Geographical Exploration

V

European Expansion

In Europe, the so-called Great Age of Exploration is often said to have begun with the Renaissance, when scholars rediscovered the works of the Greek and Latin geographers. Christianity was in the ascendant: the Moors were driven from their last stronghold in Spain in 1492, the same year that Christopher Columbus first sailed to the Caribbean. In the following years Columbus made three more voyages, and many other Spaniards explored the Caribbean islands and mainland, establishing the Spanish presence that has had such a profound impact on the Americas in the centuries since. The Portuguese made their way down the western coast of Africa and eventually around the Cape of Good Hope in search of a sea route to the spices of India. When the ships led by Vasco da Gama made the return journey from his second voyage to India in 1503, their cargo of pepper, ginger, cinnamon, and cloves was worth a fortune, while the 1497 voyage of John Cabot had opened up rich new fishing grounds off the North American coast.

Such profit inspired Pedro Álvares Cabral, whose fleet of 13 ships and 1,200 men sailed from Lisbon in 1500 and came upon the shores of Brazil on its way to India, just as Columbus had set off westward across the Atlantic hoping to reach China and Japan, and ended up in Cuba. Columbus established the first European settlement in the Americas, and promised to bring back great riches to the Spanish monarchy, which sponsored his voyages. In later decades Hernán Cortés in Mexico, Francisco Pizarro in Peru, and other conquerors were lured to the Americas by the promise of gold and silver. Ferdinand Magellan was searching for a route to the Orient as he rounded the tip of South America during a voyage that became the first circumnavigation of the world.

Jacques Cartier, the first of the great French explorers of North America, died in disgrace after returning with quartz instead of diamonds from his three voyages between 1534 and 1542, but over the next 80 years his successors, with the help of their indigenous guides, mapped all the great waterways of the eastern coast of Canada and the tributaries of its great river, the St Lawrence. Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec on its bank. Henry Hudson, sailing for the Dutch East India Company, established the first fur-trading post on Manhattan; on his last voyage, for England, he sailed into the huge bay that now bears his name. Missionaries and fur traders followed: the Hudson’s Bay Company was established in 1670, and by the late 18th century competition from the rival North West Company led both to make pioneering explorations of the waterways of the vast Canadian interior. Sir Alexander Mackenzie navigated to the Arctic on what is now the Mackenzie River, one of the greatest of North America; four years later, in 1793, he made the first overland crossing of the continent when he found a route through the Rockies to the Pacific. Further south, La Salle had sailed down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, taking possession of the river’s basin for France in 1682 and naming it Louisiana. When these lands were sold to the United States in 1803, Thomas Jefferson sent the Lewis and Clark expedition to explore the new territory. Their overland journey to the Pacific opened up the territory to the imagination of the young country.

Trade soon required permanent trading posts, and these in turn led to colonial occupation. The rare luxuries of the early explorers gave way to commodities that, to be equally profitable, required a large amount of cheap labour: sugar and cotton; gold, silver, diamonds, and emeralds from their respective mines, or pearls brought up by indigenous divers; and later coffee, cocoa, tea, and tobacco. Thus arose the slavery associated with European colonization: beginning with the forced labour of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and later, when inadvertently introduced diseases caused massive depopulation, the infamous Atlantic slave trade in people taken forcibly from Africa. Explorers were active in all these operations, often pushing beyond the colonial frontier in search of gold, silver, furs, or slaves.

By the 18th century scientific and political concerns led to exploration into territories beyond the Old World and the Americas. Captain James Cook, arguably the greatest explorer of them all, returned from his first circumnavigation in 1771. He had observed a transit of Venus across the Sun on Tahiti, charted both the North Island and the South Island of New Zealand and the eastern coast of Australia, and brought back a shipload of new botanical and zoological specimens. On his second voyage Cook sailed further south than any previous explorer and into the Antarctic pack ice, laying to rest the notion of a habitable continent south of Australia.

