The Royal Geographical Society History of World Exploration [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Man is a highly mobile creature, migrating and travelling to every part of the world. In this we are not miique. Migratory birds regularly navigate over amazing distances; whale and sharks roam the oceans: salmon, eels and other fish cross the seas in their breeding cycles: wildebeest, caribou and other animals make great migrations, as do locusts and other plague insects; some families of bat are found in every continent. What sets us apart is the ability to discover. Other creatures share our curiosity; but man alone can communicate his discoveries to his fellows. Our societies acquire a collective awareness of their known world, and the most adventurous have the urge to discover what hes beyond and to return to describe their findings. These brave people are the explorers. Motives for exploration have changed over the centuries. Prehistoric man performed prodigious feats of discovery and movement, penetrating most of the habitable parts of the world. Our species evolved in East Africa (or possibly in the Indus valley or even in the Orient), and early man naturally settled in warm and fertile valleys such as the Nile or those in Mesopotamia. It must have been the search for game that led pre-agricultural hunters into higher latitudes, to the harsher climate of northern Europe or even the frozen wastes of Siberia. We do not know what took our ancestors on the most remarkable of all migrations: the colonization of the Americas. This occurred some 20,000 years ago during the late Ice Age, when for many centuries the bed of the shallow Bering Strait between Siberia and Alaska was exposed by the lowered oceans. This land bridge, Beringia, was a forbidding place of frozen mud, lashed by icy- winds and sub-zero temperatures. Early man somehow moved eastwards, either on foot across these wastes or along their shores in some form of vessel, and then settled in Alaska before moving south into the uninhabited American continents. Man's resihence, adaptability and mobility are astonishing. Almost no part of the earth has not felt a human footprint. The Inuit have learned survival in northern Greenland and the naked Yahgan in Tierra del Fuego; the Bedou travel across the waterless Empty Quarter of Arabia, the Tuareg are lords of the western Sahara, and Mongol herdsmen live on the edges of the high Gobi desert; tribal peoples flourish in all the densest tropical forests. As an example of the speed with which so-called primitive people could move 84 villages of Tupinambua Indians fled from the Portuguese on the coast of Brazil in the 1580s. They migrated with their families. sometimes settling for a time or fighting other tribes. They travelled westwards across South America to the foothills of the Andes until they met Spanish conquistadores from Peru. Disillusioned, they turned north-east down the Madeira river and had settled on an island in the Amazon when the first Portuguese arrived there in 1639, amazed to find that these people remembered them from two generations earlier. In that short time, the Tupinamba had covered some 3000 km (1875 miles) of very difficult terrain. They explained that 'with such a multitude of fugitives it was impossible to support them all. They therefore separated over distant trails . . . some peopling one land, some another.' Australian aborigines know song-line routes right across their vast country: Canadian Indians paddled canoes over immense distances of lakes and rivers: Polynesians navigated to the remotest islands of the Pacific, even managing to settle on Easter Island with their families and domestic animals, although it is thousands of kilometres from any land. So the ability to reach remote places, to travel over great distances in tough conditions, and to understand the lie of the land are by no means the province of sophisticated people. It is rather the written record of their discoveries and adventures that distinguishes our explorers. Almost all the terrestrial explorers whom we most admire were guided and helped by natives, but their attitudes were often hopelessly Eurocentric. When David Livingstone saw the mighty falls on the Zambezi, he was thrilled by 'the most wonderful sight I have witnessed in Africa' and named them after his Queen Victoria. But to local people they were, and still are, Mosiottatunya, "The Smoke that Thunders', in the same way that Iguafu means 'Big Water' in Tupi, and Niagara means 'Thundering Water'. Until recently, explorers were the men who filled in the blanks on the map - or at least the blanks in our perception, because the places they discovered were home to local people. The essential prerequisite was a basic map that could be improved. There are countless examples of pre-literate societies producing their versions of cartography: drawing on hides, sketching river bends and rapids on a sand bank, carving geographical information on rock outcrops, or simply describing the lie of the land with hand gestures. No map has survived from Ancient Greece, but we know how it would have looked from the writings on Herodotus or Aeschylus. Tlie great geographer of the 3rd century BC, Eratosthenes of Alexandria,