FANTASTIC VOYAGES
By Candice Millard
December 3, 2006
New York Times

Original Link

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A GLOBAL HISTORY OF EXPLORATION
By Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Illustrated. 428 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $27.95

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In the early 1770s, about the time Captain James Cook was crossing the Pacific Ocean, discovering New Caledonia and charting Easter Island, one of the leading figures of the Enlightenment inaugurated a passionate attack on exploration. Denouncing Cook and all his kind as "nomadic savages" who search the world for "islands to ravage, people to despoil, subjugate and massacre," Denis Diderot, the editor of the "Encyclopédie," argued that explorers were driven not by humankind's nobler instincts but by some of its basest: "tyranny, crime, ambition, misery, curiosity."

Exploration has since taken on a more benign, if not always beneficial, cast. But in a historical sense Diderot was right. As their feats are detailed in "Pathfinders," Felipe Fernández-Armesto's sweeping history of exploration, it becomes increasingly clear that most explorers have been motivated by nothing more lofty than lust -- for land, wealth, power and that most irresistible of prizes, fame. In the words of Captain Cook, the "pleasure of being first." Although explorers may have been largely driven by self-interest, however, their journeys have had staggeringly far-reaching implications. "Explorers were vectors," Fernández-Armesto writes. "They carried culture with them."

Few scholars are as qualified as Fernández-Armesto to write a history of exploration. A professor of history at Tufts University, the editor of "The Times Atlas of World Exploration" and the author of an array of books on enormous subjects -- from "Civilizations" to "Millennium" to "Truth: A History" -- he has the breadth of knowledge and depth of understanding necessary to do justice to so formidable a topic. The result is a brilliant and readable book. "Pathfinders" is an illuminating and, at times, stirring examination of the divergence and convergence of cultures, a rich study of humankind's restless spirit. As intimate as Alexander the Great's deathbed wish and as vast as human migration, this book explains who we are as much as what we have done.

Fernández-Armesto reaches back to the origins of our species, but his story begins in earnest with the peopling of the world through migration and discovery. As successful as humans have been in exploring and exploiting our planet, it is easy to forget that, physically, we are among its least impressive inhabitants. "We are slow, weak, blunt in tooth and short in claw, with fastidious digestive systems," Fernández-Armesto writes. "We are a disadvantaged species -- the cripples of nature." Among our few physical attributes were endurance and dexterity. We could chase prey for long periods without tiring, and we could throw well enough to fight off other predators. These skills served us well in the savanna, but, of course, we did not stay in the savanna. We moved on to other environments -- to forests and mountains, deserts and swamps -- that were less accommodating but held more promise. "It was not a shortage of resources in their old homes that made them move," Fernández-Armesto explains, "but an abundance of new resources elsewhere induced and seduced them."

By 12,000 years ago, humans had spread out over most of the habitable world, but many more millenniums would pass before we had any understanding of what that world looked like as a whole. The oldest surviving attempt at a world map was painted on a cave wall in India between roughly 7,000 and 8,000 years ago. For thousands of years to come, cartographers would labor to piece together an accurate picture of the world, but with insurmountable gaps in their knowledge, they were forced to resort to what Fernández-Armesto calls "strenuous speculation." Even well into the 17th century, maps were so unreliable that explorers preferred simple directions.

The mapmakers themselves, however, could hardly be blamed. Dependent on the fabulous tales of explorers, cartographers had little hope of distinguishing fact from fiction. The ocean was a "cauldron of the imagination," as Fernández-Armesto puts it. "Cloud banks, bird flight, the appearance of the sea and the presence of floating objects" he writes, "can all generate 'discoveries' of nonexistent islands." For several decades, determined explorers sought the mythical land of Terra Australis and the elusive and essentially unnavigable Northwest Passage. In the 17th century, colonists in Virginia were convinced that only a narrow finger of land lay between them and "the happy shores of the Pacific."

The lack of information did not deter new generations of explorers from plunging farther and farther into the unknown. With no navigational tools, sailors had to feel their way across the churning seas -- steering by the wind against their cheeks or the swell under the outrigger -- and many were obliged to start out against the wind if they were to have any hope of returning home. On land, explorers faced rugged mountains, polar wastelands and seemingly endless deserts. Travelers through the Gobi followed trails marked by dung and littered with rotting camel corpses. In Mali, explorers were reduced to sucking water from the stomachs of wild animals. In New Mexico, in Fernández-Armesto's words, one man told of crossing "dunes where the glare was so fierce that his eyes roasted and seemed to burst from their sockets. The horses were blinded and stumbled helplessly. The men breathed fire and spat pitch."

In the face of such torments, why did survivors of expeditions so often and so quickly set out again? For many, the answer was a type of explorer's amnesia, a selective remembering of the adventure -- the "glamour of great deeds." Pedro de Medina, one of the greatest cosmographers of the 16th century, marveled at this anomaly, writing that he had often seen sailors "return from our Indies after experiencing great danger, having been even on the point of death, and yet soon after their arrival they forget it like a dream and then they prepare to return as if it was a pleasure." De Medina argued that this was "divine will." If explorers did not forget the agonies of exploration, few would be tempted to make a return trip. Their hard-won knowledge would be lost.

As exploration became an instrument of national power, some nations seized the opportunities while others abdicated. In the 15th century, China, which then had the greatest potential for imperialism and discovery, voluntarily relinquished its hold on the sea. Its land borders had become insecure as the Mongols regained power, but more important, the New World simply held little allure, offering nothing that the Chinese wanted or could not obtain more easily closer to home. Western Europe, with far fewer economic opportunities, stepped into the breach. The Atlantic, rather than the Pacific, Fernández-Armesto writes, became the "highway to the rest of the world."

Over the next 500 years, explorers fanned out across the globe, dispelling myths and filling in the map. So determined were they to uncover the world's secrets that the age-old question "What is out there?" finally became, "What is left?" After tens of thousands of years of stumbling blindly across our planet, we can now see it with stunning clarity. For some, the temptation is to resent those whose ambitions robbed us of the right to explore. However, one need only to think of the ocean, the biosphere and the endless mysteries of space to understand that exploration is in its infancy. Like the heroic adventurers whose stories Fernández-Armesto recounts so well, we have before us countless frontiers, the thrill of the unknown and, for a fortunate few, the pleasure of being first.