A few years after Cook’s death on his third voyage, scientifically curious gentlemen in London established the African Association, dedicated to exploring the heart of Africa. This later became the Royal Geographical Society. The African Association first focused its attention on western Africa. Mungo Park, a young Scottish doctor, died in his attempt to establish the course of the River Niger. It was not until 1830 that the brothers John and Richard Lander established the Niger to be navigable and a potential route to the interior both for commercial gain and for possible action to eradicate slavery. Heinrich Barth, the sole survivor of the 1849 expedition sponsored by the Anti-Slavery Society, travelled some 16,000 km (10,000 mi) across the Sahara from Tripoli to Lake Chad and down the Niger, providing a painstaking account of its geography.

However, still the mystery of the source of the River Nile remained. In 1856 Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke set out to investigate Lake Tanganyika. On the way back Speke sighted Lake Victoria and correctly surmised this to be the source. It led to an acrimonious difference of opinion between the two explorers, and it was not until a second expedition of 1860-1863 that Speke and James Grant were able to confirm that “the Nile is settled”—an announcement that greatly disappointed Samuel Baker and his wife Florence, who had to be content with the location of another of the Rift Valley lakes which they named Albert Nyanza, and the magnificent Murchison Falls.

In southern Africa, it was the most famous of the Victorian explorers, Scottish missionary David Livingstone, who made his mark on uncharted territory by crossing the Kalahari, and mapping much of the area from Angola to the mouth of the River Zambezi in Mozambique. The British government and the Royal Geographical Society supplied a steamboat for Livingstone to investigate the navigability of the lower Zambezi, but it ended in failure, and so in 1867 Livingstone turned his attention to the River Nile sources and Lake Tanganyika. When he failed to report back in 1871, a number of search expeditions were mounted, among them one by the New York Herald journalist Sir Henry Morton Stanley, who found Livingstone at Ujiji. When he died two years later, Livingstone’s faithful servants carried his embalmed body back to Zanzibar, from where it was sent back to England for burial in Westminster Abbey.

Stanley set out in 1874 on one of the largest and most ambitious overland journeys across Africa, following up the discoveries of his predecessors. His navigation of Lake Tanganyika finally proved it had no connection with the Nile, and he followed the River Congo to the sea on a terrible journey lasting 999 days and costing the lives of 242 of his men. Stanley later went into the service of the Belgian king Leopold II, and was one of the key players in the “Scramble for Africa” in which the European powers set about systematic colonization.

In 1818 the British Admiralty decided to resume the search for the long-sought North West Passage through the Canadian archipelago, which English navigators had begun to seek in the 16th century. In 1845 the Royal Navy mounted its most lavish expedition: two polar ships, the Erebus and the Terror, which had just returned from an Antarctic expedition under Sir James Clark Ross, were sent out under the command of Sir John Franklin. Years passed without word of the expedition, and some 40 search expeditions were mounted, the majority at the instigation of Franklin’s widow. Only in 1854 did John Rae of the Hudson’s Bay Company, perhaps the most thoroughly professional British explorer of the 19th century, hear reports from the Inuit of northern Canada of the demise of Franklin and his 137 men, and recover some relics from the ships. In 1859 another expedition finally found a single written report left by the expedition in a cairn. The massive exploratory effort of the Franklin search had, however, succeeded in filling in most of the remaining blanks on the map of the tortuous maze of islands and ice-choked channels that make up the archipelago.

On the other side of the world, explorers were searching the Australian interior for an inland sea or lake that would solve that country’s problems of drought. Edward Eyre was a sheep farmer who travelled into the outback and discovered the intermittent salt lake that is named after him. The German scientist Ludwig Leichhardt explored northern Australia, but died in 1848 trying to cross it from east to west.

