by John Keay
Travel as the raw material of geography has a pedigree as long as history. An anthology could begin with Harkhuf, “the first recorded explorer”, who around 2300 BC reached the land of Yam. An inscription on his tomb near Aswan records that after an absence of seven months Harkhuf returned to Egypt laden with “all kinds of gifts” including a dancing dwarf. He also brought panthers, ebony and ivory; it is presumed therefore that Yam lay somewhere up the Nile in Nubia. As old as history, geography amounted to much the same thing for Greek writers like Herodotus and Xenophon. Along with astronomy and what we would now call ethnology, history-geography provided the physical and human context so vital to self-conscious civilizations. Knowledge of where one stood in relation to other planets, other peoples, other lands and other ages was comforting because it presumed an intellectual supremacy over them.
Where one stood was, of course, at the apex of history and at the centre of the world, ideas which could be graphically embodied in diagrammatic form, especially maps. Thus for the Chinese the world map shaded off from their well-ordered Middle Kingdom into various degrees of barbarism; the Graeco-Roman world, with the Mediterranean at its centre, was similarly uncomplimentary about outsiders with amphibian monsters and woad-speckled savages lurking round its watery perimeter. Religion-crazed societies like those of Hindu-Buddhist India or medieval Christian Europe often found space in their maps for an additional vignette portraying the bliss of nirvana or heaven; it usually appeared at the top, the dead centre being reserved for the Hindu’s Mount Meru or the Christian’s Jerusalem. Such complacent centricity survived even scientific enlightenment about the true shape of the earth and the rather arbitrary distribution of its land masses. With no attempt at impartiality conventional maps still show the northern hemisphere, home of the erstwhile colonial powers where such cartography was perfected, at the top of the globe; and conventional projections of the world, centred on the Greenwich Mean, still accord Europe a pivotal prominence. That conceit, implicit in exploration, that any firsthand account of places unfamiliar to a European readership constituted discovery, predates the nineteenth century by at least two millennia.
Familiarity with other lands and peoples also conferred a political edge over them. Gathering knowledge is an acquisitive process, a vicarious form of conquest; and understanding one’s environment has always been closely associated with mastery of it. Later explorers were not the only ones who were hard put to disclaim all colonizing intentions. Emerging from the Australian outback after an epic crossing of that continent in 1862, one of John McDouall Stuart’s companions climbed a small hill, glimpsed the Timor Sea, and announced journey’s end. His croaked cries of “The Sea, The Sea” nicely echoed the lustier shouts of Xenophon’s Ten Thousand as they breasted the hills above Trebizond in 400 BC and sighted the Black Sea. Stuart had crossed the heart of his continent and confidently anticipated ranchers, settlers and the transcontinental telegraph line following in his trail. Xenophon was in retreat, hard-pressed and anxious to be home. But the knowledge, not the circumstances under which it was acquired, was what mattered. Thanks to Xenophon, Armenia and Anatolia had become as much a part of the Greek world as, thanks to Stuart, central Australia had of the British world. Seventy years after Xenophon, Alexander the Great turned knowledge into dominion.
Whether Harkhuf, our first explorer, was interested in intelligence-gathering is unclear. But to judge by all those “gifts” he was not indifferent to trade. As well as commerce, probably up the Nile, with Yam and other parts of Africa, the ancient Egyptians pioneered maritime trade. Punt, a land which may correspond to Somalia but was more probably in southern Arabia, was the Pharaohs’ main source of incense and unguents. To a people obsessed with temple ritual and preserving their dead these were vital commodities, every bit as valued and desirable as, much later, were spices by meat-eating medieval Europe. If Harkhuf never ventured to Punt, contemporaries and descendants certainly did, thus pioneering the maritime trade of the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. In their wake followed Greeks and Phoenicians who reached India and may even have circumnavigated Africa. High value commodities like gold, ivory, precious stones, and spices now comprised the main stimulus to exploration; tin even tempted mariners beyond the straits of Gibraltar and up Europe’s Atlantic sea-board to the British Isles. The Romans would follow but in the Indian Ocean, where long distance maritime trade supplied Rome with spices and exotica, it was the Arabs who eventually engrossed the ancient world’s most lucrative commerce and its most extensive field of geographical knowledge.
