This is a story of magnificent failures. The men who equipped the expeditions of which I shall tell you the story died in the poorhouse. The men who took part in these voyages sacrificed their lives as cheerfully as they lighted a new pipe or opened a fresh bottle. Some of them were drowned, and some of them died of thirst. A few were frozen to death, and many were killed by the heat of the scorching sun. The bad supplies furnished by lying contractors buried many of them beneath the green cocoa- nut-trees of distant lands. Others were speared by cannibals and provided a feast for the hungry tribes of the Pacific Islands.
“The Golden Book of the Dutch Navigators”, published in 1917, became the third work by Hendrik Willem van Loon (1882 –1944), a Dutch-American historian and journalist. His numerous popular histories include The Story of Mankind (1921), The Story of the Bible (1923), Tolerance (1925), America (1927), and R. v. R. (1930), a fictional biography of Rembrandt.