Ulysse invente l’exploration gratuite dont les Européens auront le monopole. Plus tard, l’esprit d’aventure sera porté dans les confins par Vasco de Gama, Livingstone, Lévi-Strauss, Jean Rouch, Cousteau, Hermann Buhl, Charcot et Magellan. Inspiré par Ulysse, l’homme européen a fouillé le monde. Mieux ! C’est lui qui a manifesté un intérêt pour ce q

The world’s newly discovered lands were thus to be divided between two Catholic nations, Portugal and Spain. Yet other newcomers had quite different ideas. From the early sixteenth century onward, two other rising Atlantic powers, Britain and Holland, both part of the Reformation that rejected papal authority, aggressively contested the papal treat

But the journals and the collections were only part of what had been accomplished, only a beginning. Humboldt would spend the next thirty-odd years and virtually all his personal fortune publishing thirty monumental volumes under the general title Voyages aux Régions Equinoctiales du Nouveau Continent,