Page:Twenty years before the mast - Charles Erskine, 1896.djvu/11

vi have caused their names to be inscribed on the scroll of the world’s immortals. My heart thrilled at the name of Columbus, whose heroic soul was made to feel the  meanness of kings, and whose dauntless courage called  into creation a New World which shall yet outrival in  glory the greatness of the Old. Of almost equal interest to my boyish imagination were the Cabots; Ponce  de Leon, the romantic wanderer after the fountain  of perpetual youth; and De Soto, the proud cavalier  who discovered the mighty Mississippi, only to find a  grave beneath its waters. Men, all these, who were courageous and enterprising, and whose adventures, sometimes tragic, sometimes romantic, have contributed largely to the annals of discovery.

Passing onward through the centuries of maritime adventures, I feel yet, as in the days of my youth, a  mighty magic in the names of Drake, Frobisher, and  the ill-fated Sir Walter Raleigh. My imagination takes me over the southern seas with Tasman, Cook, and  Magellan, over the burning sands of Africa with Mongo  Park, Livingstone, and the dauntless Stanley. I visit the ice-bound regions of the Arctic and Antarctic with  Perry, Franklin, Ross, Wilkes, and D’Urville, with  Hudson, Ringold, De Haven, with Knox, Kane, and  De Long; and I drop a tear to the memory of those  intrepid men who, in the realms of the pitiless ice-king,  became martyrs to their zeal for geographical discovery.

In the world’s early days the command of God to man was, to subdue the earth, to conquer it, and to civilize and fit it for the habitation of the human race.