Where no man has gone before

TO the would-be explorer the senior editor (expeditions) at the National Geographic Magazine is a magnetic figure, but daunting. He looks through those shoals of letters which arrive weekly with pleas of sponsorship for proposed expeditions.

The vast majority of such letters are given a firm, polite and negative reply.

A lucky few correspondents may be invited to come to the magazine’s imposing building in Washington DC to discuss their projects further.

It can be a nerve-racking ordeal — you identify yourself and get badged by the security guard on the ground floor, tramp through Explorers Hall with its current exhibition, take a lift and rise several floors to be met by a poker-faced secretary waiting for you as the doors hiss open.

Finally you are ushered through the door marked ‘expeditions’.

You enter the basilisk’s office, primed to explain how your expedition is sure to provide the magazine with an article packed with riveting new information, colourful illustrations and a tale of thrilling excitement. Then — in my experience — your eye falls on a sign prominently displayed on the expedition editor’s desk. It is placed to be read by his visitor. It reads in big, bold letters: Adventure = Bad Planning.

Where to go from there ?

Christopher Columbus had the same problem. He tramped around the courts and financiers of Europe pitching his ideas about a direct route to the Indies, and trying to obtain sponsorship for a small fleet. He made it sound as if Cathay and its riches lay just over the horizon if you sailed west. As it turned out, his planning was first-class. The winds and currents behaved as he had predicted. Two out of three ships got back home safely, as did most of his crew.

So not much adventure there, only the slow dawning of disappointment that he hadn’t found the Indies as promised.

The expeditions editor at the National Geographic would probably have spiked his article.

The Royal Geographical Society in London is frequently confused with the National Geographic Society in Washington DC. They are not the same. The former does not employ an expeditions editor. It is a learned society which publishes a scholarly journal and a less scholarly monthly magazine nowhere near as glossy as its American equivalent.

Occasionally, however, the Royal Geographical Society does give its name to a shiny, large format volume such as Explorers, Great Tales of Adventure and Endurance. This latest effort has been prepared and edited out-of-house by Dorling Kindersley, a publisher specialising in heavily illustrated books.

They’ve done a good job, and cleverly. Such books are a staple of the coffee table world. Exploration lends itself to dramatic illustration. It portrays the dimly-known in vivid detail.

The Romans walked on floor mosaics depicting marvellous birds and beasts from Libya. Medieval cartographers embellished their Sahara maps with camel trains ridden by men in billowing gowns who puffed on trumpets and waved colourful banners.

A favourite Victorian illustration had Dr Livingstone sprawled under the lion which knocked him down and chewed his shoulder. For dramatic effect the artist portrayed the lion baring its fangs, snarling viciously. For homely detail, he includes Dr Livingstone’s jaunty, nautical-looking cap knocked off and lying in the long grass. The real cap is now a prized possession of the Royal Geographical Society, and Explorers has it photographed for p223, while the famous engraving of the scene is overleaf. And there lies the challenge in publishing compendia of exploration: they repeat again and again the same pictures and tales until one begins to doubt if there really is anything ‘new out of Africa’.

So the team from Dorling Kindersley has been inventive. They provide rest breaks for the reader on the long march of their narrative. From time to time there is a pause to take breath and survey the landscapes trodden by their explorers and discoverers.

In fact, some of the best parts in the book are the digressions to give a pictorial flavour of what it was like to trudge across the tundra, thrust through tropical forest or venture underwater draped with primitive breathing apparatus.

An unexpected sidebar tells you all you need to know about the ‘chuck wagon’ of the American pioneers. The ‘chuck box’ at the tail of the wagon was the Swiss Army knife of its day. It had a ingenious fold-down table for the cook’s exclusive use and an array of drawers, containers and compartments for his equipment and provision stores.

Each day the wagon went ahead of the pioneer column, found a suitable campsite, and the cook had a hot meal waiting for the settlers when they arrived. Good planning indeed. A little light on adventure though.

To include wagon trains in the definition of ‘explorers’ means that this book casts a wide net, and there is no harm in that.

Archaeologists, anthropologists, missionaries and scientists, are included. They too pushed the boundaries of knowledge, often in remote locations. They had adventurous tales to tell on their return.

It is good to see Alfred Russell Wallace take his place alongside Charles Darwin. Both men gathered vital data on distant travels and then worked up the material to co-author the theory of evolution. Indeed, Wallace’s explorations observing the exotic birdlife in the rainforests of Indonesia were much more taxing than Darwin’s ocean voyaging.

However, the glamour of Wallace’s achievement has led the editorial team astray. They show the superb red bird of paradise as the creature named in honour of Wallace. Not so.

His namesake is smaller and much less spectacular bird of paradise, black and white with an unfortunate resemblance to a magpie, and now known as Wallace’s standard wing.

This is a volume to dip into. It starts with the voyages of the Phoenicians and ends with NASA and the exploration of outer space, and its maps are good. Thankfully, also, it takes a more international, less Anglocentric view than several of its predecessors.

We are told of the achievements of Bougainville, von Richthofen, La Perouse, Nodenskiold and Niebuhr, alongside more familiar names like Scott, Stanley and James Cook.

Among the many memorable quotes from the diaries and commentaries of the explorers, perhaps the prize should go to Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian who beat Scott to the South Pole. Amundsen had previously spent two winters in the Arctic with a crew of just six men aboard a tiny boat, making scientific observations.

There he studied how the Inuit built snow houses, made garments of fur and drove their dog teams. To report how he and his team had succeeded in navigating the North West Passage for the first time, he made an 800-mile trip by dog sled.

After that, the ‘race for the Pole’ between himself and Scott could have only one winner. As Amundsen wrote: “Victory awaits him who has everything in order — luck, people call it.”

Yet it is the poorly-prepared Scott dying in his tent who is far better known. So perhaps the expedition’s editor was right. Adventure does equal bad planning even if it can be fatal.

Tim Severin has made a career investigating the facts behind the legendary journeys of such figures as St Brendan, Sindbad, Ulysses and Jason. He now writes historical novels.