Consider this description of polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott. “Scott was the strongest combination of a strong man in a strong body that I have ever known,” wrote Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who accompanied Scott on his doomed voyage. “And this because he was so weak! Naturally so peevish, highly-strung, irritable, depressed and moody. Practically such a conquest of himself, such vitality, such push and determination, and withal in himself such personal and magnetic charm. His triumphs are many—but the Pole was not by any means the greatest of them. Surely the greatest of them was that he conquered his weaker self and became the strong leader whom we went to follow and whom we came to love.”
Scott, like other explorers, set out to challenge himself, and in the process changed the world. Their personal struggles comprise the history of exploration, a powerful study of human nature highlighting the potential within all of us to do something far beyond that which we think ourselves capable. That’s why looking back at these individuals and their achievements is so worthwhile. The RGS was somewhat right—bar perhaps the bottom of several deep-sea trenches, and some epic caves, the Earth has physically been explored. But that doesn’t mean the Earth is devoid of challenge. In our lives, we all move forward into the unknown, making each of us just one of the seven billion explorers on the planet. And the men and women I want to write about in this book are not only pathmakers who helped redraw the maps; their lives are maps themselves.
In this way, there is a universal connection between explorers and just about anyone who has ever stepped outside their comfort zone to challenge themselves. What are we capable of accomplishing? What are our limits? How far is too far? How far is not far enough?
This quest for potential spans the centuries. It is the link between Christopher Columbus and Steve Jobs. It is the root source of failure, for to fail at something one must first make an attempt. Potential, however, is also the root source of smashing, breathtaking, world-changing success. Wilfrid Noyce, a British mountain climber who was part of the first successful ascent of Mount Everest, once wrote, “Why do we do it? I think the reasons are many, and that one of them is simply that it is part of the human nature to want to ‘prove’ yourself, to show yourself that you could do something you thought impossible.”
So the history of exploration is not just an interconnected series of journeys, but also a powerful study of the human condition. There is an explorer within each of us, silently longing to climb our own personal Everest.
The commonality can most easily be seen in the seven common traits that all explorers possessed: curiosity, hope, passion, courage, independence, self-discipline, and perseverance. Explorers didn’t just own those traits; they also displayed them in specific order over the course of a journey. Take away one—just one—and an expedition was doomed to failure.
These seven traits are also vital to all of us, in the challenges we face each day, as tools to help us through our own wilderness wanderings. Motivational theorists argue that all successful human endeavors follow the same path from curiosity through to perseverance that the explorers did—and in the same order. Not only that, but navigating this path is developmentally vital to ensuring feelings of personal fulfillment and wellness. “This construct describes the natural inclination toward exploration,” wrote Dr. Richard Ryan in American Psychologist, describing the Theory of Intrinsic Motivation, which explores the roots of curiosity. “It is essential to cognitive and social development and represents a principal source of enjoyment and vitality through life.”
Psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania went a step further, stating that these attributes “improve quality of life and prevent the pathologies that arise when life is barren and meaningless,” and are “the positive features that make life worth living.”IV
The seven traits of an explorer are more than just random traits shared by hardy souls. They are the building blocks of well-being and success, applicable to each and every one of us, every day of our lives. In them, we glimpse the potential for greatness residing inside us all.
But it should also be noted there is a reason that explorers needed to find that greatness far from the social restrictions and expectations of society. This makes them very difficult people to study, and even more difficult to see past their limitations. Explorers were famous for burning down their own lives—and the lives of others. They were outcasts. They were terrible with money. They loved the wrong people.
They were the wrong people.V
And yet, they somehow achieved feats beyond belief or measure. We all have limitations, and we all have moments of messy behavior. So don’t examine the lives of explorers for morality lessons, half measures, or social cues. Instead, see explorers as men and women bent on finding their own personal greatness by fulfilling their potential, and study the steps they took to get there, succeeding in spite of their limitations. What better place to look for guidance as we divine the path through our own tangled lives than the men and women who have already blazed that trail?
“Exploration,” as Apollo astronaut Frank Borman once noted, “is really the essence of the human spirit.”
Which brings us back to Speke.
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I. Referring back to the etymology of the word “explorer,” another noteworthy example of how a word changes can be seen in the word “Roger.” Now used primarily as a common name, it was once more associated with the act of sexual congress. The dread pirates of the Caribbean, for instance, did not sail the flag of the Jolly Roger because they were happy guys named Roger. It should also be noted that the term Roger, in some parts of the world, is still slang for sex. Based on all this, one can easily imagine that at some point two or three centuries down the road there will be children with the endearing name of “Fucker.”
II. At the time, the RGS headquarters was at 1 Savile Row. This is now the home of the tailor firm Gieves & Hawkes. A photo of Livingstone’s coffin is still on display in the location of the former map room.
