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

by Stephen J. Pyne

  The biggest change is economic. Explorers do not head to known markets or seek to cultivate new ones—they do not probe new routes to great entrepôts or unveil natural resources along the routes they travel. No one can even pretend to imagine an Aztec or Incan empire to sack, or a bonanza of gold waiting to pan out of the lost streams of Mars, or a “traffick” in useful goods with the far Indies of the solar system, perhaps a triangular trade between Earth, Titan, and Ganymede. Private commerce is restricted to its offshore environments, the near-Earth of satellites and the occasional tourist, and the near-ocean of continental shelves rather than the abyssal plains.

  A modern Muscovy Company would not load its holds with trinkets for trade to discovered peoples and draw up rosters of what they have that we want, and what we have that they want, but would determine what instruments to send for reconnaissance. What can the planets and their moons tell us that we want to know? What traffic can exist between our instruments and their data? How much bullion must we expend to get the cinnamon and rubies of knowledge? Instead of red ocher and black coney skins, vessels sail with ultraviolet spectrometers and plasma wave detectors. But no more than the merchants of the Great Voyages do scientists know exactly what will trade best. They bring what they have.

  BELIEVERS

  Where there were motives, there were also motivators. Exploration has overflowed with publicists, seers, prophets, soothsayers, boosters, propagandists, the putatively all-knowing and farseeing, the promoters of fame and fortune, and the augurers of collective destiny. Through them the crassest lust for money and power could alloy with the most exalted aspirations. In some cases boosters kindled the necessary enthusiasms; but mostly they captured the sentiments of the zeitgeist and placed them into the holds of ships, on sledges, and into the software of spacecraft, for, in addition to food, water, navigational instruments, and maps, explorers needed a vision of where they were going and why.

  The roster of publicists begins with the explorers themselves. Almost all were experts in self-promotion. No one believed in their mission more than Christopher Columbus and John Cabot, Henry Stanley and David Livingstone, and it was often the very intensity of their conviction that proved decisive in their convincing others. The greatest welded an unyielding faith to an iron will, the self-certainty that if the actual scheme proved wrong, their sense of destiny was right, and if destiny proved muddled, they could succeed by strength of character alone. Even when unexpected landmasses blocked passages, when rivers did not run or seas failed to appear where promoters had insisted they would, when the Isle of Brasil and the Seven Cities of Cibola migrated from one imaginary locale to another, they completed their expedition; they found what did exist and temporarily banished what did not, and returned with that knowledge. The poorest foundered on incompetence, ill luck, and the violent collision between a lofty rhetoric of inspiring visions and the hidden shoals of an indifferent geography.

  Delusions could prove deadly. For every Ferdinand Magellan and Henry Stanley who simply would not be deflected from his self-assigned destiny, there was a Martin Frobisher and a William Baffin who could not force a Northwest Passage whatever their determination, and a Walter Raleigh and a William Paterson whose delusional bombast led to geographic fantasies and, for their followers, death. Even the greatest of explorers could not do what was impossible, and the impossible was as much a matter of historical timing as of principle. In prophecy, as in medicine, the toxicity resides not in the substance but in the dosage. Besides, explorers too often died; some other, more enduring mechanism had to keep the enthusiasm alive. Prophecy, too, needed its institutions.

  That task fell to promoters. Someone had to persuade the monarchy or a Company of Adventurers to sponsor expeditions; someone had to rally both motives and money; someone had to speak in the media of the time to influence and inspire; someone had to record and interpret what discovery had unveiled and forecast what it might yet find. As exploration became institutionalized, it found its propagandists and publicists. During the First Age, they relied on the printing press, to which in the Second, they added newspapers and popular magazines, and in the Third, film and television. Each age, too, found distinctive ways to bond commerce and culture, to fuse and transmute mixed motivations from outright greed and vainglory to national prestige, and scholarship into a popular genre that could rouse a more general ardor without which voyages were no more than fireflies in the night. Each, that is, found a suitable Romance.

