Hampton Sides: Exploring the world, finding ourselves

—This is a guest post by Hampton Sides, the author of, among other works, “Blood and Thunder,” “In the Kingdom of Ice” and, most recently, “The Wide Wide Sea.” It’s also the concluding piece of the March-April issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, which is devoted to voyages of exploration. A few months ago, while traveling in Portugal, I paid a visit to one of the most extraordinary shrines ever built to celebrate the enterprise of exploration. Lisbon’s Monument of the Discoveries, inaugurated in 1960, is a formidable structure of cement and rose-tinted stone that takes the shape of a mighty ship’s prow looming over the Tagus River estuary. Along the sides of this figurative vessel, historical luminaries from Portugal’s golden age of exploration — including Vasco da Gama, Prince Henry the Navigator, Bartolomeu Dias and Ferdinand Magellan — struggle heroically toward the sky, as though exploration were a divine activity, synonymous with grandeur itself. The monument recalls a time when tiny Portugal ruled the seas, when its sleek carracks and caravels were launched from wharves on the Tagus to probe the farthest reaches of the planet, and when Lisbon boasted the world’s preeminent shipbuilders, mapmakers and inventors of…

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