In the fifth round, team Five-hole selects in the hotly competitive
Explorer category,
Pytheas.
Pytheas lived in the 4th century BC and was a Greek explorer from the city of Massilias (now Marseilles). He:
- was the first explorer to circumnavigate Great Britain
- possibly observed and documented Stonehenge
- travelled far enough northward to discover the "midnight sun"
- was the first to link the tides with the moon
- discovered an island in the far north which he called "Thule", which may have been Iceland
- discovered "drift ice" -- icebergs -- and was the first to document them
- was the first to locate the north pole in the sky
This guy was the old school kind of explorer, the kind of dude who expected to fall off the edge of the Earth or discover a magical land where be there dragons. Check out this quote from "Strabo", whose account of Pytheas' travels is one of our only records:
"Pytheas also speaks of the waters around Thule and of those places where land properly speaking no longer exists, nor sea nor air, but a mixture of these things, like a "marine lung", in which it is said that earth and water and all things are in suspension as if this something was a link between all these elements, on which one can neither walk nor sail."
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