Navigation is of course a science and without the technical expertise of the Phoenicians, Greeks and Arabs in astronomy and instrumentation this steady widening of geographical horizons would have been impossible. Yet until the eighteenth century science remained but a means to an end. It was the same for the Vikings whose remarkable voyages in the tenth and eleventh centuries extended to Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland; and it was even so for Henry the Navigator, the Portuguese prince whose patronage and encouragement of maritime science in the fifteenth century led to the famous succession of Portuguese voyages down, and eventually round, the African coast. For Prince Henry, as for Harkhuf, trade was the priority. Pious objectives, like carrying the crusades round Islam’s African flank, discovering the mythical kingdom of Prester John, or winning converts, were quickly forgotten the moment that Vasco da Gama reached India (1498) and filled his ships with spices.
Trade was also responsible for what was known of Eurasia’s inland geography. Here the backbone of all knowledge was the famous silk route from China through Central Asia to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Political emissaries and religious propagandists occasionally threaded its deserts and mountain passes en route to fabled Cathay; but much more typical were merchants like Marco Polo. His detailed account of the route would come in for careful examination by nineteenth century explorers like Wood and Burnes, but to the medieval world it was his descriptions of Kublai Khan’s capital of Xanadu and of his rich and well ordered empire which were so intriguing. Two hundred years later it was to find a short-cut for trade with Polo’s Cathay, Xanadu and Cipangu (Japan) that Columbus sailed west. When natives in Cuba responded to his queries for gold by mentioning a place called “Cubanacan”, he was sure they were referring to Kublai Khan.
The age of discovery, as opposed to the age of exploration, began with Columbus and Vasco da Gama. Da Gama was followed east by Cabral, who en route made the first landing in Brazil, while Columbus was followed west by Amerigo Vespucci who gave his name to the new continent. To ignore them, not to mention the Cabots and the great circumnavigators, Magellan and Drake, in an anthology of exploration may seem perverse. Likewise those indefatigable Dutch and English mariners who attempted to emulate Portuguese and Spanish successes round Cape Horn and Cape of Good Hope by rounding Eurasia by the North East Passage or America by the North West Passage. Their additions to man’s knowledge of the earth’s surface created the map over which later explorers pored in search of blank spaces and unsolved mysteries. It would be absurd to belittle their achievements simply on the grounds that their motivation was wholly commercial rather than scientific.
The same could be said for another class of pioneers who followed hard in their wake and quickly circumscribed those blank spaces. In South and Central America we know them as Conquistadors, in North America as Courreurs de Bois, and in Siberia as Cossacks. Pushing east in Asia and west in Canada these pioneers reduced trade to something closer to rank exploitation as they shot and trapped their way ever deeper into the continental landmasses. Furs and hides became the currency of embryonic colonies just as in Mexico and South America did gold and silver. There all pretence at commercial exchange was abandoned as the Conquistadors, dazzled as much by religious bigotry as precious metals, butchered their way inland to claim for themselves and Christendom the untold wealth of the Aztecs and Incas.
But to Yermak, Cortes, Pizarro or even Champlain geographical discovery was
incidental if not irrelevant. The watershed between exploration motivated by greed and exploration motivated by scientific enquiry falls in the eighteenth century and owes everything to the Enlightenment. Commercial and colonial interests certainly featured in the instructions issued to Vitus Bering by Peter the Great in 1725; but so did purely geographical questions, like whether the Asian and American landmasses were joined. Furs also figured prominently in the plans for Bering’s second expedition as, much later, they did in Mackenzie’s travels across Canada. Yet Bering’s inclusion of a naturalist like Steller, and the latter’s remarkable contribution to the expedition’s findings and its survival, are more significant. Twenty years later, James Cook’s instructions from the Royal Society were wholly scientific. He was to observe a transit of Venus across the sun from the southern hemisphere and to investigate the continuing rumours of a southern continent. In this context it was his interest in the colonial possibilities of New Zealand and Australia which was incidental.
