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

by Stephen J. Pyne

  Apologists might argue with both reason and conviction that the reality of modern exploration was that it is an alloy of machines and men. “The truth,” as Oran Nicks noted, “is that there were no such things as unmanned missions; it was merely a question of where man stood to conduct them.” But equally, “crewed” missions were utterly dependent on semiautonomous machines and “flew” spacecraft that could be as easily flown on their own, without the genetically and morally flawed carbon bipeds. The proportions and perceptions might vary, but no human could venture into the realms of the Third Age except through an artificial habitat, and no robot could build, launch, and steer itself. We are of course drawn to the human, or to those creatures and machines that can be humanized. Even professional explorers such as Roald Amundsen and Henry Stanley have a complexity, a plexus of motives, surprises, and contradictions that robots cannot achieve. They are, after all, human, and it is the human story, the fusion of plot and character, powered by conflict, that drives the traditional narrative of exploration.173

  But as the relative composition of human and machine has changed, so have the stakes. No one has calculated the attrition rate for exploration, or what trend it has shown, other than that exploring has come at a declining cost of lives over the centuries, largely as a result of better shipborne travel, medicine, and technology. On his epochal voyage, da Gama lost 120 of 180 men and two of three ships. Magellan’s Armada de Molucca returned with 18 of 237 men, and one of five ships (although one vessel had deserted for home earlier), and Magellan himself died. The demands for long-voyage care and feeding were enormous. In the nineteenth century, Britain’s Royal Navy recorded the percentages of shipboard fatalities as disease (60 percent), accident (32 percent), ship losses from fire or sinking (10 percent), and enemy action (8 percent). Substitute “exploring hazards” for “enemy action” and the statistics would likely compare. 174

  No such dangers attended Voyager. JPL engineers might labor feverishly to correct a flaw that threatened a mission, and advocates might lobby Congress and NASA with tireless resolve, but such efforts are still a far cry from the young Henry Stanley, himself temporarily roused from a deep fever, with the threats of Arab slavers ringing in his ears, resolving by candlelight to succeed in his quixotic search for the “Apostle of Africa,” David Livingstone. “I have taken a solemn, enduring oath, an oath to be kept while the least hope of life remains in me, not to be tempted to break the resolution I have formed, never to give up the search, until I find Livingstone alive, or find his dead body.” No living man, “or living men,” he continued, “shall stop me, only death can prevent me. But death—not even this; I shall not die, I will not die, I cannot die!” No robot thought it might die. No spacecraft defied death in its quest. Machine failure in a robotic mission might dash dreams, but it would not claim lives. 175

  Antarctica again offers a point of inflection. Contemplating the tragedies and extraordinary exertions of the Terra Nova expedition, Apsley Cherry-Garrard characterized their endeavor as “running appalling risks, performing prodigies of superhuman endurance, achieving immortal renown, commemorated in august cathedral sermons and by public statues, yet reaching the Pole only to find our terrible journey superfluous, and leaving our best men dead on the ice.” He proposed instead that modern technology—proper ships, aircraft, specialists—“will all be needed if the work is to be done in any sort of humane and civilized fashion.” Then he came to the crux: that politicians and the public must “learn to value knowledge that is not baited by suffering and death,” be it the death of the discoverer or of those discovered. Simple adventuring was insufficient; true exploration, he thought, was the “physical expression of the Intellectual Passion.” There had to be some cultural purpose beyond simple travel and personal tests of character. He thought science might do. But his own bolt, he reckoned, was “shot.”176

  In the Third Age those appropriate technologies exist. They can allow millions to share in robotic discovery, in the only kind of sensory encounter that the forbidding geographies of ice, abyss, and space allow. The transformation of moral drama is still playing out. What modern exploration wants is not just shared sense data but shared meaning: not merely the eyes of discovery but its poetry. In some way, if only by literary tropes, the robots must be anthropomorphized. They must be agents and proxies, and a presence. They would then be, as Nicks observes, “reflections of their masters.”177

  Encounter, in brief, is not simply an event, the meeting of two entities, like the bow shock of ionic winds, but an exchange of minds, and ultimately a confrontation between moralities. How to find such moments, or their simulacra, amid ice, abyss, and space is the issue that confronts the sponsors who dispatch machine explorers. And it is what Voyager 2 enigmatically, brilliantly, poignantly displayed at Uranus.

  FIRST CONTACT

  For Voyager, planetary encounter was a programmed event. It was a prescribed ritual, written into the software commands that told the spacecraft, minute by minute, often second by second, what to do. But that did not make the event idiosyncratic to the mission, or to space exploration. What Voyager codified was five hundred years of experienced encounters.

  When Columbus made landfall, the practice already had its prescriptions. The first task was to look to the safety of the ship—wait for the dawn’s light, watch for shoals and rocks, find a protected harbor or lee anchorage. Then the admiral and captains would take the longboat ashore, kneel, and give thanks. As soon as possible they would try to locate natives (who typically were already watching the newcomers, and often came to the ship in boats), display emblems of authority, communicate by signs and perhaps share gifts, begin to train interpreters, and collect directions to the headmen, and, always, identify the way to wealth. Amid so many isles, the crews had ample time to drill and adapt, but behind them stood more than seventy years of Portuguese probing among Atlantic isles and African coastlines.

