Voyager - Exploration, Space, And The Third Great Age Of Discovery

by Stephen J. Pyne

  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

  During the era of IGY preparation, and before the space race became dominant, Clarke wrote sea and space novels in a kind of thematic fugue, which culminated in two parallel collections of essays: The Challenge of the Spaceship (1959) and The Challenge of the Sea (1960). But the deep oceans became decoupled from colonization and popular imagination, leaving space as the more untrammeled realm for the imagination, and that is where fiction, and Clarke, went.

  Clarke brought to an apex the alloy of exotic technology, latent spiritualism, and futurist settings so common to the genre. From his once-colonial island he imagined brave new worlds, bold encounters with wonders and monsters, and humanity’s assisted evolution into godlike stature. With the 1968 release of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey , based on a Clarke story and then a Clarke-co-authored screen-play, the hard engineering of rockets met utopianism, and with his Rama trilogy (1973-91) he created a Romantic epic, a Lusíads for space imperialism. Throughout there is the specter of a humanity advancing beyond the limits of its genetics and ancestral geography, with perhaps links to alien civilizations in its distant past and unbounded spiritual promise, even immortality, in its future. This vast literary output and commentaries established Clarke in the public mind as the Delphic oracle of the emerging space age. In 2000 he was made a Knight of the British Empire. He outlived, outwrote, and out-prophesied every potential colleague and rival.

  What did Clarke foresee? That “the conquest of space is possible must now be regarded as a matter beyond all serious doubt” and that “the conquest of the planets” was now both necessary and inevitable to renew the human mind and spirit.37

  It was necessary because geographic expansion enlarged “mental horizons” and stasis contracted them. Exploration and colonization were essential because “when Man loses his curiosity one feels he will have lost most of the other things that make him human,” a legacy of wanderlust that “the long literary tradition of the space-travel story” showed was rooted “in Man’s nature.” Like the Great Voyages, space exploration would spark a New Renaissance, “an expansion of scientific knowledge perhaps unparalleled in history”; would forge a common Earth identity and force Earthlings to perceive the “true” place of their “single small globe” amid the cosmos; and most thrillingly, would hold the “prospect of meeting other forms of intelligence,” for it would address “one of the supreme questions of philosophy,” whether or not “Man is alone in the Universe,” and “at last learn what purpose, if any, life plays in the Universe of matter.” The Earth is not world enough. The Intelligent Visitors would of course be benevolent, and they would force Earth into a Reformation before which those of the past would seem laughably puny.38

  This entire Romantic edifice was built on the mixed sand and stone of history and literary precedent. Clarke commenced his serious space romances as the British Empire began its dissolution; he resided at one of its former colonies; and his vision that Earth’s future necessarily lay in expansion—in exploration and empire, though of benign forms—was a lineal descendant of Rycharde Eden and Richard Hakluyt urging that England’s future lay with far-voyaging and overseas colonies. What arguments he did not invent, he revived, absorbed, and endowed with literary expression.

  In striking ways few contemporaries have added significantly to the oeuvre. Virtually the entire corpus of Carl Sagan’s passionate pleas for a future in space, for example, are not only foreshadowed in Clarke but present in almost identical language: The potential of technology. The power of scientific curiosity. The significance of expansion to forestall decadence. The search for intelligence beyond Earth and the belief that it is human destiny to make contact with such intelligence. The assumption that such contact would revolutionize human civilization.

  What Sagan added was a stronger argument from biology. In Clarke’s day rockets were the critical motive force: they made interplanetary travel possible. In Sagan’s time, rockets and gravity assist were adequate to explore the solar system, but the motives to use them needed bolstering. The search for life could serve as an intermediary to the search for intelligence. If Clarke implicitly sent a benevolent British Empire into the heavens, Sagan drafted a less chauvinistic master narrative that made the space age another link in a great chain of purposed human wandering. Significantly, the two writers’ passion for planetary exploration converged on Mars.

