The great paintings depict stalwart captains, standing upon decks and decrying fate for fortune, defying loneliness and trauma and death, and seeing in the wasteland endless possibility. But there’s more to this story than captains. The cramped cabins also housed botanists, physicians, collectors, and cartographers: men like Hans Sloane, whose specimens form the basis of the British Museum; Sir Joseph Banks, long-standing president of the Royal Society; and Mungo Park, Scottish botanist and the first westerner to track the vastness of the Niger. The explorers included in their ranks the ill-fated Robert Falcon Scott, who, like Walton, sought the land with no night and paid dearly—and a young Charles Darwin. Money, power, and politics might fund supplies and stock ships, but they could not inspire. An explorer’s heart strikes sparks from wanderlust, curiosity, and a blazing sense of the great, wide, and glorious world. It burned in the breast of Jules Verne, too, and though he never piloted a vessel of his own, he would steer an entire genre of extraordinary journeys.
The Unknown was an invitation; like Davy’s last dialogues it scintillated in its ambiguity. The explorers did not fight the darkness; they raced to its embrace. “If human beings are attracted to the known, to the realm of things as they are,” writes Elting Morison, “they are also, regrettably for their peace of mind, incessantly attracted to the unknown and things as they might be.”2 The story of electricity and the story of exploration together fired the imagination of generations to come—they inspired some of our greatest fiction, gave rise to heroes and villains before unimaginable. But most importantly, they serve as the constituent parts of George Shattuck Morison’s New Epoch. The heroes of electricity first manufactured power—that wondrous ability that Morison claims will sweep all else before it. “Man’s capacity is measured by the power which it can control,” a power that has “determined the ability of one tribe or nation to rule another.”3 But the explorers, by their ships, their maps, and the soul-stirring power of their stories, would manufacture an empire on which to practice power. Men would die (usually horribly) making inroads to new worlds. And men would die when they succeeded. The steampunk ethos, the fictional worlds of Whitechapel Gods or Frankenstein or myriad other tales help elucidate the strange underbelly of scientific desire and dread. But every explorer’s tale is also, by its very nature, a fiction. And here we see the great change at its beginning: We can follow the careful experiments of the electricians ourselves, and by those methods re-create wonders, but the voyages into dark continents, down jungle river valleys, across frozen poles, can never be replicated. The only witness also tells the tale, and spins it often years and years later, when age and illness have rendered them incapable of returning to the wild, when their journeys have become idyllic, even to themselves. Or, alternatively, the story is turned out in haste and to the political taste of whomever it serves and whoever will pay for the next voyage (and without the codicil that explains where, in the end, the explorer’s body lies). The success of the story did not depend on its veracity, but on its variety. Science and fiction begin their ages-long dance, and by the end of the nineteenth century, scientists, engineers, and explorers will become fictionalized heroes (and at least one fictional detective will seemingly become fact).
In 1596, Sir Walter Raleigh reported “headless men” lived in the country of Guiana, and that oysters grew on the mangrove trees. He claimed the natives lived in golden cities, that they bathed in gold dust, and that the land’s riches were open to any who would possess them. Even the title of his publication serves as advertisement: The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, and his reason for writing was to encourage England to possess it. Historian Willard Wallace once called it a “treatise of empire,” and Raleigh a colonist before his time.4 The early days of exploration, aided as they were by the astronomers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, looked at new worlds as lands of enrichment. The discovery of the Americas resulted in a race for consumption—the Spaniards leading—as they mauled the land and people for all they could carry. We rightly remember conquistadors for their conquests, epidemics, destruction of existing systems of government, and the razing of the Aztec, Inca, and other empires. Enslavement and genocide—some estimates suggest that before Cortez arrived in 1519, 25.3 million people lived in the discoverable parts of the New World. By 1605, only one million remained.5 More conservative estimates still point to mass death and destruction, a legacy of horror that we can never forget. By the eighteenth century, the desire for expansion had become an empire-building strategy—not to strip the land but to husband it, not to destroy the population but to colonize it. The results, not infrequently, were the same. But the meaning, and so the characters, of the new program had changed.
