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.