The Idea of Exploration

May 25, 2007

In telling the story of human exploration Felipe Fernández-Armesto presents a globe as a novel physical object:

The world-girdling voyages that followed made so much accessible that distances seemed to dwindle. Globe makers gave their customers the curious sensation of being able to cup the world in their hands. Carlos Borja, thanking his famous uncle Francis... for a gift of a globe in 1566, said that it made him realize how small the world was.

This is the pleasure of Pathfinders: its ability to communicate something of the changing perceptions of the world as the centuries pass.. something of the thrill of holding a globe in the first half of the 16th century.

The plot that runs through the book is the importance of cultural values to exploration. It is tempting to see exploration as a fundamentally economic and realistic enterprise.. pushed forward by tangible gains. Sure, there might be fanciful tales and mythmaking involved in the wake of these explorations.. but those are after-the-fact additions. That way of thinking is wrong.. if we follow the argument of this book.

Fernández-Armesto spends a number of pages asking why Spain and Portugal managed to be the pathbreakers for global exploration. Why not the wealthier and more advanced countries of the Indian Ocean?

That is where economics came in. The Indian Ocean was an arena of such intense commercial activity, and so much wealth, that it would have been pointless for its indigenous peoples to look for markets or suppliers elsewhere. [116]

There is no reason that the Spanish and Portuguese had to become explorers. Morocco faces the Atlantic, but it does not develop this kind of exploration. What made the Spanish and Portuguese different was a culture that valued adventure. The chivalric code got applied to the sea-faring world:

The hero, down on his luck, who risks seaborne adventures to become ruler of an island realm or fief, is the central character of the Spanish versions of the stories of Apollonius, Brutus of Troy, Tristram, Amadis, King Canamor, and Prince Turian among others, all part of the array of popular fiction accessible to readers at every level of literacy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. [145]

So the world owes popular fiction a debt of some kind. These crazy ideas about the ideal path of life get embedded in our heads and end up pushing us out onto the high seas of the world. Fernández-Armesto grimly recounts the deprivations experienced by conquistadors. and yet people kept coming they kept coming.. seemingly driven crazy by the ideas in their head:

Chivalric self-perception did not just inspire madcap exploits. They helped to make the consequent sufferings bearable—for the reality endured by Quirós could hardly have been tolerable without some psychological strategy of escape. [208]

One could study this mass of popular stories and extract some of the values widely accepted at the time. More interesting is to read narrative accounts written by explorers and to see how these popular stories directly influence the perception of a new situation. Fernández-Armesto cites several examples of this phenomenon. The narrative of Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá is most vivid. On the occasion of an Indian woman arriving at the Spanish camp looking for her husband, Villagrá writes:

The sergeant saw how gracious and polite
She was, how calm and frank and fair
And ordered all to grant her, without let,
The freedom due to all unblemished beauty,
As courtliness for gentleness commands. [233]

The more we reconstruct the scene historically.. taking place in the new world under harsh circumstances.. the more this description appears as some kind of bad joke. But evidently even here it was possible for Villagrá to experience his life wandering in the new world in terms of codes of chivalry.

The Spanish are not unique in this dependence of exploration on cultural values as embodied in popular literature. We know comparatively little about the cognitive world of the Polynesian explorers who spread across the Pacific, but what we do know is suggestive of a system similar to that of the Spanish:

Long-range navigation... was the achievement of people inspired by a culture of adventure. This culture was recorded in their many epics about heroic voyages. It was demonstrated by their rites—the cannibal feast, for instance, in honour of a Tongan navigator's homecoming from Fiji, witnessed by an English mariner in 1810. [47]

If Fernández-Armesto is correct in citing exploration and global connection as the big story of the past few millennia of human history, then the inevitable deep background to this time period must be the enduring ability of human cultures to send up popular stories that incite individuals to extravagant actions.. like setting off for unknown lands or searching for mythical places.