GREAT VOYAGES
WHETHER MOTIVATED BY GLORY, GREED OR SCIENCE, WE TAKE A LOOK AT THE GLOBAL IMPACT OF FOUR OF HISTORY’S JOURNEYS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD
“Cook’s men were still essentially armed intruders”
COOK AND THE PACIFIC
James Cook’s first voyage, from 1768–71, on the Endeavour had a scientific intention, to observe Venus’s transit from Tahiti, but a secondary aim was to find ‘the great southern continent’, Terra Australis
Incognita (it was widely believed that there was a huge southern land mass that ‘balanced’ the Eurasian one in the northern hemisphere). There was a botanist on board, Joseph Banks, an astronomer, Charles Green, as well as scientific assistants and artists.
After proving that this southern continent didn’t exist, Cook sailed to New Zealand, charting more than 5,000 miles of coastline. Over subsequent voyages, he mapped Tahiti, Easter Island, the Marquesas Islands, Tonga and the New Hebrides so accurately that his information was used as recently as 50 years ago.
Cook benefitted from the latest in scientific understanding, from the chronometer that could accurately determine longitude, to a fresh-water distiller. Enforcing good ventilation in the crew’s quarters and a good diet including cress, sauerkraut and orange extract successfully prevented deaths from scurvy, previously the scourge of seafarers.
Countless specimens and samples were collected, as well as illustrations of the botany and animals that they encountered – expedition artist Sydney Parkinson produced the first European depiction of a kangaroo. The voyages pointed the way for the next century’s keen interest in ethnology and anthropology.
As shown in the James Cook: The Voyages exhibition at the British Library, there were still consequences for the lands visited. Despite being more humane and moderate than their predecessors, Cook’s men were still essentially armed intruders and sometimes clashed with the people they encountered. There was more genuine exchange, of information and ideas, as well as material items. Hongi Hika travelled to England in 1820, where he sought an audience with the King and devised a Maori dictionary. The Europeans, meanwhile, and subsequent whalers and sealers, can include firearms, as well as alcohol and venereal disease on the list of what they brought to the islands.
DARWIN AND THE GALÁPAGOS ISLANDS
The HMS Beagle made three voyages to southern South America to produce accurate nautical charts. A ‘gentleman passenger’, Charles Darwin, joined them on the second, a recent graduate, invited for his geology expertise. The trip – originally meant to last two years, becoming »
almost five – cemented his reputation as geologist and fossil collector. It also became the basis of his world-shifting theories on evolution and natural selection.
Darwin collected plants, animals and fossils, taking copious notes about the exotic, to his eyes, flora and fauna he encountered. Particularly important to his work was the variation in finches spotted in the Galápagos islands, off the coast of Ecuador. Appearing to come from the same descendent, each island’s birds were slightly different. Although the publication of his Journal and
Remarks, now better known as The Voyage of the Beagle, established Darwin’s renown as a writer, the work for which he was most famous, On the
Origin of Species, wasn’t released until 1859. In it, Darwin suggested that evolution occurs gradually over thousands of years and also that a species’ survival is determined by its ability to adapt to an environment, like the finches of the Galápagos. He described his time on the Beagle as “by far the most important event” in his life, determining his “whole career”. Today’s evolutionary biology is founded on this work.
Although not first to propose such theories of evolution, Darwin became the best known, partly because he limited it to his field of science, rather than using it to forward theological or sociological theories. But who knows what he’d think about the now annual ‘Darwin Awards’, marking prime examples of human stupidity?
CAPTAIN SCOTT, ROALD AMUNDSEN AND THE SOUTH POLE
The Norwegian Roald Amundsen was the first to reach 1911 -12 the South Pole – just 33 days before Captain Scott’s British Antarctic Expedition got there. Scott’s team died tragically while attempting their return. Never intended as a race – both men had independently planned expeditions – Scott’s expedition was scientifically focused ( he’s said to have continued collecting samples, even after hearing of the likelihood of being beaten to the Pole). Scott’s team recorded magnetic and meteorological data, as well as information about wildlife such as penguins and killer whales. They were also the first polar expedition to use cameras to record their journey.
Among the thousands of examples of animals and fish, rock samples and emperor penguin eggs was the fossilised remains of glossopteris, a fern-like plant that grew millions of years ago in warm climates, showing that Antarctica’s climate had changed over time. It also proved that the southern continents were once linked
“A global audience was united, watching a boundary-breaking example of human achievement”
as a landmass, what is now understood as plate tectonics.
It’s said that while Scott showed the scope of what could be done on such expeditions, Amundsen showed the best way to do it.
Amundsen proved the advantages of detailed planning, and of using dog sleds (rather than the ponies used by the Brits), employed over subsequent Antarctic scientific explorations.
Amundsen returned home in triumph, but his reputation soured when the fate of Scott and his party was discovered.
Scott was heralded as a hero and the surplus of money raised from a public appeal to help the families of his team helped found Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute – which continues to play an important role in studying the effects of climate change. And, in Antarctica, the frontiers of science are today being pushed by the National Science Foundation’s appropriately jointly-credited Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.
THE APOLLO 8 MISSION
Like many voyages, the Apollo 8 mission gave us a new image of our planet. This time, however, it was taken from space. Fifty years ago this year, while orbiting the moon, astronaut Bill Anders photographed ‘Earthrise’, showing our Earth emerging from behind the moon’s surface.
Although the mission was fuelled by Space Age political rivalry between Soviet Russia and the United States, its impact was, as Anders later remarked, “that we discovered the Earth”. His picture, revealing the blue of the oceans, capturing the earth’s tiny place within the universe, played an important part in the birth of the environmental movement – the image of one planet with no visible political boundaries upon it. As poet Archibald MacLeish wrote in the New York Times, it revealed us as “brothers who know now they are truly brothers… riders on the Earth together.” Friends of the Earth was founded the following year.
Some of the giant leaps for mankind were also technological. For example, Apollo 8 needed a small, lightweight computer on board, at a time when computers still took up entire rooms.
NASA invested heavily in an emerging invention, the integrated circuit from a company called Fairchild Semiconductor. In 1969, two of its former employees founded a new business, Intel.
Critics point out that, if not done in so much of a hurry, the missions would have been both significantly cheaper and produced more useful scientific data. However, such cynicism was surely low among the one billion people who watched the Apollo 8 orbit (at the time, the largest TV audience for a single event) on Christmas Eve 1968. In a year known for its conflicts and protest, here a global audience was united, watching a boundary-breaking example of human achievement.