The Mammoth Book of Travel in Dangerous Places (2 page)

So peace in Europe ushered in the age of exploration, and war in Europe abruptly ended it. By 1914 the main deserts had all been crossed, the great rivers traced to their sources, and the Poles
conquered. Exploration had practically run its course and so had the typically officered and expeditionary nature of the British style of exploration. The Norwegian Roald Amundsen’s 1911
defeat of Captain Scott in the race for the South Pole was seen as demonstrating the triumph of single-minded professionals over excessively scrupulous all-rounders. Brute strength and a morality
bordering on the sentimental (ponies could be eaten but not dogs) began to seem pig-headed and arrogant. In the unbearable fortitude with which Scott and his companions met their subsequent fate
there may be detected a foretaste of the greater tragedy that was about to unfold as the gentlemanly ideals of a vanishing age were laid to rest in the fields of Normandy and Flanders.

After both World Wars exploring activity did revive, although whether crossing that small corner of Arabia known as the Empty Quarter or conquering the conspicuous heights of Everest really
counted is debatable. They were certainly worthy challenges, but exploration in the nineteenth-century sense reserved to itself an air of mystery which these new goals could scarcely boast. No one
suspected more than sand in the Empty Quarter or snow and ice on Everest. Shackleton had been thwarted in his 1908–9 bid for the South Pole by the discovery that it lay across a plateau
10,000 feet above sea-level and so nearly as elevated as Tibet. He was defeated by the effects of altitude as much as latitude; it was a surprise to everyone. So was the discovery of an elevated
“lake region” in the highlands of East Africa by Burton, Speke, Livingstone and Baker. This idea proved so exciting that soon lake regions were being predicted all over the place. Wood
thought his Sir-i-kol source of the Oxus might be part of another and Hedin insisted on a Tibetan lake region beside his Transhimalaya range. An inland sea, if not a lake region, was also
confidently predicted for the heart of Australia until Sturt, Burke and Stuart proved otherwise. But Everest held no such surprises; even its height was known to within a few feet. And no one
suspected lakes or even forbidden cities in the howling wilderness of the Empty Quarter.

There were no major discoveries left for the post-war explorer and there were, and still are, serious doubts about what exploration is now all about. In 1909 Commander Robert Peary’s claim
to have been first to reach the North Pole occasioned bitter controversy. Some preferred the claim of a fellow American, Dr. Frederick Cook, to have got there first; others disputed whether Peary,
who had insisted on making his polar dash alone but for his black servant and some mystified Eskimos, could possibly have reached the Pole in the time he indicated. Subsequently Cook was largely
discredited and Peary, when his pre-arrangements were fully appreciated, vindicated. “It was not, however, exploration” declared a doyenne of the British Royal Geographical Society as
recently as 1990. Peary’s dash was preceded by the establishment of a chain of elaborately equipped igloos reaching almost to his goal; like the post travellers of old, he could travel light
being assured of food and shelter at each halt. Whether it was or was not exploration, it was certainly not cricket.

Exploration assumed a high degree of hardship, risk and uncertainty as well as of mystery. And when, in the twentieth century, these ceased to be self-evident, they had to be contrived. Colonel
Fawcett’s mysterious disappearance in South America could be seen as a fitting end for one who, insisting on the existence of a lost Eldorado, made a mystery out of his route as well as his
goal. Similarly the traveller who elects to go on foot where he could perfectly well ride, or to cycle where there are no roads, is merely contriving hardship. His experiences are only marginally
more interesting than those of the adventurer who, failing to contrive a knife-edge situation, feels no compunction about inventing it. To such a rascal no indulgence was extended in the great age
of exploration. Incident had to be credible and when it was not, as in the monumental narratives of Henry Savage Landor, the author’s bluff would be called, as indeed happened to Landor in
both London and Paris.

So to qualify as exploration a journey had to be credible, had to involve hardship and risk, and had to include the novelty of discovery. Thereafter, like cricket, it was somewhat hard to
explain to the uninitiated. But one element was absolutely vital; indeed it was precisely that which distinguished the age of exploration from previous ages of discovery and which necessitated the
adoption of the word “exploration”. It was, quite simply, a reverence for science. This might amount to no more than avowing a curiosity about the unknown and spattering one’s
narrative with compass bearings and distances; or it might, as with some of the polar expeditions, result in a staff of distinguished researchers generating shelves of observations on everything
from meteorology to bowel movements.

