Voyager: Exploration, Space, and the Third Great Age of Discovery

by Stephen J. Pyne

  On the contrary, many Europeans absorbed discovery into their understanding of who they were, even in some cases writing explorers into a founding mythology, a cultural creation story. In short, where exploring became a force, something beyond buccaneering, it interbred with the rest of its sustaining society. The broader those cultural kinship ties, the deeper the commitment. Societies dispatched explorers; explorers reshaped society. Exploration became an institution. The explorer became a role.

  The fabled Great Voyages announced a First Age of Discovery. Its particular domain was the exploration of the world ocean: it ultimately proved that all the world’s seas were one, that it was possible to sail from any shore and reach any other. Of course there were some grand entradas in the Americas, and missionaries, Jesuits especially, penetrated into the vast interiors of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. But as J. H. Parry observes, it was the world sea that defined the scope and achievements of the First Age. Mapping its littoral was the era’s finest intellectual achievement.48

  The map reminds us that the First Age coincided with a Renaissance. The era unveiled two new worlds, one of geography, another of learning. Francis Bacon conveyed this sense perfectly when he used as a frontispiece to his Instauratio Magna the image of a sailing ship pushing beyond the Pillars of Hercules. The voyage of discovery became a metaphor for an age of inquiry that would venture far beyond the dominion of the Mediterranean and the inherited wisdom of the ancients. The discoveries overwhelmed a text-based scholarship. Scholasticism, that arid discourse that resulted from too many scholars and not enough texts, collapsed as new information poured into Europe like New World bullion into Spain, and like it, caused an inflationary spiral of knowledge.

  The nature of learning differed, too. It came not from recovered texts but from newly discovered lands and peoples, and not from the ancients but from encountered living cultures. Very little of the terrestrial world Europe discovered was uninhabited, which is to say, unknown to humanity. It was unknown to Europe, and Europe learned about it through its indigenes. Interpreters, guides, cultural brokers—all assisted in the transfer of learning from various enclaves to Europe, which proceeded to sew them together into a global quilt. Voyages were the stitches; seas, straits, and societies, the patches. Over and again, explorers succeeded by relying upon (or seizing) local pilots, and by learning the language of, and emulating the dress and mores of, the native peoples. This meant that the central act of discovery, the encounter, was almost always an encounter between peoples.

  An age of discovery thus demands more than curiosity and craft and yields more than data points or lore hoarded like bullion. Acquired knowledge has to be minted into useful currency; and exploring has to speak to deeper longings and fears and folk identities than science and scholarship. An expedition voyages into a moral universe that explains who a people are and how they should behave, that criticizes and justifies both the sustaining society and those it encounters. The Great Voyages provided that moral shock: they forced Europe to confront beliefs and mores far beyond the common understanding of Western civilization. The Renaissance expansion of Europe profoundly altered Europe’s understanding of itself and its place in the world. There was plenty of hollow triumphalism, of course, but those contacts also inspired Montaigne’s celebrated preference for the cannibalism of Brazil’s noble savages to that of Versailles’s courtiers, and Las Casas’s excoriating denunciation of the conquistadors. The contacts also compelled a reexamination of the political and ethical principles underlying Christendom and its secular principalities.

  While all peoples are ethnocentric, Europe was distinctive in that its mappa mundi placed the cartographic center of creation in the Holy Land, leaving Europe to the margins. In the early fifteenth century that displacement accurately depicted Europe’s standing in the world. A century later, however, Europe could relocate itself to the center.

  CORPS OF DISCOVERY: THE ENLIGHTENMENT EXPLORES

  By the early eighteenth century, exploration had found itself becalmed, even moribund. Discovery had achieved its purpose. It had found serviceable routes—the only ones, really—to the wealth of the East. Its sponsors felt little need to search for more, or to probe remote regions of the globe without prospects for commerce or plunder. Mariners did more poaching and piracy than original questing; the explorer blurred into the fantasist and the fraud, a promoter of Mississippi and South Seas bubbles. Expeditions of adventurers persisted largely because interlopers tried to outflank established competitors.