  With further centuries of exploring, the protocol evolved, reaching something of a pinnacle in Capt. James Cook, as he made contact with island upon island. His landing party consisted of him, his chief scientist, a physician, an interpreter, a security guard of marines, and sailors to row to shore. (Eerily, this is exactly the composition of the “away teams” so beloved by Star Trek, save that Hollywood scriptwriters could dispense with interpreters, having disseminated universal translators, not to mention other plot apparatus deemed necessary to go where, outside Hollywood, no one was.) As Cook understood, encounters typically went bad not because of natural circumstances such as high seas but because of social ones. A native stole, a sailor was killed, a chief was seized or hostages taken, the exploring expedition retaliated; or a captain failed, a crew mutinied, an exploring party fell apart. Conflict, character, choice—these are what metamorphose adventure into drama.

  What explorers most valued was the founding encounter, what popular culture has come to call first contact. Here, potentially, was exploration stripped of the qualms, morasses, and banalities into which, historically, discovery had morphed into imperialism and normal scholarship. Here, physical adventure underwent a transubstantiation into moral drama.

  Few first-contact narratives speak as today’s partisans might wish. They were not recorded as part of a genre they knew the future desired. But there is one extraordinary exception, because it happened in recent times, and that is the saga of the gold-seeking Leahy brothers when they trekked into the unknown interior of New Guinea in 1930. Not only were they seeking new lands, but they also were doing so as explorers, and they even carried a motion-picture camera to document what they saw and experienced.

  When they passed over the summit of the Bismarck Mountains, they looked down on immense highland valleys, densely cultivated, flush with fires, awash with people unknown to them and who themselves knew nothing of the world beyond their tribal borders. The prospecting expeditions, under Mick Leahy, continued into the mid- 1930s, extending discovery into valley upon valley, beyond the vales of Goroka an
d Asaro, and meeting tribe after tribe, pushing on to the putative source of the gold, much as Hernando Cortés kept moving inland until he found the great depository of Aztec wealth. That first expedition ended up crossing the island, a veritable microcontinent. Here was raw first contact of a sort not seen since the Great Voyages and the entradas of the New World conquistadors.178

  In truth, it is unsettling how fully the Leahys’ encounters echoed those of previous centuries. Without a common language, exchanges were limited to signs, pantomimes, and demonstrations. The Australians wanted food, information, safe passage, and, later, women and workers; the highlanders wanted shells (their equivalent to bullion), steel axes, and, later, weapons. The explorers demonstrated their firepower and their superior technologies, and in later years flew select indigenes by airplane to see coastal cities; they took youngsters who could learn their language and serve as interpreters. The highlanders sought to fit the strangers into their existing economic and political dynamics as well as their prevailing cosmology; they wanted the unbelievable wealth of shells the strangers could distribute, and they sought to exploit the newcomers to advantage in the complex balance of endless wars among neighbors. Quickly, the Leahy party evolved protocols for contact.

  Yet the encounter was profoundly asymmetrical. Like Pizarro or Stanley, the explorers had come without permission or prior notice. They had simply appeared and, by their sheer presence, broke the old order. They stood outside the existing etiquette of exchange, were not subject to taboos, did not warrant traditional courtesies to travelers or pilgrims, were neither friend nor foe, just a pale Other. Their very identity was upsetting. Given the options, the highlanders labeled the newcomers as the spirits of former tribal members now returned. So, too, they sought to incorporate the cornucopia of shell wealth and the firepower of the interlopers within their existing economic and political contexts. Unsurprisingly, where communication was limited to crude signs and barter, violence was almost inevitable. The explorers were determined—believed it essential to their survival—that they demonstrate their lethal weapons. The indigenes wanted, first, to seize the wealth of the intruders and then, once they understood the folly of direct force, to steer that violence against their hereditary enemies.

  In the single-mindedness of their gold lust; in claiming special spiritual powers by predicting events from eclipses to the arrival of a Junkers transport plane; in reliance on indigenous labor and local lore; in their sexual relations with native women; in their violent retaliations to theft; in the cultivation of interpreters and a common language of trade and travel (pidgin); in the white-hot rivalries occasioned by competing prospectors and the bitter quarrels over priority that followed; in their awkward relations with missionaries and colonial authorities; in their destabilizing presence; in their growing weariness over the endless violence around them and the sheer strangeness of an Otherly morality; in an exhaustion that could lead to either submersion into that order or a desire to exterminate it—the Leahys were a throwback to First-Age exploration. They recapitulated a historical scenario of the civilization they represented.

  Each group was a novelty to the other. But the Leahys coped more easily. Why? They knew what they wanted, where they wished to go, and how they proposed to get what they sought. The New Guineans did not. The Leahys were surprised, but not stunned. They carried in their baggage train half a millennium of cultural tradition based on encountering new peoples in new lands. The New Guineans knew no one outside their hostile neighbors, all of whom worked to keep one another strictly in their place. They learned quickly enough; but the momentum lay with the explorers, as it had so often in the past. It was when the explorer returned that troubles so often boiled over. That had happened with Columbus, Stanley, Cook, and it happened with the Leahys. Familiarity bred not only contempt but covetousness, as each party sought to turn the other’s strengths to its own advantage.

