"One vital piece of equipment has been a constant in explorers' kits for centuries of adventure--the sketchbook or journal. Often private, they are records of immediate experiences, insight, and discovery, and in their pages we can see what the explorers themselves encountered. Here are carefully selected excerpts from 70 such sketchbooks from explorers through history to the present, records by men and women who journeyed into frozed wastelands, high mountains, barren deserts, and dense rainforests with their senses and curiosity about the world wide open. Here is the art of discovery."--Back cover.