Peoples and Empires by Anthony Pagden

Author:Anthony Pagden
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780307431592
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T21:00:00+00:00

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THE FINAL FRONTIER

The fight against slavery began in the middle years of the eighteenth century as Britain was losing one empire and in the process of acquiring another. It began, too, at the same time as another and quite different development in the long history of the relationship between peoples. By the middle of the eighteenth century, all of the earth’s surface had been explored, charted, and in some cases colonized by Europeans. All, that is, except one area: the Pacific. The Pacific had, of course, been crossed and recrossed many times since the circumnavigation of the fleet that had set out in 1519 under the command of Magellan. But for Europeans it remained a largely uncharted mystery. It was the possible location of “the unknown southern land,” and of the still sought-after northern passage to the Atlantic. In the eighteenth century the Pacific became the final frontier.

The fantasies that since antiquity had plagued or delighted the European imagination had been moving steadily farther and farther away from Europe itself. The marvels and monsters with which the imagination of the ancients had populated the globe but which had failed to turn up in Europe or Africa or “Ethiopia” were later found in “India” or, after 1492, in America. In 1512, Juan Ponce de León went to Florida in search of the fountain of eternal youth, and Francisco de Orellana was so convincing in his description of the Amazons that he had seen that their name, not his, was given to the great river he was the first to navigate.

The horizon of these possibilities began to recede, however, with the advance of modern science, which made increasingly improbable such curiosities as men with their faces in the middle of their chests, or with one large foot that they raised over their head at noon to protect themselves from the sun. By the time first the British, then the French and the Spanish began to explore the South Pacific, no one believed any longer in such things. People did, however, still believe in something else, perhaps no less chimerical. They believed that somewhere in the world there existed lands where nature provided all that mankind required, and where the inhabitants lived wholly virtuous lives, free from the terrible constraints of civilization. This vision, part fantasy and part ethnographic curiosity, was loosely based upon impressionistic travelers’ tales. It was a transposed version of the dream of the earthly paradise, or what in antiquity was called the Islands of the Blest. Alexander had visited this paradise, in myth if not in reality, and it had been glimpsed, briefly, by eager European readers in Amerigo Vespucci’s account of America—until that was shown to be a forgery. Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), which claims to be an account of one of Vespucci’s sailors, is in part at least a satire on the possibility that any such place could ever exist in reality.

In 1766 a French nobleman, mathematician, and explorer named Antoine de Bougainville left Nantes on the

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