What makes explorers seek out the unfamiliar?
DARING FRENCH EXPLORATIONS Trailblazing adventures around the world: 1714–1854
HUBERT SAGNIÈRES 400pp. Flammarion. £65.
TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH How ancient conquerors, explorers, scientists, and traders connected the world
RAIMUND J. SCHULZ Translated by Robert Savage 560pp. Oxford University Press. £22.99 (US $34.99).
FOR ADVERTISING COPYWRITERS, exploration and discovery evoke intrepidity and exoticism. They are go-to terms if you want to sell 4X4s or a cruise-ship holiday. Most historians of exploration, by contrast, have lost interest in heroism. They now see explorers either as route-finders, who connected sundered cultures and facilitated exchanges, or as cartographers of the environment, deepening our knowledge of the surroundings we share with other inhabitants of our planet. For advocates of a postcolonial perspective, meanwhile, the connotations are negative. Explorers are dead white males who, with help from indigenous agents of empire, erected the scaffolding of exploitation: Eurocentrism, “cultural appropriation”, Westernization and everything in the history curriculum that calls for “decolonization”. They may have augmented knowledge, but they also destroyed the bliss of ignorance. Columbus went too far. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (1729–1811) merited denunciation by Diderot’s fictional Tahitian critic: “We are guided by Nature’s purest instinct, and you have sought to erase its imprint from our souls.”
Among the real problems that rival value judgements occlude is that of how exploration happens at all. Humans like to congratulate themselves on their adaptability or regret their restlessness. Most of us, however, are stay-at-homes, and when we have to move, we refashion in new surroundings the places we have left. Migrants usually look for somewhere like home. The colonists whom Aristophanes satirized in The Birds made their cloud-cuckoo lands in the image of Athens. “So many”, according to medieval rhyme, “are the Genoese / and so surefooted everywhere, / they go to any place they please / and recreate their city there.” In the nineteenth century about 400,000 people abandoned Britain to go to New Zealand, where they found a climate that recalled their own isles and favoured the foundation of what still looks and feels like an old-fashioned version of provincial England – with early closing, neat municipal gardens and bewigged lawyers. Even today, the migrants who so vex Mr Sunak and Mr Trump tend to oscillate between cities. They come from Lagos and go to London, or flee favelas to end up in slums. What makes explorers buck the trend and seek out the unfamilia