The point was that science provided a rationale for travel, and elevated it from mere locomotion to something approaching an academic discipline; hence the need in English for that new noun,
“exploration”. Science also broadened the scope of travel. Lands which travellers had hitherto found no good reason for visiting were of particular interest to scientists, while those
from which political competition or religious bigotry had barred the traveller could now be assailed in the name of science. In Africa and America it would not be uncommon for scientific
exploration to be used as a pretext for colonial and commercial expansion; British East Africa owed everything to the likes of Burton and Speke and the sea-to-sea configuration of the United States
to Lewis and Clark. In Asia exploration was often a cover for political intrigue, as demonstrated by Alexander Burnes, or for military intelligence-gathering, Francis Younghusband’s
speciality. But that in no way discredited the new priority accorded to scientific enquiry. It is what distinguishes the explorer from the merchant/navigator, and the age of exploration from the
centuries of travel which preceded it.

Travel as the raw material of geography has a pedigree as long as history. An anthology could begin with Harkhuf, “the first recorded explorer”, who around 2300
BC
reached the land of Yam. An inscription on his tomb near Aswan records that after an absence of seven months Harkhuf returned to Egypt laden with “all kinds of
gifts” including a dancing dwarf. He also brought panthers, ebony and ivory; it is presumed therefore that Yam lay somewhere up the Nile in Nubia. As old as history, geography amounted to
much the same thing for Greek writers like Herodotus and Xenophon. Along with astronomy and what we would now call ethnology, history-geography provided the physical and human context so vital to
self-conscious civilizations. Knowledge of where one stood in relation to other planets, other peoples, other lands and other ages was comforting because it presumed an intellectual supremacy over
them.

Where one stood was, of course, at the apex of history and at the centre of the world, ideas which could be graphically embodied in diagrammatic form, especially maps. Thus for the Chinese the
world map shaded off from their well-ordered Middle Kingdom into various degrees of barbarism; the Graeco-Roman world, with the Mediterranean at its centre, was similarly uncomplimentary about
outsiders with amphibian monsters and woad-speckled savages lurking round its watery perimeter. Religion-crazed societies like those of Hindu-Buddhist India or medieval Christian Europe often found
space in their maps for an additional vignette portraying the bliss of nirvana or heaven; it usually appeared at the top, the dead centre being reserved for the Hindu’s Mount Meru or the
Christian’s Jerusalem. Such complacent centricity survived even scientific enlightenment about the true shape of the earth and the rather arbitrary distribution of its land masses. With no
attempt at impartiality conventional maps still show the northern hemisphere, home of the erstwhile colonial powers where such cartography was perfected, at the top of the globe; and conventional
projections of the world, centred on the Greenwich Mean, still accord Europe a pivotal prominence. That conceit, implicit in exploration, that any firsthand account of places unfamiliar to a
European readership constituted discovery, predates the nineteenth century by at least two millennia.

Familiarity with other lands and peoples also conferred a political edge over them. Gathering knowledge is an acquisitive process, a vicarious form of conquest; and understanding one’s
environment has always been closely associated with mastery of it. Later explorers were not the only ones who were hard put to disclaim all colonizing intentions. Emerging from the Australian
outback after an epic crossing of that continent in 1862, one of John McDouall Stuart’s companions climbed a small hill, glimpsed the Timor Sea, and announced journey’s end. His croaked
cries of “The Sea, The Sea” nicely echoed the lustier shouts of Xenophon’s Ten Thousand as they breasted the hills above Trebizond in 400
BC
and sighted
the Black Sea. Stuart had crossed the heart of his continent and confidently anticipated ranchers, settlers and the transcontinental telegraph line following in his trail. Xenophon was in retreat,
hard-pressed and anxious to be home. But the knowledge, not the circumstances under which it was acquired, was what mattered. Thanks to Xenophon, Armenia and Anatolia had become as much a part of
the Greek world as, thanks to Stuart, central Australia had of the British world. Seventy years after Xenophon, Alexander the Great turned knowledge into dominion.

