Books and Exploration

I'm finishing The Tipping Point right now, and then I'm moving on to Humboldt's Cosmos, by Gerard Helferich, which I'm quite excited to read. I stumbled upon Humboldt while doing research on William Dampier, in the spring of last year. He is an explorer who, by all impressions, is one of the more important and influential ever, but does not get nearly the creedence he deserves. My theory is because he didn't sail anywhere.

In primary school, or at least my experience with it, was that exploration was a small portion of history - ie, get past it to move on to the more important stuff. The explorers we learned about (other than Lewis and Clark) were Columbus, Cook, Hudson, de Champlain - guys who found out the limits of the new continent and sailed. Humboldt and Dampier, whose most valuable contributions to exploration were based on their voyages on land, get overlooked.