Before cameras, if you wanted to bring back what you saw, you drew it. Lewis-Jones and Herbert — he’s a polar guide and historian, she’s the daughter of the explorer Wally Herbert — pulled together seventy sketchbooks kept in the field over four centuries. Darwin. Scott, still sledging his rock samples while dying. Hillary. Thor Heyerdahl. And better, the ones nobody talks about: Adela Breton, who went into the jungles of Mexico and recorded Maya monuments nobody else bothered with; Alexandrine Tinne, who died trying to cross the Sahara; Olivia Tonge, who decided at fifty to go paint India and wasn’t asking permission. Alan Bean’s paintings of picking up rocks on the moon are in there too. Each gets a short life, a quote, and pages of the real thing. Robert Macfarlane wrote the foreword and admits it showed him how little he knew.