ahead of us the island for which we were making. It lay a good way off, and, as the day was very fine and still, it seemed nearer to us than it proved to be.
The Phoenicians are said to have circumnavigated Africa as early as the seventh century before Christ. In the middle of the fifteenth century of the present era the Portuguese explored much of the coastline, and in 1497 Vasco da Gama doubled the Cape of Good Hope. But no modern explorations of the interior are known to have been made until the latter part of the eighteenth century.
Mayall went forward and circumnavigated the little lake in pursuit of the young panthers. Not finding their hiding place, he sat down on a log for a few moments to view that beautiful sheet of water, reflecting on its bosom the surrounding forest. Eolus was slumbering. Not a breath of air played over its surface, but lay like the mirror bright and fair.
It has been circumnavigated by the ships of every European nation, its slave-trade has divided its profits and its pollutions among the chief nations of the eastern and western worlds; and yet, to this hour, there are regions of Africa, probably amounting to half its bulk, and possessing kingdoms of the size of France and Spain, of which Europe has no more heard than of the kingdoms of the planet Jupiter.
"This," says Houghton, "was a great assistance to him, and the next year he began the building of those splendid ships which enabled him to engage so actively in the Chinese and West India trades." From this time on his profits were colossal. His ships circumnavigated the world many times and each voyage brought him a fortune.
But the crest of the westward moving tide has now circumnavigated the globe, and the Far West meets the Far East on the Pacific Ocean. Here and there are comparatively small, neglected tracts of land still to be developed, but there are no longer great new empires, as in former days.
A ship of a hundred tons burden, built up like a tower, both at stem and stern, and presenting in its broad bulbous prow, its width of beam in proportion to its length, its depression amidships, and in other sins against symmetry, as much opposition to progress over the waves as could well be imagined, was the vehicle in which those indomitable Dutchmen circumnavigated the globe and confronted the arctic terrors of either pole.
The Spaniards, indeed, as well as the Dutch, seem to have circumnavigated all the islands in New Guinea, as almost every place that is distinguished in the chart has a name in both languages.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking