A major development during Banks’s lifetime was the solution of what was known as the ‘longitude problem’. For centuries seafarers had tried to find an accurate way of plotting their east-west progress. North-south was simple enough: with the aid of the stars and latitudinal tables they could plot their whereabouts fairly easily. Longitude, however, was more difficult. To find one’s position one needed to compare local time with the time at a place whose longitude had been previously ascertained – the home port, say, or the nearest observatory. To do this, however, required a clock that kept perfect time. Such a thing did not exist on land, let alone at sea. Its lack caused so many deaths, either through shipwreck or scurvy, that in 1714 the British Parliament announced a prize of £20,000 for the first person to create an accurate timepiece. The English clockmaker John Harrison took the offer to heart. Between 1737 and 1759 he produced a series of machines whose array of springs and pendulums fitted Parliament’s specifications. Later distilled into a watch, and later still into a chronometer, his device transformed the art of navigation. When Cook gave it a trial on his second great voyage of 1772 he was impressed. ‘Our error can never be great,’ he wrote, ‘so long as we have so good a guide as [the] watch.’ Harrison’s chronometers were set to the time at Greenwich, a London suburb that was home to both the headquarters of the Royal Navy and the nation’s foremost observatory. Other nations set their watches to their own meridians – French navigators, for example, used Paris time – but it was Greenwich Mean Time that eventually became the world standard. Harrison’s invention gave sailors the technological competence to chart the globe. It was men like Cook, however, who proved that they could, and men like Banks who encouraged them to do so.
Banks was spiritual mentor to many explorers, but his most eager pupil was a bureaucrat named John Barrow. As Second Secretary of the Admiralty – a post he occupied almost without interruption from 1804 to 1847 – Barrow was the most influential man in the Royal Navy. Born the son of a tenant farmer in Ulverston, Lancashire, he had worked his way to power by dint of keen intelligence and unflagging use of the patronage system. He fancied himself as a geographer, having travelled to China and mapped portions of South Africa, but he was not, alas, a very good one. Opinionated and inflexible, he had definite ideas about how the blank areas of the atlas should look. He believed fervently in the existence of an open polar sea and was an even firmer advocate of the existence of a North-West Passage. He believed, too, that the Niger might be part of either the Congo or the Nile; and he was certain that the north coast of Australia was ripe for development as one of the world’s great trading centres. All that can be said to his geographical credit is that he was unsure if Antarctica really did contain seams of gold and marble, and he doubted it was home to a race of aliens. (Both theories were popular in some quarters.) Had he merely been a wealthy enthusiast, like Banks, his views might have had little impact. As it was, he controlled the world’s most professional navy and was funded by the world’s richest industrial nation. This, combined with an absolute refusal to admit that he was wrong, produced the most comprehensive programme of exploration the world had seen.
When the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1816 Barrow had a glut of unemployed naval officers on his hands. Rather than pay them to do nothing, he sent them exploring. For almost half a century he fired handpicked bands of men across the globe. Year on year, expeditions left the Thames in pursuit of Barrow’s dreams. They went singly, jointly and severally. In a single year there might be a sloop taking one man to the coast of Africa, a couple of frigates heading for the North-West Passage, and a transport dropping men in Hudson’s Bay. Sometimes they attacked a single objective, sometimes they were dispersed to different points of the globe. It was a haphazard system, undermined by Barrow’s harsh attitude towards those who failed to achieve the goals he set them and his misunderstanding of the conditions they faced – whether in the Arctic or the Sahara, officers were expected to wear appropriate regalia when dealing with the natives – but it was one that worked. In 1819 W. E. Parry went further west than anyone yet through the North-West Passage. In 1826 Major Gordon Laing became the first white man to reach Timbuctoo (but never came back), and in 1831 Richard Lander traced the Niger to its mouth. In 1827 Parry made a remarkable attempt at the North Pole, dragging his boats over the pack ice to 82° 45’ 42” N, a record that would not be bettered for almost 50 years. And in the early 1830s John Ross and his nephew James Clark Ross found the Magnetic North Pole – a feat that involved being marooned in the ice for five years. In 1839 James Ross left for Antarctica, where he discovered the massive ice shelf that now bears his name and also Antarctica’s active volcano, Mount Erebus.