When Hans Sloane made it to Jamaica, the world already knew of its existence and had already heard tales of its inhabitants. It had, in fact, already been colonized. Here would be no tales of one-legged men, or people whose mouths appeared in their stomachs, or of mermaids, mermen, and monsters. Sloane was an Irish doctor, personal physician to the island’s governor. He was also a botanist with a mad desire for collecting. Lizards of all shapes and sizes, hundreds of birds and insects and plants—all of them utterly new and strange—made their way back to the curious in England. He wrote about the utility of the land, about the possibilities of the new plant specimens for medicine, and even about the witch-doctors he encountered there, who spoke of obeah—or Voodoo. The slaves, it was said, could practice this medicine against their masters.
A white Jamaican planter, Edward Long, described the ritual: “When assembled for the purposes of conspiracy, the obeiah-man, after various ceremonies, draws a little blood from every one present; this is mixed in a bowl with gunpowder and grave dirt; the fetish or oath is administered by which they solemnly pledge themselves to inviolable secrecy, fidelity to their chiefs, and to wage perpetual war against their enemies; as a ratification of their sincerity, each person takes a cup of the mixture, and this finishes the solemn rite.”6 Obeah/Voodoo originates in the Caribbean, and thrives on the belief that spirits of the dead can be harnessed to attack the living. It also relied upon the use of herbs—and of poisons. It was with the poisons that Sloane chiefly concerned himself; European doctors had much to gain from the promise of plants, and also as much to lose. Obeah men, as centers of the community, could promise solidarity and resistance; they could threaten with invisible power. Tessa Harris’s novel The Lazarus Curse, set in the eighteenth century, plays with the power and resistance theme by transporting Voodoo back to England in a story that revolves around the power of chemicals: the still-undiscovered alkaloids hiding in vegetable matter, from opium to nightshade. Tales circulated then as well as they do now, and in 1816, a law was passed recognizing the danger of Obeah: “if there shall be found in the possession of any slave any poisonous drugs, pounded glass, parrot’s beaks, dog’s teeth, alligator’s teeth, or other materials notoriously used in the practice of Obeah or witchcraft, such slave upon conviction, shall be liable to suffer.”7 The white owners maintained at once that the black slave had no power—and yet lived in fear of obeah magic; back in England and unable to parse the fact and the fiction, eager minds wondered at what other wonders might still be discovered. Among them, Joseph Banks, the same man who would, in his later years, promote both the stargazer William Herschel and the inexhaustible Humphry Davy. And, years later, the eager mind of a young boy at a boarding school in Nantes, France: Jules Verne.
Terra Icognita
Jules Verne was born in 1828, in the same year that French abolitionists finally pushed the government to end the trade and trafficking of slaves—though it would continue covertly until Verne was a young adult of twenty. Nantes, the town of Verne’s birth, served as the launch point for slaver ships, and so remained the focus of abolitionists and government interference, a foment that would stay with Verne all his life (and appear in works like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Steam House). The trade, the town, the port, for which N
antes is well known, alone would instill a child with wonder at the wide world beyond—each day a new face and new discoveries. He read widely, too, of the explorers themselves, great men with great dreams and great worlds to traverse. But if the narratives frequently offered a tissue of errors (as Verne himself complains later), his own mythos leaps and bubbles with excited, if not entirely verified, stories of adventure. The first “authoritative” biography appeared in 1928 by Verne’s grandniece, and told the tale of his boarding school experience, where the widowed teacher spun tales of her shipwrecked husband—lost for thirty years. It also recounts his flight from home, wherein the young Verne stowed away as a cabin boy on the Coralie freighter.8 While most of these stories are specious, one thing remains vibrantly apparent: Verne had a great love for scientific discovery and an equally unassailable affection for literature. In a letter to his father while studying law, he explains, “Literature above all . . . my mind is focused uniquely on this goal! What’s the use repeating all my ideas on the subject [. . .] my dear father, whether I do law for a couple of years or not, if both careers are pursued simultaneously, sooner or later one of them will destroy the other”—and, Verne patiently explained, “the bar [law] would not survive.”9 Verne’s earliest articles, published for Pitre-Chevalier, captured the spirit of discovery: “The First Ships of the Mexican Navy,” “A Balloon Trip”—and, notably—”Wintering in the Ice.” The love of voyage never left him, and by 1880, Verne completed a history of the eighteenth-century explorers who so fired his imagination; nearly four hundred pages, twenty engravings and maps, and his own pronouncement that all great expeditions owe their allegiance to “immense progress” of science.10 In the years between, Verne first conceived of his roman de la science, the novel of scientific significance from which Nemo’s Nautilus would later emerge. And the rest, in a very literal sense, is history.
