Sat, Sep 6, 2003
Francisco de Orellana was representing Gonzalo Pizarro, the youngest Pizarro brother when in 1541 he led the Spanish expedition army from its outpost in Guio over the Andes in a mission into the unknown, into terra incognita. The objective of the expedition was to discover the "Eldorado", the land full of gold as the Incas said, and the "Cinammon land" full of spices: somewhere on the other side of the Andes.
Sat, Sep 13, 2003
Mission Southland: How Bougainville Found Out About The Globe When in 1766 Louis-Antoine de Bougainville left Nantes in France on the expedition vessel "La Boudeuse", the mathematician and diplomat intended to be one of the first man to circumnavigate the earth. The fact that the earth was a sphere was not accepted everywhere yet. When Bougainville discovered Tahiti on the 5th of April 1768, he escaped death. And this changed his thinking radically.
Sat, Sep 20, 2003
Among Cannibals: How Wallace Was Darwin's Brain. When Alfred Russel Wallace set foot on a ship in 1854 to explore Papua New Guinea, he could not imagine that would spend 8 years abroad. He collected 125,000 animals exhibits and survived by selling butterfly collections and stuffed orangutans to European museums. Wallace had not the support of a university or had generous research budgets, that could finance the adventurous expedition of the self-made scientist.