The Great Ages of Discovery by Stephen J. Pyne

Author:Stephen J. Pyne [Pyne, Stephen J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS051000 History / Expeditions & Discoveries, HIS039000 History / Civilization, SCI034000 Science / History
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Published: 2021-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

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The First Age had been charged with finding routes to the Indies. It did that, and more, and completed the task by the early 18th century. The Second Age was charged with inventorying the Earth through Enlightenment eyes. By the early 20th century it had accomplished that goal. By the time it wound down only fragments of the Antarctic coast remained unmapped along with most of Antarctica’s interior, sampled only by a few traverses, but that seemed enough. East Antarctica was an immense ice sheet the size of Australia—there was not much there to know. The ice buried even continent-spanning mountain ranges.

When the Great Voyages started, every people on the planet had its own map of the world. When the Second Age ended, Europe’s map was the world’s. Exploration fed on itself, or to borrow an image from the machinery revolutionizing industry, it resembled a self-reinforcing dynamo. Extended expeditions carried libraries with them, stocked with books of previous explorers. On the eve of the Great War, with European imperialism at flood tide, the West could point to its undaunted tradition of discovery as a reason for its rise. Rule followed trade, trade followed the flag, the flag followed the West’s intrepid explorers.

The Second Age was as varied and capacious as Europe’s ambitions. The hardships and triumphs of its explorers became the stuff of modern legends. But in the end what made the age distinctive was the mind which drove and absorbed those treks and voyages. Looking back on what he considered “the worst journey in the world,” with one ordeal tumbling into another—Robert Scott’s Terra Nova expedition to Antarctica—Apsley Cherry-Garrard thought that the vital core was an “Intellectual Passion.” True exploration had to go beyond physical adventuring: it had to engage the mind as well. And behind both was a moral urgency that discovery mattered and was worth the costs, the suffering, and the ethical angst it prompted. It had to interbraid with the larger culture. So, to commemorate the death of Scott’s polar party, Cherry-Garrard proposed to raise a wooden cross at Observation Hill on McMurdo Island, part of a continuous lineage of memorial markers that traces back to the Portuguese padrão. He chose for an inscription the closing lines to Tennyson’s great paean to exploration, “Ulysses”: “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

That seemed a suitable testimony at the time for an expedition whose drive and ambition had taken its members to the ends of the Earth, to places where geology was reduced to a single mineral, where biology and society (other than the exploring party itself) was banished, where the seasons simplified into a single long day, where there was little to gather, little to see, little to learn, where the ice reflected back on the looker, where there was plenty of striving but not much to seek and less to find. Yet in its attempt, Terra Nova went not only to the ends of the Earth, but to the end of the Second Age.

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