Whether Harkhuf, our first explorer, was interested in intelligence-gathering is unclear. But to judge by all those “gifts” he was not indifferent to trade. As well as commerce,
probably up the Nile, with Yam and other parts of Africa, the ancient Egyptians pioneered maritime trade. Punt, a land which may correspond to Somalia but was more probably in southern Arabia, was
the Pharaohs’ main source of incense and unguents. To a people obsessed with temple ritual and preserving their dead these were vital commodities, every bit as valued and desirable as, much
later, were spices by meat-eating medieval Europe. If Harkhuf never ventured to Punt, contemporaries and descendants certainly did, thus pioneering the maritime trade of the Arabian Sea and the
Indian Ocean. In their wake followed Greeks and Phoenicians who reached India and may even have circumnavigated Africa. High value commodities like gold, ivory, precious stones, and spices now
comprised the main stimulus to exploration; tin even tempted mariners beyond the straits of Gibraltar and up Europe’s Atlantic sea-board to the British Isles. The Romans would follow but in
the Indian Ocean, where long distance maritime trade supplied Rome with spices and exotica, it was the Arabs who eventually engrossed the ancient world’s most lucrative commerce and its most
extensive field of geographical knowledge.

Navigation is of course a science and without the technical expertise of the Phoenicians, Greeks and Arabs in astronomy and instrumentation this steady widening of geographical horizons would
have been impossible. Yet until the eighteenth century science remained but a means to an end. It was the same for the Vikings whose remarkable voyages in the tenth and eleventh centuries extended
to Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland; and it was even so for Henry the Navigator, the Portuguese prince whose patronage and encouragement of maritime science in the fifteenth century led to the
famous succession of Portuguese voyages down, and eventually round, the African coast. For Prince Henry, as for Harkhuf, trade was the priority. Pious objectives, like carrying the crusades round
Islam’s African flank, discovering the mythical kingdom of Prester John, or winning converts, were quickly forgotten the moment that Vasco da Gama reached India (1498) and filled his ships
with spices.

Trade was also responsible for what was known of Eurasia’s inland geography. Here the backbone of all knowledge was the famous silk route from China through Central Asia to the Black Sea
and the Mediterranean. Political emissaries and religious propagandists occasionally threaded its deserts and mountain passes en route to fabled Cathay; but much more typical were merchants like
Marco Polo. His detailed account of the route would come in for careful examination by nineteenth century explorers like Wood and Burnes, but to the medieval world it was his descriptions of Kublai
Khan’s capital of Xanadu and of his rich and well ordered empire which were so intriguing. Two hundred years later it was to find a short-cut for trade with Polo’s Cathay, Xanadu and
Cipangu (Japan) that Columbus sailed west. When natives in Cuba responded to his queries for gold by mentioning a place called “Cubanacan”, he was sure they were referring to Kublai
Khan.

The age of discovery, as opposed to the age of exploration, began with Columbus and Vasco da Gama. Da Gama was followed east by Cabral, who en route made the first landing in Brazil, while
Columbus was followed west by Amerigo Vespucci who gave his name to the new continent. To ignore them, not to mention the Cabots and the great circumnavigators, Magellan and Drake, in an anthology
of exploration may seem perverse. Likewise those indefatigable Dutch and English mariners who attempted to emulate Portuguese and Spanish successes round Cape Horn and Cape of Good Hope by rounding
Eurasia by the North East Passage or America by the North West Passage. Their additions to man’s knowledge of the earth’s surface created the map over which later explorers pored in
search of blank spaces and unsolved mysteries. It would be absurd to belittle their achievements simply on the grounds that their motivation was wholly commercial rather than scientific.

The same could be said for another class of pioneers who followed hard in their wake and quickly circumscribed those blank spaces. In South and Central America we know them as
Conquistadors,
in North America as
Courreurs de Bois,
and in Siberia as Cossacks. Pushing east in Asia and west in Canada these pioneers reduced trade to something closer to rank
exploitation as they shot and trapped their way ever deeper into the continental landmasses. Furs and hides became the currency of embryonic colonies just as in Mexico and South America did gold
and silver. There all pretence at commercial exchange was abandoned as the
Conquistadors,
dazzled as much by religious bigotry as precious metals, butchered their way inland to claim for
themselves and Christendom the untold wealth of the Aztecs and Incas.