Geographic Exploration

B

Faith and Chance

A similar outlook was found among two Atlantic Ocean peoples—the early Irish and the Vikings. Irish sailors of the 4th to 8th centuries, many of them Christian monks, launched into the difficult waters of the North Atlantic in very small boats, sometimes made of leather. For these Christian explorers, setting out in such fragile crafts was an act of trust in God, and they traveled in anticipation of seeing the wonders of a divinely created world. Their attitude, which might be described as fatalistic, brought them to the northern parts of Scotland, the Faroe Islands, and Iceland. Here their field of exploration overlapped with the Vikings who, using more sophisticated seagoing vessels, also had a risk-taking attitude to seafaring and exploration. Viking exploration went even farther into the Atlantic Ocean and reached North America around the end of the 10th century. They had confidence in their own seamanship and considered that successful exploration brought honor, as well as worldly wealth.

Chance has also played its part in the story of exploration. According to an Icelandic saga, a prolonged gale at sea in 986 drove Icelandic trader Bjarni Herjólfsson off his course for Greenland until he accidentally glimpsed the coast of North America, the first European to do so. The Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez 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.

C

Commerce, Religion, and Myth

The commercial reason for exploration has been a consistent driving force. In 1492 the great navigator Christopher Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic Ocean seeking a new, shorter, and cheaper route to reach the riches of East Asia, and Portuguese explorer Vasco 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 Sea to southeastern 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 Asia. 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 helped to shape the Arab attitude towards travel and exploration as a normal activity. Muslims are expected to perform the hajj, or pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca, at least once in their lives. 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.

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Another role of religion as a reason for exploration was the missionary journey. In the 13th century this motivated the Franciscan friars Giovanni de Piano Carpini and Willem van Ruysbroeck to seek an audience with Mongolian khans, while, in the 16th century, the Jesuits’ zeal for knowledge sent Matteo Ricci to China and Saint Francis Xavier to Japan.

The proselytizing urge of Christianity was epitomized by the travels of the Scottish missionary and explorer David Livingstone in Africa in the 19th century. European Christian proselytizing also took much more aggressive forms: In the medieval Crusades, Europeans warred with Muslims in an attempt to regain control of the Holy Land. Spanish conquistadors who explored the Americas in the 16th century 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. In these cases the motive lies deep within the cultural fabric of the society. In the 3rd century bc the emperor Qin Shihuangdi sent the courtier Xu Fu (Hsu Fu) with a fleet into the Pacific to find the islands where legend said the drug of immortality grew. His quest was echoed in ad 1513 by the expedition of the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León who sailed to Florida to look for the fountain of youth. Myths could have a long lifespan: European explorers searched for the kingdom of the legendary Christian priest Prester John first in central Asia in the 13th century, later in China, and finally in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) in the 16th century. In every case their travels increased geographical knowledge.

D

Control and Conquest

The political organization of a society helped determine how it explored. 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 huge 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 emissaries to contact and evaluate their neighbors. Farther north the Maya civilization in the 4th to 8th centuries established a trading network across Central America. The militaristic Aztec Empire of Mexico, which grew to dominance in the 14th and 15th centuries, likely sent scouts to prepare the way for its conquering armies. As late as the 19th century, British explorers mapped the Himalayas and Afghanistan for strategic reasons, to learn more about the frontiers of the British Empire, the better to defend them. The Lewis and Clark Expedition across the American West was performed for political and strategic reasons, as well as to find a route to the Pacific Coast.

Military conquest, once achieved, brought increased knowledge of foreign lands and created safer conditions for civilian travel. The astonishing overland campaign of Macedonian general Alexander the Great that took him to the borders of India in the 4th century bc added hugely to European knowledge of Asia. Similarly, 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 such travelers as Marco Polo could move with comparative safety.

E

Technology and Science

Since the 18th century, 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, sometimes cloaking older commercial or political motives.

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 Earth, or the labors 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, Captain 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 great scientific achievements have had profound political, economic, and social effects.

F

National Prestige and Personal Challenge

Successful exploration came increasingly to be driven by 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 so-called Scramble for Africa, the African continent was carved up into European colonies. This process was often headed by explorers 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, in the early 20th century, British explorer Robert F. Scott raced Norwegian Roald Amundsen to the South Pole. In 1953 Britain and its Commonwealth thrilled to the news that New Zealand mountaineer Edmund Hillary had become the first person to reach the summit of Mount Everest, the highest peak in the world.

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 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), had the resources to compete. As the cost of space exploration continued to increase, the economically weakening USSR (and, since 1991, Russia) pursued it less and less. Meanwhile, the increasingly wealthy European Union, and to a lesser extent Japan, ventured into space. While the United States retains its dominance in space exploration, costs continue to soar, so now a pooling of international effort is seen as the only way forward in space. (For more information, See Space Exploration.)

The often colorful 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 travelers 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, 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 Battūtah, the greatest traveler 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 northwest Africa to China. At his death in around 1369 he was reputed to be the most well-traveled person in the world.

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