With its rejection of dogma and its emphasis on reason and experiment the Enlightenment had given man a new perspective on his world and a new purpose in it. Primitive societies could no longer be regarded as amongst the raw materials of Christendom. Ignorance of outlandish places represented a slur on civilization. Above all the Enlightenment encouraged the individual to think and act for himself. Better examples than Steller or Cook might be James Bruce or Mungo Park. Their solitary and often hazardous wanderings in Africa were undertaken out of little more than an all-consuming curiosity. Although not scientists like the great Alexander von Humboldt, their range of enquiry was as wide and open-minded as the German polymath’s. “Man and Nature – whatever is performed by the one or produced by the other” was how Sir William Jones, another Enlightenment polymath, put it. No one took this definition of scientific enquiry more to heart than those who ventured abroad during the great age of exploration.
STRANDED ON
BERING ISLAND
Georg Wilhelm Steller
(1709–46)
As physician and scientific know-all on Vitus Bering’s 1741 voyage, Steller shared its triumphs, including landing the first Europeans in Alaska. He also shared its disasters. Returning across the north Pacific to Russian Kamchatka, the crew was stricken with scurvy and the vessel grounded. Bering and half his men would die; the others barely survived nine months of Arctic exposure. They owed much to the German-born Steller whose response to each crisis was invariably right, although no less irksome for being so.
On November 7 we had again a very pleasant day and a northeast wind. I spent the morning in packing so much of my baggage as I could get hold of near by. Because I could see plainly that our vessel could not hold together longer than till the first violent storm, when it must either be driven out to sea or dashed to pieces against the beach, I, with Mr. Plenisner, my cossack, and several of the sick men went ashore first.
We had not yet reached the beach when a strange sight greeted us, inasmuch as from the land a number of sea otters came towards us in the sea, which from a distance some of us took for bears, others for wolverines, but later on we learned to know, unfortunately, only too well. – As soon as we had landed, Mr. Plenisner went to hunt with the gun, while I investigated the natural conditions of the surroundings. After having made various observations, I returned towards evening to the sick men, and there I also found Lieutenant Waxel, who was very weak and faint. We refreshed ourselves with tea. Among other things I remarked: “God knows whether this is Kamchatka!” – receiving, however, from him [Waxel] the reply: “What else can it be? We shall soon send for podvods (horses); the ship, however, we shall cause to be taken to the mouth of the Kamchatka River by cossacks, the anchors can be had any time, the most important thing now is to save the men.” – In the meantime Mr. Plenisner also came back, told what he had seen, and brought half a dozen ptarmigans, which he sent on board to the Captain Commander with the Lieutenant, in order to revive him by means of the fresh food. I, however, sent him some nasturtium-like herbs for a salad. – Later two cossacks and a cannoneer arrived, who had killed two sea otters and two seals, news which appeared quite remarkable to us. When we reproached them for not bringing the meat in for our refreshment, they fetched us a seal, which seemed to them preferable to the sea otter for eating. As evening came I made a soup from a couple of ptarmigans and ate this dish with Mr. Plenisner, young Waxel, and my cossack. In the meanwhile Mr. Plenisner made a hut out of driftwood and an old sail, and under it we slept that night alongside the sick.
On November 8 we again enjoyed pleasant weather. This morning Mr. Plenisner made the agreement with me that he should shoot birds, while I should look for other kinds of food, and that we should meet again towards noon in this place. With my cossack I went at first along the beach to the eastward, gathered various natural curiosities, and also chased a sea otter; my cossack, however, shot eight blue foxes, the number and fatness of which as well as the fact that they were not shy astonished me exceedingly. Moreover, since I saw the many manati near shore in the water, which I had never before seen and even now could not well make out as they lay all the time half in the water, but concerning which my cossack asserted that they were known nowhere in Kamchatka, and likewise since nowhere any tree or shrubbery was to be seen, I began to doubt that this was Kamchatka, especially as the sea sky over in the south indicated sufficiently that we were on an island surrounded by the sea.
