From the comfort of our armchairs we delight in reading about the deeds of explorers. “Most humans”, writes Felipe Fernández-Armesto in his review of Raimund J. Schulz’s To the Ends of the Earth, “evidently resemble our fellow primates in resisting the allure of unfamiliar climes”. So we are naturally curious about those oddballs who are impelled to travel into the unknown. In an extract from Hubert Sagnières’s anthology Daring French Explorations, Auguste Bernard Duhaut-Cilly attributes the impulse to roam abroad to “God”, who “inspired man with an irresistible longing to spread his race”. In a more realistic vein, appropriate to a man who had failed to negotiate a trade deal with Hawaii in the 1820s, Duhaut-Cilly reflects that his fellow Europeans were also motivated by “persecution, curiosity, lust for glory, ennui and ... gold and silver above all”.
Captain Cook, whose third and final voyage Hampton Sides narrates in The Wide Wide Sea, has been the subject of much postcolonial revisionism. Sides paints a nuanced picture of a brave, irascible, complex explorer who set out to go “as far as possible for man to go”. Cook was well aware of the effect of European contact with Pacific islanders: “as far as possible for man to go”.
So far no alien life forms have been discovered (or exploited) through space exploration, but humanity brings its own troubles. Adam H