Barrow’s men were not the only explorers active during this period. Spain and Portugal, which had previously led the field, had neither the need nor the energy to increase their overseas possessions; but other countries were eager to catch up. The governments of France, Russia and, increasingly, the United States played a prominent role in mapping the globe, despatching expeditions to Africa, Siberia, Antarctica, the Pacific and the west coast of North America. Similarly a host of whaling and sealing companies made their own independent contributions to polar discovery. But, by sheer perseverance, Barrow set the standard that everyone wanted to match. His reign came to an end in 1845 when he sent Sir John Franklin into the North-West Passage. Franklin was never seen again; neither were his two ships or the couple of hundred men aboard them. To date, nobody has successfully unravelled the mystery of their deaths. Nor, in fairness to the Second Secretary who sent them to their doom, has any man in the history of exploration bettered Barrow in the cracking of barriers and the opening of new territories.
Barrow’s programme was in tune with the times. Not only did his men bring back the required scientific information, but their deeds reflected a new vogue known as Romanticism. Superficially a rejection of Enlightenment ideals, Romanticism celebrated individual expression, the identity of nations and, particularly, the glory of what the French author Jean-Jacques Rousseau dubbed ‘the noble savage’. Adherents of the craze delighted in wilderness and disorder, relished the unruliness of Nature (spelled always with a respectful capital), and sought in its crags and cliffs an expression of their own hidden nobility. Like their Enlightenment predecessors, the Romantics were obsessed with the workings of the world; but they sought less to change it than to find their place in it. The quest for identity – indeed, for many people, the realization that they could have an identity – had as much to do with money as with anything else. Thanks to innovations in agriculture and industry, Europe was by 1800 more prosperous than ever before and its wealth was distributed more widely across the social classes. Whereas power and influence had previously devolved from the Crown to a small circle of landowning aristocrats, they were now wielded by a growing number of bourgeois, whose commercial acumen was to define the coming century. Although far from being a paradise, the continent offered its citizens something they had rarely had before: opportunity. Ludwig van Beethoven spoke for many when he said, in 1802, ‘I will seize fate by the throat.’
There was nothing new in the idea of glory – people had always tried to cheat death by means of reputation – but there were now more avenues whereby it could be attained and a larger audience to appreciate it. Not everyone could be a Beethoven: for every person who succeeded there were hundreds who failed and hundreds of thousands who did not even try. But even the most talentless individual participated vicariously in the pursuit of fame. Those who were literate bought the books; those who were not relied on interpreters who, for a few pennies, read newspapers aloud in their local hostelry. Poets, generals, admirals, inventors and even politicians acquired iconic status. It was the beginning of the age of celebrity.
The people who seemed most obviously to seize fate (to tempt it, too) were explorers. Travel books had always been popular – the newborn printing presses of the Middle Ages had produced little else, apart from religious screeds –
but in the 18th and 19th centuries they became required reading. This was the high noon of exploration literature, writers, artists and armchair explorers feeding off the accounts that were published almost yearly. Cook was a favourite, but men like Alexander Mackenzie and Samuel Hearne, who had crossed North America, also thrilled people with their depictions of noble savagery (though in some cases, such as Hearne’s gruesome images of warring Indian tribes, the savagery seemed to outweigh the nobility). Their exploits connected intimately with the Romantic ethos, informing many of the age’s great creative works. Cook’s voyage was the basis for Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, it inspired, too, Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats produced some of their most famous poems when they followed the path of mountaineering pioneers to the Alps; Shelley’s wife, Mary, drew on Arctic journals for her novel Frankenstein. Explorers were icons, as W. E. Parry discovered in 1820 after his return from the North-West Passage. ‘Even strangers in the coffee-room introduce themselves, and beg to shake hands with me,’ he wrote. Two years later, when Franklin published his journal of an expedition through Canada – a book which contained details of murder and starvation, and in which Franklin admitted to having eaten his boots – the first impression sold so rapidly that second-hand copies went for considerably more than the original asking price.