  DOUBTERS

  The rhetoric for space was vibrant, loud, and, for many, compelling. But where there are arguments, there are also counterexamples, and where prophets flourish, apostates abound. For every Arthur C. Clarke and Carl Sagan, there were Cassandras and chroniclers to count the cost.

  In The Sirens of Titan, published the year after IGY ended, as satellite after satellite lofted upward, Kurt Vonnegut mordantly observed that “the state of mind on Earth with regard to space exploration was much like the state of mind in Europe with regard to exploration of the Atlantic before Christopher Columbus set out.” There were differences, of course, almost all tending to make the contemporary scene even more formidable. “The monsters between space explorers and their goals were not imaginary, but numerous, hideous, various, and uniformly cataclysmic; the cost of even a small expedition was enough to ruin most nations; and it was a virtual certainty that no expedition could increase the wealth of its sponsors.” In the face of such facts only one conclusion was possible: “on the basis of horse sense and the best scientific information, there was nothing good to be said for the exploration of space.” His satire places Vonnegut in a long tradition that has turned the rhetoric of prophets, in this case the siren call of space wrapped in technological romance, against itself.39

  From the beginning the skeptics and the scoffers were at the docks, in the committee rooms, and all over the press to rebut dazzling thesis with grubby fact, and to scorn forecast bright visions of the future with recalled dark visitations from the past.

  In the greatest of exploration literature they come together, as in Luiz Vaz de Camões’s The Lusíads, which casts the founding voyage of Vasco da Gama to India within the elevated style of the classical epic. The Olympians themselves are astonished by the audacity of the Portuguese. Jupiter exclaimsNow you watch them, risking all

  In frail timbers on treacherous seas,

  By routes never charted, and only

  Emboldened by opposing winds;

  Having explored so much of the earth

  From the equator to the midnight sun,

  They recharge their purpose and are drawn

  To touch the very portals of the dawn.

  He tells a worried Venus that they will exceed even the exploits of Ulysses and Aeneas, that “Your greater navigators will unfold / New worlds to the amazement of the old.”40

  This exchange occurs while the mariners are leaving the piers at Belém, ready for their passage to the Indies, but as demanded of an epic, the tale had begun in medias res. When the text returns to narrate the fleet’s departure, Camões inserts an astonishing scene, one of The Lusíads’ most moving, in which the crew try to avert their eyes from the sight of loved ones left behind and close their ears to those petitioning them to cease. But they cannot avoid an old man, his eyes “disapproving,” who harangues the departing ships from the shore, hurling prophecies and mockery from a wisdom plucked
out of a “much-tried heart.”41

  One by one, the Old Man of Belém demolishes the presumptions that fill the sails of the unmoored ships. Honor is no more than “popular cant”; fame, but vainglory; “visions of kingdoms and gold-mines,” delusions; bold discoveries, mere folly; idealism, a disguise for greed. Crusading zeal is better satisfied closer at hand. Adventuring will only lead to “new catastrophes” and wreck “all peace of soul and body.” The glitter of gold is a seductress’s call that will deplete rather than enrich. Subtly, yet “manifestly,” the Carreira da India will “consume the wealth of kingdoms and empires!” The voyage is but the latest example of an interminable, tragic restlessness:In what great or infamous undertaking,

  Through fire, sword, water, heat, or cold,

  Was Man’s ambition not the driving feature?

  Wretched circumstance! Outlandish creature!42

  There lies the meaning of the Old Man’s lament: the unalterably flawed character of humanity. The founding epic is a tragedy. And so it proved. Six years after The Lusíads was published, with its admonition to renew the grand adventure, King Sebastian led a crusade to Morocco that destroyed his army, cost him his life, and shortly after Camões’s death, drove Portugal into a reluctant union with Spain. Without the quick riches of the India trade, such foreign adventures would not have been possible, and without the elevated rhetoric of redirected romance, they could likely not have rallied the obligatory enthusiasms.

