William Henry Ashley Quotes

I would stare at maps of Delaware for hours.

My first occupation was to map the country.

Some persons were to be sent in search of the river Missouri in order to discover whether it had any communication with the Pacific Ocean …

There's just something hypnotic about maps.

Japanese maps tend to come in two varieties: small, schematic, and bewildering; and large, fantastically detailed, and bewildering.

For some reason the most devoted mapheads seem to be kids.

After the departure of the land parties, I embarked with six men on thursday, the 21st april, on board my newly made boat and began the descent of the river.

Mapping, both literal and metaphorical, has always been about our quest for knowing.

We were just looking at maps.

They were maps that lived, maps that one could study, frown over, and add to; maps, in short, that really meant something.

I [had] added another small piece to the pages of the atlas that were real to me.

There must be something innate about maps, about this one specific way of picturing our world and our relation to it, that charms us, calls to us, won’t let us look anywhere else in the room if there’s a map on the wall.

The expedition of Messrs. Lewis & Clarke for exploring the river Missouri, & the best communication from that to the Pacific ocean, has had all the success which could have been expected.

Even before you understand them, your brain is drawn to maps.

A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.

I like geography. I like to know where places are.

They have a book of locations, and we would do a story about the Sahara Desert for instance, and in the California book you would find a comparable location, to match that location in California.

I am not solicitous to examine particularly everything here, which indeed could not be done in fifty years, because my desire is to make all possible discoveries, and return to your Highnesses, if it please our Lord, in April.

What drives me is exploration with a purpose, more the classic Royal Geographical Society genre.

Cartography and geographic thinking are cool.

I've always been fascinated and stared at maps for hours as a kid. I've especially been most intrigued by the uninhabited or lonelier places on the planet. Like Greenland, for instance, or just recently flying over Alaska and a chain of icy, mountainous islands, uninhabited.

There was a time when a man was so convinced that the world was round that he was determined to prove it.

I would read the atlas for pleasure. I knew it was weird. It was weird.

History is not intelligible without geography.

I've always been interested in exploration and the history of exploring the world, but it seems like we've found everything now.