Meanwhile Charles Sturt, and later John Stuart, moved from the southern settlements into the barren interior. In 1860 and 1861 the tough, experienced Stuart twice almost traversed Australia, from Adelaide across the dusty outback to the northern territories. In 1862 he finally succeeded in making the 3,250-km (2,020-mi) crossing using horses and camels; he returned to Adelaide at the same time that the bodies of Robert O’Hara Burke and William Wills were brought back into the city. Burke and Wills had left Melbourne in a large expedition hoping to track Stuart across Australia. They came within sight of the northern coast, turned back, and were more than halfway to Melbourne before they died of thirst and starvation at Cooper Creek.

Other explorers, often guided by Aborigines whose ancestors had been crossing Australia for thousands of years, mapped the remaining parts of the vast land: the Gregory brothers across the Northern Territory, John Forrest in Western Australia, Ernest Giles who became the first European to sight Ayers Rock (Uluru) in 1872, and Gibson and Simpson in the deserts that are named after them.

The Great Trigonometrical Survey of India was probably the greatest geographical project undertaken anywhere in the 19th century. It began as a number of independent surveys from 1767 onward but did not become a single national surveying project until 1817. The systematic trigonometrical survey started in 1800 under William Lambton and lasted for 70 years, with teams of surveyors measuring every inch of the subcontinent with chains, triangulations, and theodolites. They started at Madras, on the eastern coast, fanning out north and south and finally reaching the Himalaya, under the directorship of George Everest and his successor, Andrew Waugh.

To the British in India the most intriguing uncharted areas lay north of the Himalaya. There was no single expedition to explore this heart of central Asia, but throughout the century brave individuals plunged deep into the unknown, often disguised as Muslim or Buddhist traders and occasionally being killed by local peoples or suspicious rulers. Many of these intrepid explorers were army officers spying out the land for the “Great Game”, the race by Britain and Russia to gain control of central Asia and the overland approaches to India. The Russians sent equally daring explorers such as P. P. Semenov in the Tian Mountains and Count Nikolai Przhevalski. On the British side, the Royal Geographical Society honoured many, including H. H. Godwin-Austen (after whom the world’s second-highest mountain, also known as K2, is unofficially named), George Hayward for his work in the Karakorum Range, and Ney Elias for his work in China and Turkistan.

Perhaps the bravest of all were the Pundits, the Hindu surveyors trained by the Survey of India, who penetrated Tibet disguised as Buddhist pilgrims. Trained to walk exactly 2,000 paces to the mile and equipped with surveying equipment hidden in prayer wheels, explorers such as Nain Singh, Kishen Singh, and Kintup secretly mapped the approaches to Lhasa at great personal danger. The era ended with the big expedition of Francis Younghusband who marched to Lhasa in 1904 but whose diplomatic intentions went awry and resulted in a battle that led to the deaths of many Tibetans. The ambitious Swede Sven Hedin and the Anglo-Hungarian Aurel Stein combined remarkable exploration of central Asia with the removal of its neglected ancient works of art.

With the mapping of the northern shores of North America and Russia, the last great prizes for explorers were the two poles. Norwegians and Americans were the heroes of attempts on the North Pole. During the 19th century the British expeditions of Admiral William Parry in 1827 and of Captain George Nares in 1875-1876 battled north to within some 645 km (400 mi) of the Pole. The outstanding feats of exploration were by the Norwegians. Fridtjof Nansen crossed Greenland in 1888 and then sailed and drifted his tough little ship Fram across the north of Russia, from Siberia to the Atlantic in 1893-1896. A few years later Roald Amundsen, who would be the first person to reach the South Pole, took three years to bring the tiny sailing ship Gjöa through the North West Passage, the first to do so in a single vessel.

Meanwhile the ambitious American commander Robert Peary was determined to reach the North Pole, which he claimed to have done in April 1909. Another American, Dr Frederick Cook, claimed to have reached it in April 1908. Both Peary and Cook may have exaggerated their claims or miscalculated their coordinates, although Peary certainly came very close to the Pole. The first reliably confirmed attainment of the North Pole on the surface was by Wally Herbert, who drifted across it on his British Trans-Arctic Expedition of 1968-1969.