  But as the Old Man knew, the ships were already unmoored and riding the tides of the Tagus out to sea. His voice has to call to them over the waters. His warning comes too late.

  As the Great Voyages proliferated, scoffers found ample experiences to criticize. Only the incorporation of exploration into national creation stories has allowed the chronicle to tilt toward the visionaries.

  Columbus proved almost delusional in his systematic inaccuracies and willful refusal to acknowledge what he had actually discovered rather than what he wished to have discovered, much less what he had promised would result from his discoveries; and this stubbornness resulted in a loss of interest in the New World, certainly among prospective colonists. Until global warming melted back the pack ice, the Northwest Passage was a fata morgana that called challengers to their death. The Castilian sagas of conquest in Mexico and Peru sent ravenous conquistadors forlornly over much of the New World in a vain, often disastrous, pursuit to find another Tenochtitlán or Cuzco, and inspired a flagging Portugal to dispatch exploring warriors to unveil fabulously rich Mexicos rumored to be hidden in the interior of southern Africa, all with ruinous outcomes. Still, the call to oars was stronger, or at least louder, than the injunction to mind one’s store.

  But as the First Age became moribund, as exploration was tamed into trade, the doomsayers outwrote the soothsayers. The prevailing perception among elites was that exploration was a loser’s game, the geopolitical equivalent of buying lottery tickets. Many of the dominant figures of the age, if they commented at all, turned against what they regarded as irrational, wasteful, and destructive voyaging. The classics of travel literature that span the early Enlightenment and continue through Britain’s Augustan age are almost all inoculated against the riotously extravagant rhetoric that accompanied the Great Voyages and ridicule the voyaging visionaries. The era begins with a cautionary tale from Daniel Defoe, passes through brutal satires by Jonathan Swift and Voltaire, and ends with a moral epistle wrapped in a story by Samuel Johnson.

  Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is not what abridged juvenile literature today often makes it: the celebration of a bold adventurer who finds and then fashions a new world in his own image. Rather, it is a paean to destructive willfulness and wanderlust that leads to a loneliness that leaves Crusoe only a stone’s throw from all-consuming despair in what he openly calls his “captivity.” Appropriately, the story opens with Crusoe’s father in the role of the Old Man of Belém. Sensing his son’s intentions, he asks “what reasons more than a mere wandering inclination” Robinson might have to throw away his prospects. “He told me it was for men of desperate fortunes on one hand, or of aspiring, superior fortunes on the other, who went abroad upon adventures, to rise by enterprise, and make themselves famous in undertakings of a nature out of the common road; that these things were all either too far above me, or too far below me; that mine was the middle state,” which he had found by long experience was “the best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness” and the one “which all other people envied.” Robinson père urges his son to reconsider, to be satisfied with his station in life, and cease his footloose folly, or else he would have ample opportunity to reflect upon his heedlessness. In that, Crusoe notes ruefully, his father proved “truly prophetic.”43

  The great satirists of the Enlightenment went beyond a chronicle of misplaced ambition to ridicule outright appeals to free-floating discovery and utopian adventuring. The godfather of the genre was Jonathan Swift’s classic, nominally written by a Lemuel Gulliver, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World (1726; revised in 1735). In it Gulliver, a surgeon forced to turn to the sea for his livelihood, finds himself “condemned by Nature and Fortune to an active and restless life” that results in four voyages of discovery. The first takes him to Lilliput, a land of tiny people northwest of Van Diemen’s Land; the second, to Brobdingnag, a land of giants east of the Moluccas; the third, to Laputa, an island magnetically levitated, and to other islands leading to Japan, all full of “projectors” and other visionaries; and the fourth, as captain of the Adventure, after being overthrown by mutineers, marooned in the country of the Houyhnhnms.