  By almost any index, exploration sagged. Although missionaries and bandeirantes had worked through the rivers of South America, and fur traders had done likewise for the main lakes and rivers of northern Asia and North America, few new islands were unveiled, and nothing of the interiors of Africa, and nothing of the outlines of Australia and Antarctica; and what was learned was often hoarded. They had not, of course, surveyed the Earth in its fullness; until the late eighteenth century, even the world’s coastlines still had unmapped gaps. But the implacable will (or the internal furies) that had driven explorers now flagged. Exploration seemed destined to be left marooned on the shore of a fast-ebbing historical tide. As with a Titan/Centaur launch, the saga of exploration also had its coasting periods.

  Then the historical dynamics changed. A period of coasting and consolidating ceased. The elements for a revival of exploration positioned themselves. Cultural engines again burned and boosted a new stage of exploration upward.

  The long rivalry between Britain and France, the penetration of high culture by the Enlightenment, and a hunger for new markets, all combined to move Europe again out of dry dock and onto the high seas of commerce and conquest. The grand tour became a global excursion around the Earth. Perhaps most extraordinarily, the missionary emerged out of a secularizing chrysalis as the naturalist. Increasingly, scientists replaced priests as the chroniclers and observers of expeditions—Linnaeus’s apostles supplanted Saint Francis Xavier’s Jesuits—and scientific inquiry substituted for and justified the proselytizing that had helped sanctify an often violent and tragic collision of cultures.

  The era’s annunciatory events were two sets of expeditions. The first was a paired undertaking sponsored by the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1735 to measure an arc of the meridian. One expedition went to Lapland under Pierre Maupertuis and one to Ecuador under Charles-Marie de la Condamine. For the first time abstruse questions of natural philosophy, in this case involving the shape of Earth and competing theories of gravity, drove expeditions. The second cluster proved significantly more impressive as it mounted an international campaign to measure the transit of Venus, first in 1761 and again in 1769.

  Here was a scientific campaign urged by scientists, to be conducted by scientists, aimed at simultaneous global surveys that would measure a critical value needed to understand models of the solar system, whose calculated working had become the exemplar of Enlightenment science. It was, to advocates, a unique opportunity, a passage of astronomical alignments across a suitable civilizational setting. In its request for funding, the Royal Society of London appealed to two principal “Motives”: the “Improvement of Astronomy and the Honour of this Nation.” There was national glory to be gained from success, and national shame to be endured from failure, and of course one could necessarily expect economic spinoffs from the inevitable improvements in scientific knowledge that would result. The 1761 transit featured 120 observations, of which 106 were in Europe; the 1769 transit, 150 from European outposts around the Earth.49

  The swarm of expeditions helped rouse geographic discovery from its long slumber; they defined the terms by which exploration, empire, and Enlightenment might find common causes; they midwifed a transition from an exploring science welded to natural philosophy to one bonded to natural history. The expeditions of Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche to Tobolsk and then to Baja California, of Legentil de la Galaissière to the Indies and Alexandre-Guy Pingrè to Rodrigues and Haiti, and especially the voyage of the HMS E
ndeavour under Captain James Cook to the Pacific galvanized public opinion and helped spark a revolution in scientific discovery—a model less for measuring the distance of Earth from the Sun than for inventorying the splendor of Earth. Here in cameo was demonstrated the ambition and means to inspire a new age of discovery.

  Over the next century every aspiring great power dispatched fleets to seek out new wealth and knowledge, to loudly go where others had not yet staked claims. Once again, the rivalries among the Europeans were as great as anything between Europeans and other peoples. In 1769 James Bruce reached Lake Tana, the traditional source of the Blue Nile, while James Cook arrived at Tahiti to measure the transit of Venus. One journey represented rediscovery, a reconnection by a new sensibility with classical lore; the other, a new discovery, a barely known place subject to vision.