In the Antarctic a series of endeavours by different European countries in the early 20th century included perhaps the most famous of all expeditions. Captain R. F. Scott commanded the Discovery expedition from 1901 to 1904 that did admirable scientific work; and the Nimrod expedition of 1907-1909, led by Ernest Shackleton, penetrated close to the South Pole. Shackleton’s second expedition in 1914 achieved a miracle of survival when its ship, the aptly named Endurance, sank after becoming trapped in the ice: the crew crossed the icy, storm-swept Antarctic Ocean in an open boat, then after gaining land a smaller group rowed to South Georgia and traversed the glaciers of the desolate island to summon help; all were eventually rescued.

Antarctic exploration culminated in the famous “race” of 1911-1912. Captain Scott’s small team man-hauled sledges to the Pole and had covered most of the return journey, hauling precious geological samples, when exhaustion and cold led to their deaths in a frozen tent not far from safety. Arriving at the South Pole, Scott’s men had been greeted by the Norwegian flag and a message from their rival Amundsen. He had reached the most southerly point on Earth some five weeks earlier, by an efficient plan using husky dogs, who pulled the sledges and were periodically killed and fed to the surviving animals.

VI

Exploration in the Modern World

When Edward Whymper led a team of tweed-clad climbers in a successful attempt on the Matterhorn in 1865, he inaugurated the concept of exploration for sporting adventure. Whymper climbed in the Andes and the Rockies in the following decade, and throughout the 20th century mountaineers have been scaling peaks across the world. Pioneering attempts to climb Mount Everest were organized by the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society. George Leigh Mallory and Andrew Irvine disappeared close to the highest point on Earth in 1924 (Mallory’s body was eventually found in 1999), and during the 1930s Bill Tilman and Eric Shipton penetrated many of the hidden valleys of the Himalaya that are now renowned climbing centres for serious mountaineers. Some experts claimed that it was physically impossible for human beings to climb Everest. They were confounded on May 29, 1953, when John Hunt’s expedition put Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norkay on to the summit.

Since 1953 mountaineers have achieved further prestigious feats. They have been helped in their objectives by easier communications, by vastly improved equipment, and by better training and techniques. There is a move away from big expeditions towards Alpine-style climbing by two or three people moving quickly and unsupported. Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler scaled Everest without bottled oxygen in 1978, and Alison Hargreaves became the first woman to do so in 1995, while Chris Bonington has made first ascents of many Himalayan peaks. Every ridge of Everest has now been climbed, photographed, or mapped.

Sporting expeditions have taken people into inaccessible crannies of the Earth—kayaking down the white water of river gorges; ballooning or hang-gliding into volcanic craters and forest canopies or across oceans; and venturing into deep unexplored caverns or fissures all over the world.

The second half of the 20th century has witnessed a marvellous acceleration in discovery and exploration. Satellite imagery can plot every physical feature and translate it into digital form for computerized mapping. The emphasis is now on discovery of all the biological and physical wonders of our planet. Discoveries are coming thick and fast in every realm of science, transforming people’s understanding of the processes that govern the world and its amazing range of flora and fauna. However, these findings are now largely made by unpublicized teams rather than famous individuals. Their successes result from months or years of tough fieldwork, often followed by lengthy laboratory analysis. Every year an increasing number of expeditions go into the field.