  Over time the English became particularly adept at promotion. The history is worth tracing, since it leads directly to those who, apart from the Russians, have most boosted interplanetary exploration. The condensed version is this: England needed trade, which meant it needed explorers to identify places, goods, and routes.

  In late medieval and Renaissance Europe, news of the earliest voyages of discovery was mixed. Some reports were quickly promulgated, such as Columbus’s Letters; others were hoarded as state secrets. But if details were locked away, the general outlines of discovery became known, if only to ensure claims to lands, seas, peoples, and trade. At the Spanish court, Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, better known as Peter Martyr, became the official chronicler of Iberian discovery, his register updated as a series of Decas (Decades of the New World). It was Peter Martyr who appreciated, as Columbus never did, that the latter’s four voyages had not made landfall on Golden Chersonese but on what Martyr termed an otro (or novo) mundo, a New World. The printing press helped to propagate the news of discovery, and something of its excitement, throughout the elite of Europe.

  England, however, lagged. Though the first press arrived with William Caxton in 1477, it specialized in what the public wanted to read, and works of geographical discovery were not among them. Those sponsoring merchants who needed to know the latest voyages did so through other means; the reading public still preferred pilgrim guides and updated encyclopedias. Despite Bristol merchants, England’s interests pointed to Europe rather than New Found Lands. Not until 1554, with the crisis of Mary Tudor’s marriage to Philip of Spain, did the Decas appear in English. It did so amid a political crisis, economic opportunities, and a spiritual call to arms for what would evolve into a prolonged struggle with Spain.

  The critical voice was Rycharde Eden, England’s “first literary imperialist.” Eden began by publishing A Treatyse of the Newe India, arranged to have the Decas translated along with Martin Cortes’s The Arte of Navigation, and urged his countrymen to learn from the major colonial powers and then expand for themselves, searching out new markets for the “commoditie of our countrie,” which was wool. In dedicating the Treatyse to the Duke of Northumberland, Eden listed his reasons for urging travels of discovery. They could improve the national economy, they served God, and they could inspire both an entrepreneurial and an adventuring spirit essential to a robust people. Those who demurred from overseas enterprises showed, he felt, a contemptible lack of courage. The earliest endeavors focused mostly on the Northeast Passage, culminating in the Muscovy Company and trade with Russia, and then renewed interest in a Northwest Passage. As Eden’s first book suggested, the Indies were the prize .30

  As England quickened the tempo of its overseas probes, the basic rhetoric laid down by Eden endured: that only by joining the scramble overseas could England secure its future at home. Yet the governing classes and reading public remained largely apathetic. Not until 1580 did the tide begin to turn. In that year, England determined two routes to the wealth of the East: a trade treaty with Turkey and the astounding return of Sir Francis Drake from “the world encompassed,” not least with the Golden Hind stuffed full of the plunder from unsuspecting Spanish ships and towns in the Pacific. More important, England found its great publicist of voyaging. That year Richard Hakluyt, then thirty years old, commenced his pleas for an English overseas empire of commerce and colonies.31

  An older Hakluyt recalled that, as a much younger Hakluyt, he had chanced upon “certain books of Cosmography, with an universal Map�
�� in his cousin’s study, and that he then and there resolved that he would “by God’s assistance prosecute that knowledge and kind of literature.” His 1580 appeal on the occasion of Humphrey Gilbert’s first try at an American colony, was followed by a 1582 compendium, Divers Voyages Touching upon the Discovery of America, in which he exploited historical events to argue the cause for English expansionism. Discourse of Western Planting followed, this time aligned with schemes by Walter Raleigh. More than a simple shill, Hakluyt was a Renaissance scholar, versed in many languages and intent on amassing accurate accounts from any source, and thus eager to talk with pilots, merchants, and captains. His masterpiece followed the year after Elizabethan England defeated the Spanish Armada.32

  Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation was an immense encyclopedia of travel that celebrated the new age of adventuring while seeking to establish continuities with an ancient English past. It argued that the English were, by heritage, a voyaging and trading people, that an expansion of enterprises was both possible and essential, and that accurate knowledge was the font of such inspiration. The Principal Navigations was in equal measure patriotic and practical. A second, expanded edition published in 1598-1600 weighed in at a million and a half words distributed over three volumes. Here was history in the service of commerce and politics.

