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The Great Expeditions: A Treatise on Ambition, Discovery, and the Uses of Failure
Paperback
Series: Scottish Science Society History Books, Book 2
Please select the version of book you would like to purchase.
ISBN13: 9798176515848
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 23 2026
Pages: 224
Weight: 1.17
Height: 0.47 Width: 8.50 Depth: 11.00
Language: English
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 23 2026
Pages: 224
Weight: 1.17
Height: 0.47 Width: 8.50 Depth: 11.00
Language: English
Every library of travel keeps two shelves, though it rarely admits to the distinction. On the one stands the literature of arrival: the flag planted, the strait named, the summit photographed, the natives suitably astonished. On the other, considerably dustier and consulted by a smaller and more discerning company, stands the literature of failure - the ships that did not return, the sources misidentified, the presidents nearly drowned in tributaries no cartographer had troubled to chart. This treatise is unrepentantly devoted to the second shelf, on the conviction, argued at length in what follows, that it is the more instructive of the two.
The reader will find here no simple chronicle. Each chapter is built as an argument rather than a recitation: a thesis about what an expedition was supposed to achieve, an antithesis drawn from what in fact occurred, and a synthesis - offered with such confidence as the evidence permits, and no more - about what the discrepancy between the two actually purchased for the species that sent the ships out in the first place. The dialectic is not an affectation. It is the only honest way to write about ambition, which is a subject that resists straight lines.
A further peculiarity should be confessed at once. This is a book about geography that insists, at intervals, on being a book about mathematics as well - for no expedition worth the name proceeded without measurement, and no measurement is worth reproducing unless the reader is shown, step by derivable step, where it came from. Nothing in these pages is permitted to fall from the sky. Every formula is built in front of the reader, brick upon brick, and dismantled again in the exercises that close each chapter, so that the curious may rebuild it unaided. The author has assumed of his reader nothing more than patience, and rather less credulity.
The illustrations, likewise, are not decoration but argument: a route is a claim, and a claim ought to be drawn. Portraits and period engravings are reproduced from public-domain holdings, each captioned and sourced; diagrams original to this treatise are rendered in the Society's own hand. Where a plate is pending final clearance for the printed edition, its place is marked and its provenance given in full, that the production record may remain as honest as the argument it accompanies.
To the reader who suspects, not unreasonably, that a book praising failure is a curious vehicle for a press that would rather like to succeed - the suspicion is noted, and cheerfully set aside. Onward, then, to the ships.
R. M. M.
Edinburgh - Porto, 2026
A further peculiarity should be confessed at once. This is a book about geography that insists, at intervals, on being a book about mathematics as well - for no expedition worth the name proceeded without measurement, and no measurement is worth reproducing unless the reader is shown, step by derivable step, where it came from. Nothing in these pages is permitted to fall from the sky. Every formula is built in front of the reader, brick upon brick, and dismantled again in the exercises that close each chapter, so that the curious may rebuild it unaided. The author has assumed of his reader nothing more than patience, and rather less credulity.
The illustrations, likewise, are not decoration but argument: a route is a claim, and a claim ought to be drawn. Portraits and period engravings are reproduced from public-domain holdings, each captioned and sourced; diagrams original to this treatise are rendered in the Society's own hand. Where a plate is pending final clearance for the printed edition, its place is marked and its provenance given in full, that the production record may remain as honest as the argument it accompanies.
To the reader who suspects, not unreasonably, that a book praising failure is a curious vehicle for a press that would rather like to succeed - the suspicion is noted, and cheerfully set aside. Onward, then, to the ships.
R. M. M.
Edinburgh - Porto, 2026
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