More than 70 per cent of the Earth is covered by oceans, and yet it was only in 1943 that Jacques Yves Cousteau helped invent the aqualung that opened the submarine world to easy human exploration. There were primitive submersibles before World War I, but the greatest oceanographic expeditions have taken place in recent years. American, British, French, and other investigators are exploring the ocean floors and discovering how submarine currents and marine organisms affect the weather, atmosphere, and survival on Earth. It was the exploration of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge by scientists such as Robert Ballard that finally demonstrated the reality of plate tectonics—the most important breakthrough in geological thinking of recent decades. Other marine scientists are revealing the millions of species of fish that inhabit the waters. In 1960 Jacques Piccard dived in the Trieste to the lowest point of the sea floor ever reached, achieving the depth of 10,912 m (35,800 ft) below sea level in the Mariana Trench in the Pacific.

On the seas there have been epic voyages such as the first solo circumnavigation of the globe by Francis Chichester in 1967. Twenty years earlier Thor Heyerdahl and his crew thrilled the world by sailing his raft Kon-Tiki across the Pacific. Heyerdahl, and more recently Tim Severin with Brendan and other vessels, learnt much about ancient navigation by repeating legendary voyages in replicas of early craft.

In the deserts, Wilfred Thesiger followed the traditions of a line of famous desert explorers in his crossings of the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia’s Danakil Depression. Additionally, teams of scientists are working on many expeditions to discover the dynamics of dunes, the geological formations of desert regions, the palaeontological and archaeological evidence of early human beings, and the life cycles of desert creatures.

Most biological discoveries are being made in the tropical rainforests, the world’s richest ecosystem, containing perhaps half of the 10 million or more species with which people share the Earth. In the 19th century naturalists from many nations started to record this biological cornucopia, classifying plants, animals, and insects by the system devised by the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus.

The British scientists Henry Bates, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Richard Spruce were all active in the Amazon in the 1850s. Wallace went on to work in south-eastern Asia, and in 1858 the Linnean Society of London published two papers of seminal importance, the results of investigations of two indefatigable naturalists, Wallace and Charles Darwin, who had independently developed the theory of evolution by natural selection.

Amazonia contains a third of the world’s tropical forests, and its greatest explorers in the 20th century have been Brazilians, who have also championed that country’s indigenous peoples. In the first half of the century Candido Rondon discovered and surveyed more great rivers and contacted more isolated tribes than anyone before or since. His work of protection of the tribes he encountered was continued for 25 years by the Villas Boas brothers.

Botanists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and many other institutions have penetrated isolated forests in search of plants, while entomologists are constantly discovering new insect species. Ecologists are studying the dynamics of the nutrient and water cycles that nourish tropical forests, and environmentalists have investigated the vital role those systems play in maintaining life on Earth.

Scientists are also working in the polar regions. Researchers from various nations regularly spend the winter in Antarctica and there is a permanent American base at the South Pole itself. Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey noticed the alarming hole in the Earth’s protective ozone layer, a discovery that has led to international initiatives to phase out CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons). There have been exciting expeditions in recent years to both poles. Vivian Fuchs led a Trans-Antarctic Expedition in the 1950s that used motorized sledges to make the first crossing of the southern continent; Ranulph Fiennes and Charles Burton were the first to traverse both poles in the 1979-1982 Transglobe Expedition and Robert Swan was the first to man-haul to both poles.

Little new seems to remain under the classic definition of “first discoveries” although there are still a few mountains unclimbed, rivers undescended, and caves unfathomed. Explorers seeking fame must now try to reach remote destinations by difficult or unusual means: by going “solo”, “unsupported”, running, hang-gliding, or by mountain bike. In 1986 Dick Rutan and Jeanna Yeager took nine days to fly around the world non-stop and without refuelling in their specially built aircraft Voyager, and in 1999 Bertrand Piccard (son of Jacques and grandson of Auguste) and Brian Jones made the first non-stop circumnavigation of the world by balloon (designed by Jones), crowning a decade of attempts by an array of international teams.

In scientific exploration, however, the amount to be discovered seems almost infinite. Possibly millions of species are as yet unrecorded, while many have received only basic recording or description, and people are still learning how the oceans and land habitats function. There is more than enough to discover for many generations to come.