Going for gold
Andro Linklater
PATHFINDERS: A GLOBAL HISTORY OF EXPLORATION by Felipe Fernández-Armesto OUP, £25, pp. 428, ISBN 0199295905 ✆ £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 rying to work out why he had not reached India after crossing the Atlantic in 1492, TChristopher Columbus concluded that he must have been sailing uphill, albeit to a most enticing part of the globe:
It is as if someone had a very round ball and at one point on its surface it was as if a woman’s nipple had been put there, and this teat-like part would be the most prominent and nearest the sky. Not that I suppose it would be possible to sail to where the altitude attains its highest point ... For I believe this is where the earthly paradise is, which no one can reach save by God’s will.
Apart from its Freudian connotations, this image of the ocean as a cosmic breast offers a revealing glimpse of what happens to the minds of explorers as they attempt to make sense of the unknown that surrounds them. Easily the most attractive strand in Professor Fernández-Armesto’s latest millenniastraddling history is his insistence that exploration has always involved a double journey — through the psyche as well as the world. Darting from source to source, he shows pioneer navigators, Polynesian, Inuit and Phoenician, cannily choosing upwind routes rather than the easier downwind alternative in order to have the insurance of being able to run for home if faced by ultimate disaster. Elsewhere he demonstrates that fourth-century Buddhist explorers of a route to India feared the Taklamakan desert as a haunt of demons threatening those in search of the pure doctrines of Buddha, and later still reveals that the great Portuguese and Spanish explorers of the 15th and 16th centuries imagined themselves to be chivalrous knights, their ships mettlesome steeds, and the oceans the home of marine dragons. ‘Patriotic pride,’ he concludes ‘exempts explorers from sanity.’ Fernández-Armesto’s human-centred story-telling and dazzling command of material convey the excitement of exploration admirably. His real goal, however, is ‘to trace the laying of the infrastructure of the history of the world’, and there his method fails altogether. Nowhere is the impact of exploration more apparent than in the way that European voyages of discovery, from Columbus to Cook, carried the continent’s power and values into almost every corner of the world, an outcome that appears the more extraordinary as its end draws into view. Yet, if Pathfinders is to be believed, all that made Europe’s exploration different from that of China or Islam was its cultural ‘idealisation of adventure’, an advantage amplified by favourable wind systems in the Atlantic.
Fernández-Armesto knows very well, however, that what drove European exploration was an infinitely more complex engine. Part of it was made up of an already existing financial expertise, especially in northern Italy where a skill in calculating odds had led both to Fibonacci’s sequence and a flourishing mercantile insurance system. Some of it came from printing, which made knowledge of the world democratic. And much of it was based on a recognition that legal rights existed even when they could not be enforced by might: hence the evolution of a theory of natural rights in Protestant Europe (notably the freedom of the seas put forward by Hugo Grotius in Mare Liberum) as an authority equal to that of the pope who had divided the globe between Portugal and Spain. The European respect for law meant that unlike travellers on the Silk Routes whose safety depended on Mongol or Chinese power, users of oceanic trade routes — even new comers such as Sweden’s East India Company in 1731 — enjoyed at least nominal rights of equity, giving each trading nation an interest in sustaining the system.
Having ignored the cultural background, Fernández-Armesto is also unable to deal with the profoundest social consequence of European exploration –– the transfer in the last 250 years of the greater part of the world’s agricultural land from communal to individual ownership. This was England’s contribution, for good or ill. All explorers expected to profit from their acquisition of gold, spices or furs, but when Sir Walter Raleigh sailed for Virginia in 1585, Elizabeth’s commission also gave him the right to profit from owning the land ‘in fee simple’. That concept of individual landed property, long established in English common law but not found in other European empires for another 150 years, underpinned the British colonisation of North America, southern and eastern Africa, Australia and New Zealand, and largely explains what is left inexplicable in Pathfinders, the disproportionate influence of British exploration, vestigial though it was, as Fernández-Armesto points out, compared to Spain’s.
The central hollowness of the book is compounded by superficial but irritating flaws. The failure to cite the outstanding document throwing light on the mentality of early European explorers, The Lusiads de Camões’ Aeneid-like telling of Portuguese voyaging, is simply inexplicable. As a method of finding longitude, the superior accuracy of celestial navigation based on Nevill Maskelyne’s almanacs superseded Harrison’s chronometer rather than the other way around. Contrary to the assertion in Pathfinders, there is overwhelming evidence to show that early exploration routes in North America were indeed primarily concerned with commerce in the form of the fur trade and with colonisation in the search for productive land.
By my estimate this is the professor’s sixth book in six years, during which he has also occupied chairs of history in Britain and the United States, and maintained an impressive output in Spanish and English on radio and in print. Even his warmest admirers may begin to suspect that he is spreading himself a little thin.
Previous page