  In this, however, the exploration of New Guinea marked perhaps the last hurrah of discovery before the Third Age. While the march of exploring prospectors across the highlands had its oddities, it shared with those other ages some great constants: they all had to deal, instantly and unavoidably, with the indigenes. Survival skills had less to do with hunting, tracking, making lean-tos, wrestling with grizzlies and shooting rhinos, or with more rugged nineteenth-century versions of camping out and backpacking, than with cross-cultural politics and negotiations. Explorers would succeed or fail according to their ability to deal with local peoples. They needed them as guides, interpreters, collectors, laborers, porters, assistants, and soldiers. With few exceptions—those stray desert islands such as Diego Garcia and Midway, those patches of continental terrain too empty for people and nearly for life, such as the inner Gobi, the Barren Grounds, and the interior ice sheet of Greenland—exploration was about encounters with people and, through people, places.

  That was the great divide among discovered places—and it is the major divide between the Second and Third Great Ages of Discovery. When Verrazano cruised off the coast of North America, and Cook off New Zealand, they saw smoke that they interpreted as evidence of people; but the Voyagers saw nothing that spoke to life, much less to exotic hominids. When Voyager 2 zipped past Uranus, there was no one on the planet or its moons to marvel at the strange spacecraft or wonder if it signified a returned ancestor, a forecast god, or a marooned machine ready for sacrifice. There was no one to threaten harm or to offer friendship. There was no one to enlist as a guide or impress as an interpreter. There was no one to reflect back a self-image of the explorer or serve as a prism to refract visions of the future. There was no one to stand, simply as himself, for an alternative moral universe. There was no one at all.

  Encounter was the great set piece of exploration, in which something happened that placed the journey beyond the routine of travel and through which narrative moved beyond tedium and banality into the essential drama of discovery. Yet it was less a simple process of reaching a goal—the source of the Nile, the North Pole—than it was an exchange between peoples whose aftershocks could affect the discoverer as much as the discovered.

  While Columbus might exalt, “How easy it would be to convert these people and to make them work for us,” the reality was that conversion might go either way. Europeans might themselves be forcibly converted, or simply choose to go native. The threat was present from the beginning, as Cortés discovered at Cozumel. Through an Indian interpreter named Melchior (who “understood a little Spanish and knew the language of Cozumel very well”), Cortés learned of two Spaniards who were held as “slaves” by Indians farther inland. One, Gerónimo de Aguilar, was freed, while the other, Gonzalo Guerrero, chose to remain. Aguilar told their story. They were the refugees of a voyage from Darien to Santo Domingo, brought on the wrecked ship’s boat by currents to Campeche. Some fifteen men and two women had escaped the downed ship. Upon the refugees’ landing, the indigenes they encountered sacrificed some “to their idols”; some died of disease; the two women had perished “of overwork”; but Aguilar and Guerrero had escaped, and now they alone survived. So far this was almost a parody of those narratives in which the indigenes found themselves under Spanish control. The climax came when the captives had to choose which society to follow.179

  When Aguilar appeared, he squatted “in Indian fashion” and wore no more clothing than the natives. He had taken holy orders, was grateful to be rescued and reclaimed by Spain, and willingly accepted clothes and relearned Spanish. But Gonzalo Guerrero, a sailor from Palos (where Columbus had first embarked), did not wish to return to Spain. Tattooed and pierced, he was married now, a father; a Cacique and a “captain in time of war,” he had been absorbed into indigenous society. Aguilar reminded him that he was a Christian and “should not destroy his soul for the sake of an Indian woman,” and if necessary could take his family with him to Spanish settlements. Gonzalo refused; and “neither words nor warnings” could persuade him otherwise. He had converted.180

  And that was
the threat, that exposure to other cultures might subvert loyalty to the true faith, be it of religion, ethnicity, or enlightened science. The discoverers could not simply slide newly discovered peoples into thematic pigeonholes. Their presence challenged those categories, and more powerfully, they did so by experience and felt belief, not simply by myth and codes of conduct. Over the coming centuries the proliferation of discovered peoples and the elaboration of their cosmologies disturbed Western civilization’s assumed values as fully as the bones of Megatherium and Archaeopteryx did the great chain of being.

  Because so many explorers thrived to the extent that they adapted native technologies, emulated native practices, or even assumed native identities, their experiences gnawed at the ideological and ethical roots of their self-identities and those of their sponsoring culture. The experience could be corrosive. Isolated, unfettered from their own social norms, they might lose the restraints of either society, as the officers of his rear column did on Stanley’s last expedition across Africa in 1887. They kidnapped or bought Manyema women for sex, became recorders (and perhaps enablers) of cannibalism, and sank into the kind of debauchery and brutality that Joseph Conrad would later characterize in Heart of Darkness.