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Of Shoes, and Ships, and Sealing-Wax... Of Cabbages, and Kings
by Jamie McNulty
The history of exploration is threaded with individual desire and propelled by the force of nations. The desire to know what lies beyond the next hill or to discover the shape of the universe is linked by the same longing for knowledge, so aptly termed "curiosity."
One curious fellow, the young astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks, first observed our sister planet, Venus, cross the face of the sun in 1639. Following Horrocks's observation, Edmond Halley (of Halley's Comet fame) proclaimed it was the duty of future generations to travel around the globe to view the 1761 and 1769 transits of Venus to help determine the distance between Earth and the Sun — and, therefore, to get a better idea of the size of our solar system. Presently, the next Venusian
transit will take place on June 8 of this year, the first time in 122 years. Venus, our morning and evening star, is said to draw and attract us, shaping our character and leading us to our destiny, guiding us across unknown seas, and weaving the history of travel with myth, science, and desire.
So, more than 100 years after Horrocks's observation, with Venus as their
muse, a series of expeditions was sent out by a concert of European nations
on voyages of discovery. One of the most famous of these voyages was Captain
James Cook's first circumnavigation of the world, amply recorded in the nine-volume
account of his journey and compiled by Cook, John Hawkesworth and James
King. Cook and his crew observed the transit from the island of Tahiti, where
they were fortunate to have clear skies and the company of "three handsome
young women," escorted by the ship's natural historian, Joseph
Banks. One wonders which Venus Cook was actually observing.
Cook's voyage was one of the first to be sent on a scientific rather than
economic mission. The success of his voyage led to other voyages of discovery,
such as those recorded in Charles
Darwin's Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty's Ships Adventure
and Beagle between the Years 1826 and 1836, and Cook's later unsuccessful
search for the Northwest Passage. In the early and mid-19th century, the
famous Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin tried more than once to find the
fabled passage with the approval and funding of the British government. Both
ships attached to his last expedition, the Erebus and the Terror,
never returned, guaranteeing Lord Franklin and his crew posterity in folklore
and song.
Several expeditions were mounted to search for John Franklin. The American
effort is recorded by Elisha
Kent Kane in Arctic
Explorations: The Second Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin,
1853, '54, '55. While most of the search missions serendipitously discovered
more about the Arctic than the fate of Franklin, it was Captain Erasmus Ommanney
of the HMS Assistance who finally found traces of Franklin's expedition
in August 1850. [While there is no account authored by Erasmus Ommanney of
this journey, we do have a copy of The
Eruption of Krakatoa from Ommanney's
personal library and complete with his signature on the front endpaper.]
If not the stars and the sea, what draws adventurers to fulfill
their fateful or even fatal destinies? For
some, such as seemingly pedestrian Fanny Parkes, it was a matter of circumstance.
She followed her husband, a customs officer, to India in 1822, where she
developed a love and exuberance for India which was at times a source of
offense and gossip for other English ladies. Fanny's journalistic two-volume
account of her life there, Wanderings
of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, is an encyclopedia of Hindu
culture, language, and costume, the latter reproduced in many hand-colored
plates.
For Henry M. Stanley, worldly fame may have been the primary motivation. He made his way around the world as a journalist and adventurer for hire with remarkable success, especially in Africa: finding the not-necessarily-lost Livingstone; "opening" the Congo to European exploitation in the service of King
Leopold; and finding Ptolemy's fabled "Mountains of the Moon," the cloud-hidden Ruwenzori.
The more talented but less fortunate Mungo
Park began as a ship's surgeon. His association with Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, and his discovery in Sumatra of eight new species of fish brought him some notoriety and the rise of his star. Mungo Park's trials of privation, disease, capture, and incarceration during his
first mission to find the mythical Timbuktu and explore the Niger River are only outdone by the disasters of his second. Seduced by wanderlust, he could not simply sit by his fire in Scotland and recount his adventures. He set off on a second and fatal expedition to Africa's interior. The account
of his second expedition is taken from his journal and later investigations by surviving companions, describing the death of most of his crew from malaria and dysentery, and then his own by drowning in the great river he explored.
Of all the travelers and explorers under the spell of wanderlust, none is
greater than Richard
Francis Burton. Educated on the continent in his early
years, Burton had a hard time adjusting to public school in England. After
being expelled from Oxford, he decided to expand his horizons. He joined the
military, serving in Sindh. He taught himself Hindustani, Persian, and Arabic,
practiced Sufism, and performed the pilgrimage to Mecca, disguised as a Pathan
from the border area of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Probably his most famous
expedition was his search with John Hanning Speke for the source of the Nile.
The journey resulted in a controversy that brought the two of them to London
to debate in front of the Royal Society the scientific truth of Speke's claim
to have found the river's source. Mysteriously, Speke shot and killed himself
in a hunting accident only hours before the debate. You can read Speke's version
of the story in What
Led to the Discovery of the Source of the Nile. Burton's account is
recorded in the scarce The Lake Regions of Central Africa: A Picture of
Exploration, often reprinted as The Source of the Nile.
Burton went on to write and explore other parts of Africa and the Americas
and completed
his masterful translations of the Kama
Sutra, The
Perfumed
Garden of Sheik Nefzawi, and the 1001 stories Scheherezade told in The
Thousand Nights and a Night. Surely it was the goddess Venus who was
Burton's patroness in these endeavors.
Exploration, the tangling of personal desires and destinies with the manifest destiny of empire, has resulted in an uncomfortable human history. Exploration has sometimes unleashed the destructive forces of war, colonialism, slavery, and the mediocrity of globalism. But at its best, travel and exploration bring us together in all our human variety with a wealth of knowledge, developing the rich conditions necessary for scientific revolution, the emergence of new ideas, and the flowering of culture.
These accounts preserve something of the original desire and curiosity of those who set out to explore the unknown. Reading them inspires our own curiosity. In the words of Tennessee
Williams, "Make voyages! Attempt them!... there's nothing else." |
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