Above the Romantic gush, and the supposed scientific objectivity, rose the spectre of imperial conquest. Although not as pronounced or as objectionable as it would later become, the subjugation of foreign lands was an important element in every voyage of discovery. Already, France and Britain had established themselves in North America and India, and with every new land they reached there was a zealous unfurling of flags and firing of guns. No matter how barren or unprofitable the territory appeared, it still had to be claimed for the mother country. Britain was a major culprit in this respect, performing the same rites whether they were observed by a cluster of bemused natives or a rookery of penguins. Other nations sneered: in 1840, when Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d’Urville became the first man to set foot on mainland Antarctica, he recorded that, ‘following the venerable custom which the English have carefully maintained, we took possession in the name of France’. But he dared not do otherwise. In an increasingly competitive imperial age it was unwise to miss an opportunity.
The races who inhabited the lands on which Europeans raised their standards, and whom the intelligentsia lauded for their noble savagery, must have seen things very differently. From the Inuit of Etah and the Clatsops of Columbia to the Chukchis of eastern Siberia and the Aborigines of Australia, nobody was left in ignorance of the white man. There are few indigenous accounts to describe how they felt as the foreign ships approached with their guns and cargoes of trinkets. It is possible, however, to chart their reaction from statistics and the journals of their ‘discoverers’. Take the island of Tahiti. When Cook visited it in 1769 two expeditions had been there before him, one British under Samuel Wallis, one French under Bougainville. Wallis, Bougainville and, in his turn, Cook, reported it a paradise where the weather was good, the food plentiful, the women easy and the men warlike but not unreasonable. In 1769 there were 40,000 Tahitians. Thirty years later, thanks to the introduction of western diseases and firearms, that number had dropped to 16,000. Christian missionaries cast a further pall: in 1820 a Russian navigator reported that no one danced, played music or wove traditional flower garlands and that moral guardians patrolled the island to prevent out-of-marriage sex. By 1850 the population of Tahiti stood at 6,000. It was the same throughout the South Pacific. In 1788, on the advice of Joseph Banks, Britain sent its first shipload of convicts to Australia. During succeeding decades Australia’s estimated 300,000-strong population of Aborigines was halved and that of Tasmania was wiped out.
By the mid-19th century almost every corner of the world had been examined, conquered and described. The process had been arduous and, while producing the knowledge that Enlightenment scientists had anticipated, it had also redefined the nature of exploration. The tribulations of men like Caillié, Park, Parry and, most dramatically, Franklin had a profound effect on the public imagination. Some people condemned them for taking unnecessary risks, but many more saw them as heroes. Their example spawned hundreds of imitators, among them some of the great figures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Previously explorers had existed to perform a task; now exploration had become a task in itself.
LINKING RUSSIA AND AMERICA
Vitus Bering (1725–42)
I. – At Kamchatka or some other place you are to build one or two boats with decks.
II. – With these you are to sail along the land that goes to the north, and according to expectations (because its end is not known) that land, it appears, is part of America.
III. – You are to search for where it is joined to America, and to go to any city of European possessions, or if you see any European vessel, to find out from it what the coast is called and to write it down, and to go ashore yourself and obtain first-hand information, and placing it on a map, to return here.
In these magnificently sweeping terms Tsar Peter the Great ordered Captain Vitus Bering to go east on 23 December 1724.
