Exploration, Geographical

I

Introduction

Exploration, Geographical, process of conscious discovery by human beings of the world around them. The human species is highly mobile, migrating and travelling to every corner of the globe. In this human beings are not unique. What sets human beings apart from other animals is the ability to discover. Other creatures share humankind’s curiosity; but human beings alone can communicate their discoveries. Human societies acquire a collective awareness of their known world, and the most adventurous have the urge to discover what lies beyond and to return to describe their findings: these are the explorers.

II

To Explore or Not To Explore?

The exploration of the Earth, and now the space around it, has proceeded from many different sources and perspectives. Chinese, Europeans, Africans, Polynesians, and Native Americans all explored the frontiers of the regions they knew. The pace of this exploration has been uneven, extraordinarily quick in some periods, with long intervals when little has happened. Some cultures have felt the need to explore, others appear to have deliberately turned inward. Still other cultures made great bursts of exploration, and then abandoned the quest. Such was the case in China, where in the first quarter of the 15th century, the emperor Chengzu sent out his courtier Zheng He in charge of the largest and best-equipped exploring fleets then known, over 60 ships at a time. Zheng He is recorded as making seven successive voyages into the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean between 1405 and 1434, reaching as far as the coast of eastern Africa. It was one of the most comprehensive feats of exploration in history. However, when Zheng He finally returned home, the Chinese administration abruptly cancelled all further trips, and the country reverted to its traditional policy of seclusion. The heavy cost was probably one reason, but so too was the traditional Chinese attitude that China was already the self-sufficient centre of the world, and had no need to look outside its boundaries. This notion was symbolized by the Great Wall, begun in the 3rd century bc and built to protect the “civilized” Chinese from the “barbarian” nomads outside. Sixty-four years after Zheng He’s seventh expedition European ships, led by the Portuguese, began entering the Indian Ocean from the opposite direction, around the Cape of Good Hope, and the tidal flow of exploration reversed.

Societies which it seems did not explore may not have been as static as thought. Some perhaps did explore but never recorded their findings. Others certainly lacked the necessary technology. Many island cultures of the Pacific eventually lost the ability to construct vessels capable of the transoceanic travel that must originally have brought their ancestors there, and thus became confined to their islands. Several cultures seem to have been so highly adapted to their environment that they remained within it—for example, the forest-dwelling peoples of tropical central Africa do not appear to have travelled widely. An unusual case of a “non-exploring” society was Japan. Early contact with the outside world was limited to an occasional embassy to China and trips by pilgrims to the mainland. As late as 1500 the Japanese had not yet fully explored the island of Hokkaido, part of the main archipelago. The reasons for this lack of interest are not clear, but as time passed the closed attitude became formalized when Japanese were forbidden to travel abroad, and by government edict Japanese ships were limited in size and had to be built to designs only suitable to sail close inshore.

III

Motives of Exploration

A

Migration by Land and Sea

The driving forces for exploration are complex, and have changed in response to social and historical circumstance, as well as the advances of enabling technology. It can only be surmised that the very earliest explorations by preliterate peoples were driven by the need to tap new resources such as hunting and fishing grounds or pastures when the old ones became inadequate or exhausted, or in response to social pressures. To these early peoples climatic change could have opened up new regions or closed off others. A severe drought in a desert margin might cause people to move; or a very cold winter might create strong enough sea ice for people to cross a hitherto unbridgeable gulf. These early motives can be characterized as primarily of necessity and, less often, of opportunity. If it is accepted that the human race had a single place of origin then this original exploration distributed people into different corners of the Earth, rather than joined them. It is the reverse process, when the settled and different cultures began to get in touch again, or find uninhabited lands, that is now thought of as exploration.

The furthest journeys of exploration have been by sea, as water was the easiest medium for long-distance travel and water covers most of the globe. Maritime cultures thus had an inherent advantage in having an “open” horizon towards the sea. The earliest known long-distance sailor-explorers are, not surprisingly, associated with the greatest body of water, the Pacific Ocean. By 1000 bc the ancestors of the Polynesian navigators had reached Tonga and Samoa from south-eastern Asia. Their descendants then made voyages of exploration surpassing anything achieved in the West until modern times and, sailing probably from the Society Islands, had reached New Zealand by ad 1000. One motive for the great Polynesian voyages was the need to find new land for settlement. Original settlers of an island might also be forced to move on by later arrivals. To set out into the Pacific required superb boats—which the Polynesians had in their double-hulled voyaging canoes—but above all it needed self-confidence in seafaring and navigation, and an outward-looking view of their environment. The Polynesians were able to postulate the existence of other islands based on observation of natural phenomena such as clouds, currents, and the migration paths of birds, and they had the confidence to launch upon the ocean.

B

Faith and Chance

A similar outlook was found among two Atlantic peoples—the early Irish and the Norse, usually known as Vikings. Irish sailors of the 4th to 8th century, many of them monks, were prepared to launch into the difficult waters of the North Atlantic in very small boats, sometimes made of leather. Setting out in such fragile craft was an act of trust in their God, and they travelled in anticipation of seeing the wonders of a divinely created world. Their attitude, which might be described as fatalistic, brought them to the islands of Scotland, to the Faroes, and to Iceland. Here their field of exploration overlapped with the Norse who, using more sophisticated seagoing vessels, also had a risk-taking attitude to seafaring and exploration. Viking exploration went even further into the Atlantic and reached North America around the end of the 10th century. They too had confidence in their own seamanship and considered that successful exploration brought honour, as well as worldly wealth.

Chance has also played its part in the story of exploration. It was a prolonged gale at sea in 986 that drove Bjarni Herjólfsson off his course for Greenland until he accidentally glimpsed the coast of North America, the first Norseman to do so. The Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca was obliged by a catastrophic shipwreck on the Texas coast in 1528 to walk, with three other survivors, across what is now the southern United States to reach his compatriots in Spanish Mexico. Many of the “explorers” from the closed society of 19th-century Japan were shipwrecked fishermen picked up by foreign vessels, who subsequently found their way home.