  The outcome could not help but awe and, through awe, inspire both admiration over what had been achieved and ardor to further it. Yet Hakluyt was candid about his purpose: “our chief desire is to find out ample vent for our woollen cloth, the natural commodity of this our realm, the fittest place I find for that purpose are the manifold islands of Japan and the northern parts of China, and the regions of the Tartars next adjoining.” To this goal were gradually added colonies in America, where trade might be supplemented by the natural wealth of those lands. The second edition made the point even more explicit by adding “Traffiques” to the title.33

  Others, such as Samuel Purchas (Purchas His Pilgrimage), were less fastidious about authenticating sources and less willing to subject readers to vast catalogues of prospective trade goods. They abridged the long chronicle into a brisker narrative, pumped up the emotional receipts relative to empirical expenditures, and bequeathed a saga that made the voyage of discovery and the planting of colonies a distinctive and necessary feature of the English identity. Complicated accounts of commercial traffic became tales of derring-do and patriotic glory. The exorbitant costs of exploring were only apparent: the enterprise would pay for itself many times over.

  Yet for some journeys, mirages work as well as landmarks. Samuel Eliot Morison observed that “although the French seaports had every possible advantage for Atlantic exploration that the English had; although the French crown gave its merchant marine more support and encouragement than the Tudors ever did, there is one English asset which the French lacked—a Hakluyt.” France lacked that enormous compendium, the comprehensive vision, that sense of urgent inspiration. Later French enthusiasts for a Greater France lamented the similar lack of Robinsonades—French versions of Robinson Crusoe, popular stories of overseas adventuring.34

  In truth, Richard Hakluyt and his counterparts did more than chronicle an age of discovery. They placed it into a national (and civilizational) narrative, they created valences with other vigorous elements of the culture, they implanted it into the minds of the educated and governing classes. They helped institutionalize exploration. They ensured that the Great Age of Discovery could lead to others. Exploration became complex, and because of that cultural complexity, it could survive. It endured in part because Western civilization could no longer imagine itself not exploring.

  During the Second Age, exploration found new prophets, new romances, and a more popular media. Not only had books become far more common, but also newspapers and popular magazines abounded to spread stories of discovery widely throughout a vastly more literate public. Particularly among former colonial societies such as a newly independent America, now bent on its own imperial project, explorers became iconic figures, founders of a national creation epic. They were American Aeneases, the guides and seers of national destiny. The frontiersman became the new knight-errant of a romance later called the Western. The explorer into unknown lands became a Romantic hero.

  Their accounts were enormously popular. Let William Goetzmann tell how the reclusive Henry David Thoreau spent days “in his quiet study at Concord, at his cabin at Walden Pond, or stretched out under a poplar tree in his backyard behind the family pencil factory” reading exploration literature. A master of synecdoche, Thoreau could see the whole world in Walden Pond, and he could observe also in his journal that “the whole world is an America, a New World.” So, too, we might have his personal absorption stand for that of his culture. He read Humboldt’s Personal Narrative, Cook’s Voyages, and Darwin’s A Naturalist’s Voyage Round the World. He read Alexander Henry’s adventures in Canada, Thomas Atkinson’s travels across Tartary, John Dunn Hunter’s narrative of Indian captivity. He trekked across Africa with John Barth, Hugh Clapperton, and David Livingstone; sledged to the Arctic with Isaac Hayes and Elisha Kent Kane; traveled over China with Evariste Régis Huc; searched for Mount Ararat with Frederick Parrot; tracked down the source of the Mississippi with Giacomo Beltrami and Henry Schoolcraft; sailed down the Amazon and Orinoco with Lts. William Herndon and Lardner Gibbon; slogged along the Mosquito Coast with Ephraim George Squier; and accompanied Ida Pfeiffer on A Lady’s Voyage Round the World. He read the five-volume narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition in its entirety, steering around Lt. Charles Wilkes’s cloying prose as the USS Vincennes did Antarctic floes. He was, in William Goetzmann’s words, “another of Humboldt’s children.”35