It was not the first time Peter the Great had shown an interest in the extremities of his realm. During his reign he had despatched several expeditions to map the Siberian coast and to conquer outlying regions such as the Kamchatkan peninsula. In doing so he had acted mostly for selfish reasons: new additions to Russia’s empire were always welcome, as were the minerals, furs and timber they contained. Lately, however, the French Academy of Sciences had advised him he would do the world a great service if he could ascertain whether the Asian and American landmasses were separate or whether, as some thought, they were linked. As a man who had spent his life trying to make Russia the cultural equal of Western Europe – Bering was part of that programme: born in Denmark in 1681, he had been employed in 1703 to bring much-needed expertise to Russia’s infant navy – Peter was flattered by the Academy’s approach.* The proposition was also economically attractive: if there was open water between the two continents this suggested the possibility of a navigable passage via the Arctic – the North-East Passage – linking his Siberian territories, and indeed the whole western empire, to the markets of China; if there was not, and the two continents were joined, then his expansionary programme could continue unimpeded; and even if there was no North-East Passage, and no possibility of annexation, then profitable commerce could still be established with America, and possibly Japan too.
As far as the North-East Passage went, Peter the Great’s expectations were the product of ignorance. In 1648 a Cossack named Semen Ivanovich Dezhnev had taken seven boats from Siberia’s Kolyma River to the Anadyr River above Kamchatka. He rounded a mountainous promontory that he named the Chukotsk Peninsula, after the Chukchi tribe who lived there, and in doing so proved that a slender, fitful passage did exist between Siberia and the Far East. But Dezhnev’s achievement was compromised by fatalities and poor communications. Of the 90 men with whom he sailed only 13 survived, and it was not until 1662 that he returned to Moscow. After 14 years the authorities had forgotten why he went to Siberia in the first place. His report vanished, leaving only a distant rumour of what he had done.
During the next 50 years, Russian expeditions probed the north-east corner of Asia. They explored most of Kamchatka and found no landmass connecting it to America. They tramped along the Siberian and Pacific coasts, discovering several rivers that might be useful to trade. But they never went to the Chukotsk Peninsula. Some mapmakers followed Dezhnev’s example and portrayed it as a finisterre, on which they wrote ‘Hostile Natives’. Others left an open-ended squiggle bearing the rubric: ‘It is not known where this chain of mountains ends and whether it does not join some other continent.’ Or, more promisingly: ‘Mountain chain which is joined to what is believed to be the continent of Americ
a.’ As for the North-East Passage, everyone declared it a chimera. The Dezhneviskis said it was too frigid to be a reliable trade route. Others said that it would be blocked by a chain of mountains – the so-called Shalatskii Promontory – that rose on the Chukotsk Peninsula and ended somewhere in North America.
If Bering’s orders are anything to go by, Peter the Great favoured the Shalatskii theory, but whatever his thoughts, he died shortly after delivering them. By then, however, Bering and his second-in-command Aleksei Chirikov had already left St Petersburg, in January 1725, on the long journey through Siberia to the Sea of Okhotsk. From here, in the armpit between Kamchatka and mainland Asia, they intended to fulfil the late Tsar’s instructions.
The crossing of Siberia was arduous. One party went by boat, to chart the region’s rivers. Another, under Bering, struggled on horses across the tundra. Bering reached Okhotsk in mid-August 1726, having covered 685 miles of trackless terrain at terrible cost to his horses. While waiting for the boat party to arrive he erected a collection of huts and, as instructed, began to build a ship, the Fortuna. The boat party, however, did not appear until 6 January, having been forced to abandon their vessels at the onset of winter and having subsequently walked 250 miles overland. They were frostbitten and exhausted and had only avoided starvation by eating the dead horses that littered Bering’s trail. Whatever comfort they felt at reaching Okhotsk was dispelled when they heard Bering’s plan for the coming year: they were to finish the Fortuna, sail in it across the Sea of Okhotsk to the nearest part of Kamchatka, carry their boats, supplies and equipment overland to the River Kamchatka, travel down the river to its mouth on the north coast of the peninsula, and there build new ships to take them north to the land of the Chukchis.
Off the Map Page 18