The adventurous 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea gives us gadgetry through the electric and gear powered Nautilus, and The Steam House features a mechanical elephant trundling through the Indian jungle. But even here, there’s more to mimicry than clockwork conchs and steam-powered pachyderms. Captain Nemo uses his ship to sever all ties with humanity following the devastatingly bloody “Indian Mutiny” of 1857. The steam elephant serves as a safety vehicle for British colonists (whom Nemo calls the “oppressors”) in the aftermath of the same rebellion. Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon and The Mighty Orinoco, and even The Mysterious Island feature landscapes awash in rebellion, in bloody battles and the deaths (or near-deaths) of those who seek to explore and profit. Verne’s nonfiction account of the explorers whose shadows he chases in fiction begins, likewise, with needless bloodshed practiced by Dutch explorer Roggeveen, who fired upon “an inoffensive population which had awaited them upon the shore, and whose only fault consisted in their numbers.”11 We remember the bright adventures. But we forget the darkness, says Verne, at our peril.
Roggeveen’s company played a dangerous game. Like all eighteenth-century navigators, they fumbled in the dark to find islands whose coordinates were ambiguous, or even the stuff of imagination and legend. Food ran short, or went sour, and men suffered horribly with scurvy, crawling into their hammocks sometimes never to rise again. When they came ashore, it was as desperate men, but they pressed their advantage in weapons and massacres “worthy of barbarians” rather than “civilized men.”12 The British Lord of the Admiralty couched these exploits in patriotic terms: “nothing contributes more to the glory of this nation, in its character and of a maritime power, to the dignity of the British crown, and to the progress of national commerce” than exploration. Go, therefore, and bring light to the unknown places. Commodore Byron received that office, and took command of The Dauphin, a man-of-war, in 1764. The ship went heavily armed: 24 guns, 150 sailors, 37 petty officers. Byron landed at Rio to aid the sick, and was only then told of his secret mission—to hunt out islands in the Southern Seas, for England. In those climes, he encounters the extraordinary: an island, where waves lapped a pleasant shoreline and two steep mountains rose from the water. The vessel chased the island for hours, only to discover a mirage: “only a land of fog! I have passed all my life at sea,” Byron’s log explains, “but I never could have conceived so complete and sustained an illusion.”13 On other islands, he encounters men “of gigantic stature, and looking like monsters in human shape” with bodies “painted in a most hideous manner.”14 Byron’s crew submitted to extraordinary heat, to privation, and to landings which continued to end in the deaths of natives, but he returned to England without having laid claim to new discoveries. His ship, however, would carry on—and under the captaincy of a man called Wallis, she would land in paradise.
So many of the islands offered only desolation and “resembled the ruins of the world” rather than “an abode of living creatures.”15 Wallis’s men suffered constant damp, a rain that would not permit even one dry corner (all the foodstuffs were spoiled rotten), and were afflicted with fever and ague, distemper of bodies and minds, and long hours under sail and in baking sun. Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner of 1834, built from the stories of seafarers and whalers, reimagines the sick want of breeze and freshening air:
All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.
Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
The same might be said of the fetid water, still and turning bitter to the stomach and worse to the intestines: “Water, water, every where,/Nor any drop to drink.” The Dauphin skirted land it could not touch, turned away by hostile natives or sheer cliffs. Imagine, then, the delight of sailors so long at sea when the painted sky opened over a wondrous jungle. “The huts of natives were sheltered by shady woods,” the account recalls, with “graceful clusters of cocoanut-trees,” and wooded summits, and best of all “the silver sheen of rivers glistening amid the verdure as they found their way to sea.”16 The natives invited them to shore, especially the women (so the narrative goes) with “unequivocal gestures,” and the men brought fruit and fowls and pigs as presents. The captain had discovered his paradise, a promised land, and one that Captain Cook would return to with the best of botanists, Joseph Banks. But for all the talk of Eden, the natives called it Tahiti.
Richard Holmes’s account of Banks’s journey begins as follows: “On 13 April 1769, young Joseph Banks, official botanist to HM Bark Endeavour, first clapped eyes on the island of Tahiti, 17 degrees South, 149 degrees West. He had been told that this was the location of Paradise: a wonderful idea, although he did not quite believe it.”17 He’d joined Captain Cook’s expedition to draw plants, collect specimens, and provide what Wallis’s trip had not: scientific observation—but he, not unlike Humphry Davy after him, had a poetic turn. Despite initial misgivings, Banks described this place as “the truest picture of an Arcadia of which we were going to be Kings that the imagination can form.”18 Like the men of the Dauphin, the sailors found the islanders welcoming, and the women “free” with their affections. A sexual trade between the sailors and the inhabitants (in which sex could be exchanged for any metal item) had rendered Wallis’s ship endangered—the crew pried up the boards to obtain any screws, nails, bolts, and iron that united the timbers, and when they returned to sea, a storm carried away the Dauphin’s poop deck and forecastle.19 Cook tried to be more careful of his Endeavour; they were there, after all, to see the transit of Venus across the face of the sun and to establish the solar parallax.20 But Venus was tempting Banks in her other guise; he spent enough time on the island to take a “wife,” the lovely servant of the Tahitian queen, to learn their language, and in many other respects behave and live as the natives lived. He was, says Holmes, pioneering a different kind of science—what we think of today as anthropology—and unlike the bloody voyages before hi
m, he “trusted [himself] among them almost as freely as I could do in my own country, sleeping continually in their houses in the woods with not so much as a single [white/British] companion.”21 He had gone, with the fervor of Enlightenment burning in his breast, to practice “pure” science; to elucidate dark corners with the light of new mechanism. A colleague listed the materials that went into the hold: “a fine library of Natural History [. . .] all sorts of machines for catching and preserving insects; all kinds of nets, trawls, drags and hooks [. . .] they even have a curious contrivance of a telescope by which, put in water, you can see the bottom at a great depth.”22 The ship had been previously known as the Earl of Pembroke, but the British navy purchased her for exploration—to hunt the Terra Australis Incognita, the “unknown southern land.”23 They would also witness an astrological event that would not take place again for one hundred years. Light, or at least enlightenment, would carry them into parts unknown, and all under the flag of a now international science, a public project followed as closely from home. The London Gazetteer reported shortly after they sailed: “[t]he gentlemen, who are to sail in a few days for George’s Land,” or the newly discovered Tahiti, “with the intention to observe the Transit of Venus, as likewise, we are credibly informed, to attempt some new discoveries in the vast unknown tract” of the Southern Seas.24 They did not find them. For Banks, “some pleasure” could come of finding nothing at all, if only to disprove “that which does not exist but in the opinions of Theoretical writers,” men wrote about the seas without ever being in them.25 Banks, in his role as jungle explorer and later his role as head of the Royal Society, lived in a world far removed from that of Newton. For Banks, only seeing was believing, and though they might be looking at the same constellations as their predecessors, for captains like Cook (and in fact the British crown and navy) those stars were useful mainly as a means of recording coordinates, and of expanding and enriching the empire.
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