The European Discovery of America; Vol 1: The Northern Voyages A.D. 500-1600 (The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages )
"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