具体描述
Riding the waves and exploring the depths, popular characters Tracker John and his sidekick, D.J., take us on a special exploration of the seas. This full-color children's book helps us understand this mysterious frontier, while introducing young readers to a wide variety of God's ocean creatures. A delightful children's story with plenty of teaching information, this book will make an instant connection with kids.
A study section in the back of the book of terms, facts, and what the Bible says about the ocean includes:
• The oceans cover nearly three fourths of the earth. The water is so deep that all the land could fit inside and still be covered by 10,000 feet of water.
• A starfish can move in any direction without turning around.
• Originally, there was only one ocean.
The Cartographer’s Legacy: A Tale of Shifting Sands and Hidden Truths The year is 1888. In the bustling, smog-choked heart of London, Elias Thorne, a man whose inheritance is as precarious as the maps he painstakingly restores, receives a cryptic, leather-bound journal. It is not the usual dusty ledger of faded colonial transactions he expects from his recently deceased uncle, a renowned but disgraced Royal Geographical Society member. Instead, it pulses with the scent of brine and dried hibiscus, filled with frantic sketches of impossible coastlines and celestial alignments that defy known astronomy. Elias, a meticulous archivist with a profound mistrust of anything that cannot be cataloged and indexed, initially dismisses the journal as the ravings of a dying man obsessed with myth. However, a single, perfectly rendered watercolor tucked within its pages—a depiction of a constellation visible only from the Southern Hemisphere, yet overlaid with markers pointing precisely toward a small, obscure island chain in the North Atlantic—piques his rigorous academic curiosity. The journal hints at "The Atlas of the Unseen," a legendary compendium supposedly compiled by a secretive society of Renaissance navigators who believed the world's true geography was not fixed by continental drift, but shaped by deep, resonant magnetic currents—a concept branded heresy by the emerging scientific orthodoxy of the Victorian era. Elias’s uncle, it suggests, didn't merely study these currents; he believed he had found a way to predict their movements, potentially unlocking routes to lands thought lost since the Age of Exploration. Driven by a need to clear his uncle’s tarnished name—and perhaps to prove the superiority of true historical inquiry over dry, established science—Elias secures passage aboard The Sea Serpent, a repurposed whaler captained by the pragmatic and deeply superstitious Captain Morwenna Rhys. Rhys, a woman hardened by two decades battling the unpredictable nature of the North Atlantic, agrees to transport Elias to the coordinates provided in the journal, less for the promise of discovery and more for the substantial upfront fee Elias manages to secure from a shadowy consortium interested in new shipping lanes. Their journey is immediately fraught. The usual reliable compasses begin to spin wildly as they approach the designated area, the iron deposits in the ship's hull protesting with strange groans. The crew, a collection of hardened sailors from various corners of the British Empire, quickly falls into unease. The weather itself seems unnatural—fog banks that resist the sun's penetration, waves that crash in rhythmic patterns resembling forgotten drumbeats, and sudden, eerie silences where the normal symphony of the ocean vanishes entirely. Elias finds himself increasingly reliant on the few remaining members of the crew who possess an intuitive understanding of the sea: first mate Kael, a silent Finn who claims to "read the water’s memory," and the ship’s cook, an elderly Malay man named Jamil, who mutters incantations over the galley stove to ward off "the hungry deep." As they navigate the increasingly bizarre coordinates, the journal reveals its true danger. It is not just a map; it is a key. Certain entries must be read aloud at specific times during the lunar cycle, causing temporary, localized distortions in reality. One such reading, performed during a violent squall, causes the silhouette of a massive, perfectly geometric structure—far too vast to be natural—to briefly breach the horizon before submerging again. The consortium funding the trip, represented by the unnervingly polished Mr. Alistair Finch, who booked passage under the guise of a marine biologist, reveals his true intentions. Finch seeks the Atlas not for academic curiosity, but for military application—to weaponize the magnetic anomalies and secure global naval dominance for an unnamed industrial power. He believes the Atlas contains schematics for harnessing geothermal energy locked within the planet’s mantle, energy that could power cities or shatter coastlines. The climax of the journey takes Elias and the loyal remnants of the crew to a vast, shallow sea choked with bioluminescent algae, the air thick with the smell of ozone. Here, they find not a tropical island, but the remnants of a colossal, submerged complex—the source of the magnetic distortions. The architecture is unlike anything known to human history, suggesting a pre-human civilization that manipulated the very forces of the Earth. Elias must race against Finch, whose mercenaries attempt to seize the journal and any artifacts they find. The struggle becomes a desperate battle not just for survival, but for the preservation of knowledge. Elias realizes that revealing the Atlas to the avarice of the Victorian world would be catastrophic. The true legacy of his uncle wasn't the discovery of new land, but the guardianship of a dangerous truth: that the world is far older, stranger, and more mutable than anyone in the gaslit drawing rooms of London dares to believe. The resolution sees Elias making a profound choice: to destroy the evidence, sacrificing his reputation and perhaps his own future security, rather than handing power over to those who would exploit the planet's deepest secrets. He ensures that the Atlas, now understood not as a set of directions, but as a warning, sinks back into the currents from which it arose, leaving only the shifting sands and the unanswered, profound questions about the deep history of the Earth. Elias Thorne returns to London a ruined man in the eyes of society, but with the quiet, heavy knowledge of a world far larger than its maps allow.
