Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919). Through the Brazilian Wilderness. 1914.
Page 357
| He visited places which had been settled and inhabited for centuries and traversed places which had been travelled by civilized men for years before he followed in their footsteps. But these places were in Spanish colonies, and access to them had been forbidden by the mischievous and intolerant tyranny—ecclesiastical, political, and economic—which then rendered Spain the most backward of European nations; and Humboldt was the first scientific man of intellectual independence who had permission to visit them. To this day many of his scientific observations are of real value. Bates came to the Amazon just before the era of Amazonian steamboats. He never went off the native routes of ordinary travel. But he was a devoted and able naturalist. He lived an exceedingly isolated, primitive, and laborious life for eleven years. Now, half a century after it was written, his “Naturalist on the Amazon” is as interesting and valuable as it ever was, and no book since written has in any way supplanted it. |
| Travel of the third category includes the work of the true wilderness explorers who add to our sum of geographical knowledge and of the scientific men who, following their several bents, also work in the untrodden wilds. Colonel Rondon and his associates have done much in the geographical exploration of unknown country, and Cherrie and Miller have penetrated and lived for months and years in the wastes, on their own resources, as incidents to their mammalogical and ornithological work. Professor Farrabee, the anthropologist, is a capital example of the man who does this hard and valuable type of work. |