Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2007), "Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration", Library Review, Vol. 56 No. 8, pp. 732-734. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530710818081

The first chapter of The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, edited by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, describes the “stirrings and searchings” that took place between 1500 and 1720: these were arguably the beginnings of the genre of travel and exploration writing. Robin Hanbury‐Tenison carefully differentiated between explorers and tourists by suggesting that explorers are driven by a desire to discover, and that this “transcends the urge to conquer, the pursuit of trade, the curiosity of the scientist, the zeal of the missionary, or the simple search for adventure”, while tourists merely go abroad to rest their bodies and minds. No mere tourists here.

In Pathfinders, Felipe Fernández‐Armesto (Tufts University and editor of The Times Atlas of World Exploration) provides a substantial addition to stirrings and searchings and provides a challenging interpretation of exploration that takes in science and myth, trade and adventure, technology and nationalism. His over‐arching narrative is one of early divergence as communities and cultures explored and migrated and conquered, taking advantage of increasing knowledge of global wind systems and technology, towards later convergence in the period 1620‐1740 and beyond, as science and trade made the world smaller.

It is a story of encounters between cultures, realigning conventional Western models of exploration by highlighting Mongol and Muslim, Chinese and Polynesian exploration, but at the same time accounting for the “great leap forward” in the 1490s (the years of Columbus and Cabot, Da Gama and Vespucci) from maritime Europe. A series of maps capture the way the author refracts traditional European perspectives, reconceptualizing perspectives on how the world was seen, and providing a conceptual framework for the numerous early maps (and discussions of cartography, some in full colour) that the book contains.

Such exploration might have been “a march of folly” at times, “attempts to leap ahead” which continue to the present day, yet they were also ingenious and heroic enterprises – to decode the Pacific wind systems so that round‐the‐world voyages became possible (first by Magellan), to penetrate the Americas in order to find the East and find out what was there (overland with Cortes and Pizarro, into the interior with Lewis and Clark, round the North‐West Passage with Baffin and later Franklin, and up the Amazon). It was a search for gold in Africa, a pursuit of dreams in the Pacific, and a pragmatic growth of business with the East India Company. Cartographers and scientists like Cassini grew more and more skilled at representing the world in their maps, determining latitude and then longitude, until, as Hemming suggests, by the 1960s, there seemed little left to do – perhaps only “discover” unknown communities like the pygmies of Amazonia.

Fernández‐Armesto is not afraid to criticize – the waste of energy spent by the British on the North‐West Passage, the persisting lure of the East, the myths of El Dorado and Tibet and the great southern continent, and the erratic accounts of both early (like Marco Polo) and later (like Peary) explorers. Detailed accounts of famous explorers sit easily within a clear smooth narrative framework of convergence and divergence, of exploration where the dynamo of travel shifted from Asia and India to the West (and reasons for it), and of unexpected centres of exploration, like the Ottoman Empire and Bering's journeys for Russia and Islamist expansion in the Indian Ocean. Rivers and tides and winds played as important a role in this panorama of historical and global exploration as trade and technology and nationalism.

Pathfinders draws easily on a wide range of sources from a wide historical period (all cited in conscientious notes at the end), and a useful index helps the reader pin things down. This is more than just background to anthologies of exploration and travel, like Hanbury‐Tenison and Allen: it is a challenging sweep through exploration history, as chapter titles reveal – stretching, stirring, vaulting, girdling, connecting, deepening, and globalizing. Apart from a crass final statement to the text, and some self‐indulgent anecdotes along the way, it is elegantly written. At the price a remarkable bargain for the school, college, and university library and for the personal collection of anyone seriously gathering together works on exploration and travel (but not on tourism).