  Gulliver’s Travels turned the emerging genre of the travelogue, or more properly, the journal of a voyage, back onto itself, for what Gulliver finds are commentaries upon his own society, and a critique upon discovery as it was practiced. He was particularly disgusted with the prevailing logic by which exploration must lead to claims, and claims to conquest, since he did not believe the lands he had visited had “a desire of being conquered and enslaved, murdered or driven out by colonies, nor abound either in gold, silver, sugar, or tobacco,” he did “humbly conceive they were by no means proper objects of our zeal, our valour, or our interest.” He scorned travel writing as “fables” and thought it “better, perhaps, that the adventure not have taken place, or if occurring, that its discoveries remain unknown.”44

  To Voltaire outrage invited a bitter satire, the short story “Micromégas” (1752), likely inspired by the 1735 journey to Lapland under Pierre Maupertuis. Voltaire reverses the usual relationship between discoverer and discovered by imagining a giant from Sirius and a dwarf from Saturn who visit Earth. As with Swift, the obsession of the age with mathematics and travel combine to produce a work of measurements and proportions, though in the end these are not so much mathematical as moral. They become an argument for a golden mean. The real need is not to look outward with idealistic awe but to look inward with greater realism. A missionary turned entrepreneur turned visionary of colonization such as Pierre Poivre might want more stories of travelers who, like Crusoe, must create gardens on deserted isles, but most preferred, after Voltaire, to tend their own plots outside the kitchen.

  The same year that those paired expeditions set out to Lapland and Ecuador was the year Samuel Johnson translated into English A Voyage to Abyssinia by the Portuguese missionary Father Jerome Lobo. In 1759 that project birthed Rasselas; or, the Prince of Abissinia. Rasselas grows up in Happy Valley, a hidden Eden in a remote valley of Amhara, in which every desire is sated. Yet the prince is restless. “That I want nothing,” or “that I know not what I want,” he concludes, is “the cause of my complaint.” The only solution, it appears, is for him to escape and see for himself “the miseries of the world, since the sight of them is necessary to happiness.” The journey begins.45

  This of course is a moral trek, a Pilgrim’s Progress, brought into alignment with the geographic travels that the past age had thrown up. The journey reverses the e
xpected route by flowing down the Nile from its source to its delta; it thus begins with a putative paradise and ends with a knowledge of misery. The conclusion is that the travel was pointless, except to confirm what the sages had said originally. Marooned during the Nile’s flood, the party abandons the ambitions that launched its travels, the search for a scheme of happiness, and resolves to return home.46

  But that had always been the true bullion brought back by travelers. They saw themselves and their society differently. They had to engage with Others in what could ultimately be described only as an encounter between moral worlds. They did not merely climb mountains or search out the fountains of great rivers: they had to talk with other peoples. Gulliver talks, Micromégas talks, Rasselas talks, and only after Friday arrives on his island can Crusoe cease to talk to himself and begin the real task of discovery. But for such knowledge, one did not have to sail to undiscovered worlds. Equivalent lessons existed in history, for the past, too, was “a foreign country,” and the neoclassicists could argue that Pliny and Plutarch might inform as fully as the Houyhnhnms and the Laputans. This, however, was an argument for learning and languages, a scholar’s plea, not a call for geographic adventuring.

  Yet even as Rasselas the text saw print, a Second Great Age of Discovery was aborning. An inextinguishable restlessness would be channeled into a renewed era of far-voyaging. On March 31, 1776, James Boswell informed Samuel Johnson that he had found a copy of Johnson’s translation of Lobo’s travels, which Johnson dismissed and was content to have forgotten. Two days later Boswell described a meeting he had just had with Capt. James Cook, recently returned from the South Seas, and found Johnson “much pleased with the conscientious accuracy of that celebrated circumnavigator.” Boswell then burst out that “while I was with the Captain, I catched the enthusiasm of curiosity and adventure, and felt a strong inclination to go with him on his next voyage.” It was easy, he continued, to be “carried away with the general grand and indistinct notion of a Voyage Round the World.” The august doctor agreed but dismissed the sentiment when he considered “how very little” one “can learn from such voyages.”47