The late Samuel Eliot Morison, twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, was the author of numerous books including The Oxford History of the American People, The Growth of the American Republic, and Admiral of the Ocean, a biography of Columbus.
"Now [Morison] has united the latest findings of modern
scholarship, American and European, to his own zestful explorations
by land, sea and air, to produce a comprehensive and, for our day
and age, definitive account of the process by which Europe
substituted fact for fable and knowledge for ignorance about the
New World across the Western Ocean....[A] unique combination of
scholarship and fieldwork....Into these volumes is distilled a
lifetime of
experience--of sailing, of learning and of the sadly neglected art
of historical narration. They are a joy and a treasure
house."--Economist
"The first comprehensive effort, in nearly a century, to bring the
whole subject under a 20th-centry camera....Morison has been able
to bring his reader something none of his predecessors has....This
reviewer recalls no other recent historical narrative where there
is a more helpful blending of illustration and text."--Christian
Science Monitor
"Irresistibly entertaining."--Newsweek
"In this mellow book Morison blends pungent insight as a historian
and extraordinary knowledge as a navigator, familiarity with the
ancient sagas and graphic understanding of the dangers which the
mariners encountered. He threads his way through the myths and
national rivalries with a strong hand and salty wit....His
scholarship is never forbidding, for throughout the narrative he is
speaking as a twentieth-century admiral of the ocean sea, urbane,
good
humored, experienced, and acute in his reading of human nature. The
notes are spicy and persuasive, the maps and illustrations
profuse."--The Atlantic
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