  The alliance with Enlightenment science had created powerful incentives. What was good for science was good for empire, and what was good for empire was good for science, and both looked to exploration to advance their interests. The frontiers of science were, as its promoters never ceased to proclaim, endless. Institutions of science became boosters of geographic exploration and forums for announcing their findings, which quickly moved from the pages of obscure academic proceedings to the front pages of penny newspapers.

  The prophets of exploration experienced another transfiguration for the Third Age. With renewed tenacity the old justifications were refurbished, given a high-tech gloss, and sent to explore ice, abyss, and space. A new genre of romance—science fiction, or more properly technological romance—reoutfitted the knight-errant with the armor of a spacesuit, a grail quest to find intelligence or at least life elsewhere, and adventures across galaxies. The HMS Beagle acquired warp drive; astronauts unveiled new Botany Bays on the moons of Saturn; a New Jerusalem arose on Mars. New media that substituted light and electrons for ink added to popular enthusiasms through film and television. The pioneering rocketeers must be numbered among the emergent seers, for so they saw themselves, and it was a vision of extraterrestrial exploration (and colonization) that drove their engineering imaginations. A Great Migration beyond Earth had inflamed both Tsiolkovsky and Goddard.

  But the godfather of the Third Age in space is surely Arthur C. Clarke, who knotted together as no one else could the technical, the institutional, the literary, and the visionary. It is not just that Clarke was a type or a precursor, but that he was himself the dominant oracle for an age of space voyaging. Almost every defining feature of the space age finds echoes in his voice. As seer and revelator, his immense, and immensely successful, literary output became a kind of Testament of the Space Age. Born in Britain in 1917, he outlived all his contemporaries and even the first generation of successors. He was in Britain when V-2 rockets rained down on London, and he commented by teleconference on the Cassini mission to Saturn.

  He could not afford college; he learned his craft by working and by writing science fiction in his spare time. During the Battle of Britain he served in the radar units of the RAF; after the war he earned a first-class degr
ee in mathematics and physics at King’s College London, and applied his literary talents to predictions of telecommunication satellites and space travel generally. In 1949 he committed himself to a full-time career as an author of short stories, novels, and semi-technical studies. Of necessity for one who lived by his wits, he evolved a graceful, popular style. In 1950 he wrote a technically informed but accessible book on astronautics, Interplanetary Flight. By then he was chair of the British Interplanetary Society, an institution devoted to promoting space travel, a successor to such Second Age organs as the African Association and Royal Geographical Society. A year later he expanded from astronautics to a survey of what might be possible not only technically but socially, and perhaps spiritually, with a foundational book, The Exploration of Space. In 1956 he moved to Sri Lanka, only recently unyoked from British colonial rule. A year later, Sputnik made Clarke’s prophecies seem clairvoyant; within three years the first communication satellite was in orbit.

  Interestingly, from his tropical island Clarke enthused over the two emerging realms of Third Age discovery. He became, as he put it, “amphibious.” The sea beckoned. He took to underwater scuba, toured reefs, and wrote a string of sea novels that paralleled his space fiction. His motivations? He liked the experience, and after he suffered paralysis in 1962, he relished the sensation of weightlessness. He regarded the two environments, sea and space, as similar, so much so that he believed the seas could train future astronauts and serve as a nursery for space treks, since “submarine exploration is so much cheaper than space flight.” It could also prepare travelers for exotic life forms and, with whales and porpoises, for encounters with alien intelligences.36