III. Stoddart was also no dummy. The Aldabra Atoll is a tropical paradise in the Seychelles. It is virtually uninhabited and untouched by humans. Having a deserted tropical island to oneself sounds like a spectacular way to spend summer vacation.
IV. Researchers Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, leading voices in the study of positive psychology, framed the traits as hope, wisdom, creativity, future-mindedness, courage, spirituality, responsibility, and perseverance.
V. Paraphrased from a speech given by Bruce Springsteen while accepting an award on February 19, 2013. He was speaking about musicians. Given that explorers have frequently been labeled as the rock stars of their time, the comparison is apt.
CURIOSITY
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The air reeked of squalor and coal dust as twenty-seven-year-old Jack Speke stepped off the P&OI steamer from Calcutta in search of his first African adventure. Flies were everywhere. It was mid-September 1854, and the miserable port of Aden, with its barren volcanic landscape, unremitting heat, and towering piles of coal, was to be a brief stopover. The refueling hub at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula was just 300 miles across the Red Sea from the mysterious and uncharted land so often referred to as “the Dark Continent.” All Speke had to do was find a ship that would transport him to the other side. His goal was hunting big game, and he had no qualms about traveling alone. In fact, he reveled in the solitude.
Speke was born on May 4, 1827, in rural England, into a lineage that suggested anything but a life of adventure. Jack Speke was a loner who performed poorly in school, and stumbled with the social graces. Little about him suggested he would become an explorer, let alone one of such surpassing greatness that a nation whose vast global empire was built upon the discovery and conquest of previously uncharted spots on the map would erect a towering monument in his name.
In a word, Jack Speke possessed that most vital requirement for b
ecoming an explorer: he was ordinary.
By his early twenties, Speke was just a shade under six feet tall, brown-haired, long-limbed, and prone to anxiety—unless he was hunting, whereupon Speke became the picture of steely resolve. His family had owned an estate in the British countryside since Norman times, giving him a societal edge that he used to great effect throughout his life. His mother was domineering and his father had no interest in leaving his manor to run for political office, like so many influential men of his time. But Jack Speke had no such qualms. He left home at seventeen because it was clear that his older brother was the apple of his father William’s eye. Remaining at Jordans, the family home in Somerset, would have been a daily reminder that none of the green pastures and hills on which he so loved to hunt would ever be passed on to him.
So, with the intercession of the Duke of Wellington, Speke was commissioned and packed off to India. There he fought in the First Anglo-Sikh War, was heavily decorated for courage under fire, earned a reputation for keeping to himself, abstaining from drink most of the time, keeping his hands off the local women, and taking solitary hunting adventures into the wilds of India and Tibet.
Though his penchant for solitude and heady independence made Speke a poor choice for a military man, the Royal Army was the making of him.
By 1854, after ten long years of service, Speke had accrued a massive three years of leave. Having also used that time to save as much of his salary as possible, Speke possessed the time and the means to wander across the plains of Africa, hunting game and collecting plant and bird specimens for his private collection.
If the otherwise virtuous Speke had a fault, it was the zeal in which he pursued those shooting forays. He shot in the manner of the great buffalo hunters of the American West, killing any new and unique animal that wandered into his path. His native bearers then toted the heads and skins back to his outpost, whereupon they were shipped home to Jordans for display in the small family museum. The carcasses were often left where they fell. This might have been considered enterprising on the Great Plains, where some sixty million bison were wiped out in less than forty years,II but among his fellow British officers, Speke’s obsession with these solitary hunts marked him as an outsider. On September 4, just one day after finishing his ten years of service in India and attaining the rank of captain, Speke boarded the P&O bound for Aden. After exhaustively overhunting the Asian subcontinent, he had every intention of doing the same in Africa. Before leaving India he had purchased “cheap guns, revolving pistols, swords, cheap cutlery of all sorts, beads, cotton stuffs of a variety of kinds, and sewing material, to the amount of £390 sterling” for the purpose of bartering with Africans along the way.
For a man who had taken fire from the militant Sikhs in pitched military battles at Rámnagar, Sadullápur, Chilianwala, and Gujarat, Speke seems to have been possessed of a powerful naïveté. One did not merely wander alone into Africa and amble about the countryside, no matter how well armed. At Somaliland, for instance, the point of landfall closest to Aden, there lived a tribe colloquially known as “the penis-cutting people,” for their fondness of emasculating their victims. European missionaries who had made the mistake of venturing solo into Africa were routinely killed, or sometimes held captive by a tribal king for the rest of their lives. The British aura of supremacy, which had protected Speke during his hunting forays into the relatively peaceful tribal regions of the Punjab and Himalayas, was nowhere to be seen in Africa. Other than Cape Town, some four thousand miles south of Somaliland, the British presence in sub-Saharan Africa was limited to an exploration party currently making its way along the Zambezi River and led by David Livingstone—a dyspeptic former missionary and physician who was hardly the embodiment of military might.