  Circumnavigation revived, but ships proved mostly a means to reposition explorers, who promptly moved inland. The world’s continents replaced the world sea as a primary arena for discovery, and the cross-continental traverse substituted for circumnavigation as its boldest expression. The voyaging conquistador metamorphosed into the Romantic naturalist. The transition matters because as the nineteenth century ripened, Europe was no longer content to remain as a trafficker on the beaches of the world sea. Like its exploring emissaries, it shoved and swarmed inland. Trading ventures became imperial institutions, coastal colonies evolved into continental nations, and the politics of commerce gave way to outright conquest. Exploration as a reconnaissance for trade segued into surveys for settlement; imperialism moved from founding coastal trading factories to establishing states over which they would rule, some of which they would populate with émigré Europeans.

  The outcome was a fabulous era for exploring scientists. New intellectual disciplines bubbled up out of the slush of specimens shipped home. The returns from the earliest explorers to a particular place were often phenomenal—the scholarly equivalent to placer mining or, in the First Age, to the sacking of Tenochtitlán or Malacca. A revolution in geographic discovery again accompanied a revolution in learning, aptly symbolized by the simultaneous recognition by two exploring naturalists, Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, of evolution by natural selection.

  The moral drama changed accordingly. Secularization and science translated Vasco da Gama’s famous declaration that he had come to the Indies for “Christians and spices” into a cry for civilization and commerce. The deeper drama concerned that fraction of Europe’s imperium colonized by European emigrants. These settler societies tended to look upon discovery as part of a national epic, and to honor explorers as vital protagonists—a Moses, an Aeneas—of those founding events. Their subsequent folk expansions proceeded hand in glove with formal exploration, such that Daniel Boone, not George Washington, became America’s folk-epic hero. These were new worlds, premised on the prospects for a new order of society. America truly was, in William Goetzmann’s words, “exploration’s nation”; but so were Russia, Australia, Canada, and others.50

  Discovery metastasized. As measured by the number of exploring expeditions, a slight increase appears in the latter eighteenth century and then erupts into a supernova of discovery that spans the globe. In 1859 the last unknown Pacific island, Midway, was discovered; by the 1870s, explorers had managed comprehensive traverses—cross sections of natural history—for every continent save Antarctica. With the partition of Africa, expeditions proliferated to assess what the lines drawn on maps in Berlin libraries actually meant on the ground. Exploration had become an index of national prestige and power. The first International Polar Year (1882) had turned attention to the Arctic. An announcement by the Sixth International Geographical Congress in 1896 that Antarctica remained the last continent for untrammeled geographic discovery inspired a swarm of explorers to head to its icy shores; even Belgium and Japan sponsored expeditions. (America’s attention remained fixated on the North Pole and that other stampede to the Klondike.) Ernest Shackleton’s celebrated 1914 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition was, after all, an attempt to complete for that continent the grand gesture that had crowned every other.51

  But Antarctica was the last. There were no more unvisited lands to traverse, other than such backwaters as the Red Centre of Australia, the crenulated valleys and highlands of New Guinea, and the wind-swept Gobi. The enthusiasm for boundary surveys and natural history excursions—for imperialism itself—waned with the slaughter of the Great War. Plotting the number of exploring expeditions reveals the Second Age as a kind of historical monadnock, rising like a chronological volcano above a level terrain. The peak crests in the last decades of the nineteenth century, as exploration crossed the summit of the Second Age. Then it began a descent down the other side.

  Like a cycle of economic boom and bust, what had ramped up now ramped down. The process went into reverse—exploration’s equivalent of deleveraging. The reasons are many. One is simply that Europe completed its swarm over the (to it) unknown surfaces of the planet. There was nowhere else for the Humboldtian explorer to go, and there were no more lands to meaningfully settle. Antarctica, the deep oceans, interplanetary space—these arenas for geographic discovery might be claimed, but they would not be colonized.

