Nine Against the Unknown is the story of nine great explorers. We are told of Leif Ericsson and his coming to America four hundred and eighty years before Columbus; of Marco Polo’s great land journeys to Cathay and beyond; of Columbus, led by a dozen rumours, sailing across the Atlantic; of Cabeza de Vaca, that enigmatic Spaniard who searched North America for the Golden City of Ciboa; of Magellan, the first to reach the East Indies from the west; of Vitus Bering, the discoverer of Bering Strait, and his search for Gama Land in the North Pacific; of Mungo Park’s tramp through jungle Africa in his quest for the Niger and Timbuctoo; of Richard Burton’s innumerable quests in three continents for the golden unknown land; and of Nansen’s great drift in the Fram towards the last refuge of the Fortunate Land, the North Pole.
Passionately written, the nine biographies are fascinating and revealing; the journeys dramatic and breathtaking. This is a record of geographical exploration from a time when many believed that the future of humankind lay in the recovery of freedom – of spirit, of belief, of society.
Lewis Grassic Gibbon (James Leslie Mitchell) was one of the finest writers of the twentieth century. Born in Aberdeenshire in 1901, he died at the age of thirty-four. He was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, essays and science fiction, and his writing reflected his wide interest in religion, archaeology, history, politics and science. The Mearns trilogy, A Scots Quair, is his most renowned work, and has become a landmark in Scottish literature. His novel Sunset Song, one of the Scot’s Quair trilogy, was voted number one in the List/Orange Best Scottish Books of All Time.
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