Exploration, Geographical

C

Commerce, Religion, and Myth

The commercial reason for exploration has been a consistent driving force, most notably among Western societies in the so-called Great Age of Exploration that began in the late 15th century. Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic seeking a new, shorter, cheaper route to reach the riches of the Orient, and da Gama circumnavigated Africa for much the same reason. Yet similar investigations of the profitable eastern trade had already been made by Arab sailors. Arab trading ships were sailing from the Arabian Gulf to south-eastern Asia probably as early as the 7th century, and had reached China by the 9th century. Both Columbus and da Gama acknowledged the priority of the Arabs. Columbus set out with Arabic-speaking interpreters on board, expecting this to be the trade language of the Orient; and on the eastern coast of Africa da Gama hired an Arab pilot, believing the navigator’s claim that he could guide the Portuguese flotilla to the coast of India.

The religion of Islam, with its idea of the hajj or pilgrimage, helped to shape the Arab attitude towards travel and exploration as a normal activity. Other religions played a role in encouraging exploration, both as quest and as commitment. In the 7th century the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang journeyed to India to find the sacred sites of Buddhism, and the very few medieval Japanese travellers known about today were pilgrims seeking the wellsprings of their faith. Another role of religion as a reason for exploration was the missionary journey. In the 13th century this motivated the Franciscans Giovanni de Piano Carpini and Willem van Ruysbroeck to seek an audience with Mongolian khans, while the zeal of the Jesuits in the 16th century sent Matteo Ricci to China and St Francis Xavier to Japan. The proselytizing urge of Christianity was epitomized by the travels of the missionary explorer David Livingstone in Africa in the 19th century, but was also found in a much more aggressive form in the medieval Crusades, when Europeans attempted to regain control of the Holy Land, and among the Spanish conquistadors who explored the Americas in the 16th century. Many conquistadors were motivated by a combination of religious zeal, the desire for plunder, and a wish for fame, aptly summarized by the phrase “God, Gold, and Glory”.

The quest for a particular object of desire—often mythical—has also led many cultures to send out explorers, and in this case the motive lies deep within the cultural fabric of the society. In the 3rd century bc the emperor Shi Huangdi sent the courtier Hsu Fu with a fleet into the Pacific to find the islands where legend said grew the drug of immortality. His quest was echoed in 1513 by the expedition of the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León who sailed to Florida to look for the Fountain of Youth. Myths have a long lifespan, and the search for the partly mythical Christian potentate known as Prester John took European explorers first to central Asia in the 13th century, then to China, and finally to Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in the 16th century. In every case their travels increased geographical knowledge.

D

Control and Conquest

The political organization of a society had several roles to play. A highly organized society could arrange state-sponsored exploration, pay the heavy cost, and have a need for information about countries, far and near, for reasons of state. The rulers of the enormously extended Inca Empire of South America, which spread over 4,000 km (2,500 mi) north to south by the early 16th century, had to build up a geographical concept of their own territories for administrative reasons, and sent embassies to contact and evaluate their neighbours. Further north the Maya Empire in the 4th to 8th century established a trading network across Central America, and the militaristic Aztec Empire of Mexico, which grew to dominance in the 14th and 15th centuries, must have sent scouts to prepare the way for its conquering armies, just as Roman soldiers were sent up the River Nile by the emperor Nero when he planned to invade the Sudan. As late as the 19th century, British explorers were mapping in the Himalaya and Afghanistan for strategic reasons, to learn more about the frontiers of the British Empire, the better to defend them. The journey of Lewis and Clark across what would later become the United States of America was performed for political and strategic reasons, linked with the Louisiana Purchase, as well as to find a route to the Pacific coast.

Military conquest, once achieved, then brought increased knowledge of foreign lands as well as creating safer conditions for civilian travel. The astonishing overland campaign of Alexander the Great that took him to the borders of India in the 4th century bc added hugely to European knowledge of Asia; and the great Mongol Empire, which at its peak in the late 13th century was the largest land empire in history, opened up the paths along which travellers like Marco Polo could move with comparative safety.

E

Technology and Science

In the past 200 years, exploration on a global scale has received its main impetus from the advance of technology, and this in turn has meant that technologically developing societies have been at the forefront of exploration. At the same time, the improvements in ships, weapons, clothing, navigation techniques, and now rocketry and underwater techniques, have opened up previously inaccessible regions. With exploration and science inextricably linked, the motives for exploration took on new forms, though they sometimes cloaked the older reasons.

In fact a “scientific” approach to exploration dates back to the curiosity of Classical Greek geographers such as Eratosthenes, who was interested in establishing the circumference of the Earth, or the labours of early Chinese surveyors making maps of the great silt plains of northern China. The Age of Enlightenment in 18th-century Europe took this approach one step further, and might almost be called the Age of Curiosity. The theme, embodied in the work of the greatest of Enlightenment explorers, James Cook, was to find new lands and examine their peoples and products, and to put them on the map for the greater increase of knowledge available to all human beings. It was politically convenient that discovery also led to territorial claims for the new-found lands and their contents. The history of cartography thus shows how one of the greatest achievements of science has had profound political, economic, and social results.

F

National Prestige and Personal Challenge

Successful exploration came increasingly to be driven by a sense of national rivalry, and colonial ambition. Although this had been apparent since the Spanish-Portuguese rivalry of the late 15th century, it intensified during the 19th century when, in the “Scramble for Africa”, the continent was carved up into European colonies. This process was often headed by explorers, such as Fernand Foureau, who marched forward under the flag of their nation, and planted it to stake a claim. When there was no more “new” land to discover, the sense of rivalry continued in the form of competition for prestige rather than territorial gain. Thus Robert Scott, an Englishman, “raced” Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian, to the South Pole; Robert Peary attempted the North Pole on behalf of the United States; and there was much pride in the coronation year of Queen Elizabeth II, head of the Commonwealth, that Edmund Hillary, a New Zealander, became the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest supported by a largely British team.