Toward noon I returned to the hut and after dinner decided to go with Mr. Plenisner and our cossack westward along the beach in order to search for forests or small timber; we found nothing whatever, but saw a few sea otters and killed various blue foxes and ptarmigans. On the way back we sat down at a small stream, regaled ourselves with tea, and thanked God heartily that once more we had good water and under us solid ground, at the same time recalling how wonderfully we had fared and remembering the unjust conduct of various people.
During the day an effort was made by the disposition of the anchors, large and small, as many as we had, to make the ship secure to the land in the best possible manner, and for that reason the boat did not come ashore. In the evening, as we were sitting around the camp fire after having eaten our meal, a blue fox came up and took away two ptarmigans right before our eyes. This was the first sample of the many tricks and thefts which those animals practiced on us later. – I had to encourage my sick and feeble cossack, who regarded me as the cause of his misfortune and reproached me for my curiosity which had led me into this misery, [thus] making the first step to our future companionship. “Be of good cheer,” I said, “God will help. Even if this is not our country, we have still hope of getting there; you will not starve; if you cannot work and wait on me, I will do it for you; I know your upright nature and what you have done for me; all that I have belongs to you also; only ask and I will divide with you equally until God helps.” – But he said: “Good enough; I will gladly serve Your Majesty, but you have brought me into this misery. Who compelled you to go with these people? Could you not have enjoyed the good times on the Bolshaya River?” – I laughed heartily at his frankness and said: “God be praised, we are both alive! If I have dragged you into this misery, you have in me, with God’s help, a lifelong friend and benefactor. My intentions were good, Thoma, so let yours be good also; moreover, you do not know what might have happened to you at home.”
In the meantime I took this as a cue to consider how we could protect ourselves against the winter by building a hut, in case it turned out that we were not in Kamchatka but on an island. That evening, therefore, I started to confer with Mr. Plenisner about building a hut for all eventualities and assisting each other with word and deed as good friends, no matter how the circumstances might shape themselves. Although for appearance’s sake, in order not to discourage me, he did not assent to my opinion that this was an island, nevertheless he accepted my plan in regard to the hut.
On November 9 the wind was from the east and the weather rather bearable. In the
morning we went out to look for a site and to collect wood and selected during the day the spot where we built later on and where the whole command also set up their huts and wintered. – However, we were far too busy killing blue foxes, of which I and Mr. Plenisner in one day got sixty, partly knocking them down with the axe and partly stabbing them with a Yakut palma. – Towards evening we returned to our old hut, where again some of the sick had been brought ashore.
On the 10th of November the wind was from the east; in the forenoon it was clear, in the afternoon cloudy, and during the night the wind whirled much snow about. We carried all our baggage a verst away to the place which we had selected the day before for the building of a dwelling. In the meantime more sick were brought ashore, among them also the Captain Commander, who spent the evening and night in a tent. I, with others, was with him and wondered at his composure and singular contentment. He asked what my idea was about this land. – I answered that it did not look to me like Kamchatka; the great number and tame assurance of the animals of itself clearly indicated that it must be sparsely inhabited or not at all; but nevertheless it could not be far from Kamchatka, as the land plants observed here occur in the same number, proportion, and size as in Kamchatka, while on the other hand the peculiar plants discovered in America are not found in the corresponding localities. Besides, I had found on the beach a poplar-wood window shutter, with cross moldings, that some years ago the high water had washed ashore and covered with sand near the place where we later built our huts; I showed it and pointed out that it was unquestionably of Russian workmanship and probably from the ambars which stood at the mouth of the Kamchatka River. The most likely place for which this land might be taken would be Cape Kronotski. Nevertheless, I did not fail to make known my doubts as to this, based on the following experience: I showed, namely, a piece of a fox trap that I had found on the beach during the first day; on this the teeth, instead of being of iron, consisted of so-called Entale (tooth-shell), of the occurrence of which in Kamchatka I have no information and regarding which it consequently is to be supposed that the sea must have washed this token over from America, where, in default of iron, this invention may well have been made use of, while in Kamchatka, where iron already is plentiful through trade, it would be superfluous. I mentioned at the same time the unknown sea animal, manati, which I had seen, and the character of the water sky opposite in the south. – To all this I got the reply: “The vessel can probably not be saved, may God at least spare our longboat.”