We’ll get to Livingstone later, for he plays a crucial role in the drama of Speke and Burton. But for now the fact remains that Speke did not possess a clear command of the facts when it came to Africa. Call it the entitlement of a man raised in wealth, or the mind-set of a man just returned from a decade of subjugating a nation to the will of Britain and Queen Victoria, but Speke was deeply out of touch with reality.
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Thankfully, the British political agent in Aden, Colonel James Outram, told him so. Informing Speke that the Somali were “of such a wild and inhospitable nature that no stranger could possibly live among them,” Outram specifically forbade Speke from attempting the journey. And without Outram’s blessing, Speke’s quest was as good as over.
This saga might have ended there, were it not for the presence of another would-be traveler enduring the heat and flies of Aden. Richard Francis Burton had been there since May, his heart set on exploring the interior of Somaliland. At the time of Speke’s arrival, the intense and often contentious Burton was embroiled in a bitter feud with Outram over the political agent’s refusal to let him venture into Africa.
Burton was a proven adventurer, already famous (and increasingly infamous) throughout England. He had placed his life at great risk by disguising himself as a Muslim pilgrim and successfully traveling to the holy city of Mecca just a year earlier. The punishment for a non-Muslim caught attempting such a deception is death, and Burton was forced to don several disguises, affect several different dialects, and even undergo circumcision to make sure he could pass for a Muslim. Once, while urinating standing up instead of squatting in the Arab custom, he almost gave himself away. But Burton talked his way out of that awkward moment, completed his pilgrimage, and became instantly revered throughout England for his audacious courage.
On the infamous side, Burton, who had enlisted in the army after being kicked out of Oxford’s Trinity College in 1842, had been charged with investigating the brothels of Karachi during his army service in India. The resulting report effectively ended all chance of a serious military career, as it incriminated several high-ranking British officers on charges of having sex with young men and small children. And while Burton was a proficient fencer, falconer, and linguist,III the charge that would follow him the rest of his life was that of hedonist—for while Burton was investigating the brothels, there was also ample evidence that he mightily enjoyed them. Burton certainly didn’t help matters later in life by translating the Kama Sutra into English and starting a secret society to publish and circulate erotic literature at a time when the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 meant prison time for violators.
All that being said, Burton’s Somaliland Expedition was down a man, due to the sudden death of his old friend, Dr. J. Ellerton Stocks, while back home in London. The cause of death was apoplexy, which at the time meant any sort of unexplained instant demise ranging from heart attack to cerebral aneurysm. A far worse fate might have awaited Stocks in Africa, as Burton and Speke would soon learn for themselves. But the bottom line was that Burton was in a spot of bother. He needed a new hand for his expedition, and was glad to overlook the obvious societal and personal gaps between the two of them. Once it was agreed that Speke might join the expedition, the two men set to work on changing Outram’s mind.
On the surface, Jack Speke and Dick Burton had little in common. But there was the one trait they shared in abundance, and this made them fast friends. The trait was evidenced not just by their determination to explore an uncharted land, and their vast range of personal hobbies, but also their unrepentant desire to seek the unknown at all cost.
It is known as curiosity.
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Human curiosity is a private thing, the satisfying of a need. It was curiosity that motivated explorers to venture forth. “A desire,” as Venetian Ludovico di Varthema noted in the sixteenth century, “to behold the kingdoms of the world.”
Curiosity beats within all of us, for mankind is innately inquisitive. In childhood our curiosities are vast, leading us to wonder, often aloud, about the world and the heavens. For most of us those curiosities narrow to the practical as we grow older, until questions about the vast unknown beyond our dai
ly routine occupy a neglected corner of the brain, trotted out only while reading travel brochures or gazing at constellations.
Explorers were different. Their curiosity had a boundlessness that never diminished. It inhabited their psyches and their dreams, allowing them to approach each day with a sense of wonder. And in that wonder, they attained the epic. “Then, too, there was the fascination of seeing the very heart of the Himalayas,” wrote Francis Younghusband in 1887, during his epic walk from Peking to Bombay, “as we should have crossed their entire breadth on the way to India. And all combined was one grand project—this idea of striking boldly out from Peking to penetrate to India—that of itself inspired enthusiasm and roused every spark of exploring ardor in me.”
Curiosity drew explorers into the magnetic pull of new places, people, objects, rituals, and vistas. They longed to learn more, and often became so immersed that these lands became a sort of second home. With this familiarity, the explorer was compelled to push on, to begin the cycle of leaving normal and striking into the unknown all over again. “Already I dropped back into the desert as if it were my own place,” Gertrude Bell wrote while wandering across central Arabia before World War I. “Silence and solitude fell around you like an impenetrable veil.”
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