The same drive for national prestige, combined with the age-old strategic imperative, helped fuel early space flights and the race for the Moon. In the latter only the two most technologically advanced countries, the United States and the Soviet Union, had the resources to compete. Then, as the cost of space exploration continued to increase and the economic balance between nations changed, so the importance of the Soviet Union and, more recently, Russia in space exploration has dwindled in comparison to the efforts of the increasingly wealthy European Union, and to a lesser extent Japan, while the United States retains its dominance. However, the cost of space exploration continues to soar, so now a pooling of international effort is seen as the only way forward with multinational collaboration in space. Thus, a small step for a man has indeed become a big step for all mankind.

A similar pattern can be seen in deep-sea exploration, where only the wealthiest nations can afford the large sums needed to maintain research fleets. An example of how scientific exploration relocates in response to economic resources is the career of Professor Auguste Piccard. This brilliant Swiss pioneer of deep-sea diving, using pressurized submersibles, was originally funded by the French after World War II, but by 1960 he had teamed up with the US Navy for the necessary technical and financial support when his son Jacques Piccard made the deepest dive, nearly 11 km (7 mi) down in the Pacific Ocean south of Guam. The trench itself was the Challenger Trench, named after the great British oceanographic survey commanded by Sir George Nares in the early 1870s, and paid for by the British Empire, then at the height of its economic and military power.

The often colourful story of exploration has left it with a very romantic image. This image leads to continuing efforts by individuals or small teams to penetrate into truly remote places, whether on land, beneath it, or below water. Efforts to cross, climb, or descend difficult terrain by arduous methods are often called “exploration” but have more to do with surmounting physical challenges. These efforts are heirs to a great tradition where the role of the individual has been crucial. Many of the most famous travellers and explorers created their own success, not just in the field but in the preparation of their journeys. Columbus spent years researching his ideas, and then badgered the Spanish Crown for financial support. Sir Henry Morton Stanley, the American explorer of central Africa who met David Livingstone with the immortal phrase “Dr Livingstone, I presume” was a man of prodigious energy and drive who personally led small armies of porters, scouts, and scientists on huge marches through appallingly difficult equatorial jungle. The combination of perseverance, wanderlust, and curiosity that characterized the individual throughout exploration was summed up by Ibn Batuta, the greatest traveller of the Arab tradition. In 1325, at the age of 21, he resolved to travel “throughout the Earth” and spent the rest of his life doing so, journeying from western Africa to China. At his death in around 1369 he was reputed to be the most travelled person in the world.

IV

Exploration in the Ancient World

From beginnings in eastern Africa, early human beings settled first in the warm and fertile valleys of the Nile and Mesopotamia, and probably moved north into the harsher climes of northern Europe and Siberia in search of game. The settlement of the Americas during successive ice ages over perhaps the past 20,000 years almost certainly occurred as a result of migrations across the frozen land bridge linking Siberia and Alaska. There is virtually no climatic region in the world that has not been inhabited or crossed since the earliest times. The settlement of the Pacific was carried out by Polynesians who navigated to some of the most remote Pacific islands, and even settled on Easter Island, thousands of kilometres from the nearest land.

Explorers have often been described as those who filled in the blanks on the map; or perhaps more properly the blanks in their own society’s perception, because the places they discovered were usually already inhabited. Although simple maps were produced by preliterate societies, it was not until Ptolemy, often called the “father of modern geography”, established the conventions that enabled the features of a spherical globe to be displayed as a flat map, that the foundations of map-making (see Cartography) were in place. Although his discoveries were forgotten in Europe in the following centuries, they were preserved by Islamic scholars in Arabic translations and survived to be rediscovered in the West because Ptolemy had recorded them.

The early explorers left no written record of their discoveries, or it has not survived, and reliance has to be placed on the evidence uncovered by archaeologists, or preserved by others who recorded them, often long after the event, to build up a picture of their movements. Egyptian hieroglyphics record an expedition in about 3000 bc to the Land of Punt (probably the coast of modern-day Eritrea or Somalia). The extraordinary circumnavigation of Africa by Phoenician explorers is only known from a single reference by the Greek historian Herodotus, while the voyage of Pytheas, who left Marseille in about 325 bc to make the first circumnavigation of Britain, and possibly visited the Orkneys and Norway, is only recorded by the historian Polybius. Nothing is known from written records about the bold feats of seafaring that must have brought settlers from Indonesia westward to the island of Madagascar some 2,000 years ago, yet today some 40 per cent of that country’s population is of Indonesian descent.

During the Middle Ages, Christians in Europe believed that Jerusalem was the centre of the universe, and the findings of the ancient geographers were suppressed. Although European sailors and navigators continued to chart the Mediterranean and surrounding seas, it was the Chinese and Arab traders in luxury goods who made the greatest contribution to exploration at this time with their fine cartographic skills. The 13th-century Venetian traveller Marco Polo used Chinese and Arab trade routes, both overland and by sea, to visit the great Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, while Ibn Batuta a century later used trading dhows to visit India and most places in the Indian Ocean. To demonstrate the might of the Chinese Empire, Zheng He captained a series of seven voyages between 1405 and 1434, involving a total of 317 ships and 37,000 men that visited all the major ports in the China Sea and Indian Ocean. The only important European effort in this period were the voyages of the Vikings. Sailing from Iceland, Eric the Red settled Greenland in the late 10th century, and his son Leif Ericson attempted to colonize Newfoundland a few years later.