  No less important, the dynamic behind exploration changed. The Second Age had kindled with a rivalry between Britain and France, much as the contest between Portugal and Spain had powered the First Age. Thereafter virtually every competition featured Britain, which is why its explorers so dominate the age. Britain and France clashed in India, the Pacific, and Africa; Britain and the United States in North America; Britain and Russia, the Great Game, across central Asia; Britain and all comers in Antarctica. But after the Great War, Britain and France could no longer afford the enterprise. Russia turned inward with revolution. The United States had few places other than Antarctica in which discovery had geopolitical meaning. The Second Great Age of Discovery, like the First before it, deflated. Moreover, the old rivalries, once projected outward, now turned inward, and Europe brought its colonial wars home in what ended with near self-immolation.

  By the middle twentieth century, after two world wars, a global depression, and the sudden shedding of colonies, Kipling’s “Recessional” had become prophetic. The Great Powers were exhausted, Europe sought to quench its internecine wars by severing its colonial ties, and the resulting decolonization accompanied an implosion of exploration. Europe turned inward, quelling the ancient quarrels that had restlessly and violently propelled it around the globe, pulling itself together rather than projecting itself outward.

  And as in the past, there were cultural factors also at work. The Second Age had served as the exploring instrument of the Enlightenment. Geographic discovery had bonded with modern science such that no serious expedition could claim public interest without a complement of naturalists, while some of the most robust new sciences, such as geology and biology, relied on exploration to cart back the data that fueled them. Science, particularly natural history, had shown itself as implacably aggressive as politics, full of national rivalries and conceptual competitions, and through exploration, it appeared to answer, or at least could address, questions of keen interest to the culture. It could exhume the age of the Earth, reveal the evolution of life, celebrate scenic monuments to nationalism and Nature’s God. Artists such as Thomas Baines and Thomas Moran joined expeditions, or as John James Audubon did, mounted their own surveys. General intellectuals eagerly studied narratives of discovery. Exploring accounts and traveler narratives became best sellers; explorers were cultural heroes; exploration was part and parcel of national epics; exploration was a means to fame and sometimes fortune. The Second Age, in brief, braided together many of the dominant cultural strands of its time.

  By the early twentieth century, however, this splendid tapestry was unraveling. A Greater Enlightenment found itself challenged by a Greater Modernism. One consequence was that, in field after field, intellectuals turned to subjects that no longer lent themselves to
explication by exploration. Natural scientists looked to the very large and the very small, to redshifting nebulae and subatomic particles or molecular genes. Artists turned inward, probing themselves and the foundations of art, not outward to representational landscapes. High culture was more inclined to follow Sigmund Freud into the symbol-laden depths of the unconscious, or Joseph Conrad into a heart of imperial darkness, than to ascend Chimborazo with Humboldt or to paddle with John Wesley Powell through the gorges of the Grand Canyon. The Second Age sagged not simply from the exhaustion of closed frontiers but from a more profound weariness and ironic dismay with the entire enterprise of Enlightenment and empire.

  Once more Western exploration began to coast. In the early nineteenth century an intellectual could claim international acclaim by exploring new lands. By the early twentieth he could not, if he could even find suitable lands. There were a few spectacular exceptions. The gold-prospecting Leahy brothers trooped into the unknown highlands of New Guinea. Richard Byrd wistfully erected Little America on the Ross Ice Shelf. Roy Chapman Andrews, with carbine and Model T, whisked across the Gobi in search of dinosaur eggs, the very model of a Hollywood action hero (and inspiration for Indiana Jones). But there was overall a rueful, forlorn quality to the striving, aptly expressed when the American Museum of Natural History, with Andrews in command, dispatched an expedition to Shiva Temple, an isolated mesa within the Grand Canyon, to look for exotic creatures, as though it stood somewhere between the Galapagos and Shangri-La. Sixty years before, the Canyon had claimed center stage not only for geographical discovery but also for the answers it offered to fundamental questions about the Earth’s age and organic evolution. Now the press boosted a minor foray into a journey to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World. Lost world, indeed.