Quotes from Buddy Levy

fortune always favors the bold.

It would be better not to know how to write. Then one would not have to sign death sentences."16

Just before noon on February 28, 1882, the thin outline of a glowing orb pierced the southern skyline and hung there, like a wafer pasted in the air. Though faint, the sight was glorious: It was the first time they had seen the sun in 137 days.

Throughout his 720-page book Three Years of Arctic Service, Greely's

Orellana's achievement would later be called one of the world's greatest explorations, "something more than a journey, and more like a miraculous event.

Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition, would

In places the Amazon sprawls a remarkable fifty miles wide; it can vary in depth with floodwaters or tides by as much as fifty feet; and, near its terminus at the Atlantic, it contains an island the size of Switzerland.

Mock-turtle soup, salmon, fricasseed guillemot, spiced musk-ox tongue, crab-salad, roast beef, eider-ducks, tenderloin of musk-ox, potatoes, asparagus, green corn, green peas, cocoanut-pie, jelly-cake, plum-pudding with wine-sauce, several kinds of ice-cream, grapes, cherries, pineapples, dates, figs, nuts, candies, coffee, chocolate.

Of the nearly two hundred men who had parted ways with Francisco Orellana's group, only eighty made it back to Quito. They had traveled, mostly on foot, more than two thousand miles, and literally everything they had started the expedition with—200 horses, 2,000 to 3,000 swine, 2,000 dogs, and more than 4,000 native bearers—was gone, dead and gone, along with the 120 of their companions who had perished en route.