New Spaces of Exploration

Geographies of Discovery in the Twentieth Century

Simon Naylor, James R. Ryan, Simon Naylor, James R. Ryan

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781848850170
• eBook ISBN: 9780857731890
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

For many the dawn of the twentieth century ushered in an era where the world map had few if any blank spaces left to discover. The age of exploration was supposedly dead. "New Spaces of Exploration" challenges this assumption. Focusing specifically on exploration in the twentieth century, the authors demonstrate how new technologies and changing geopolitical configurations have ensured that exploration has remained a key feature of our rapidly globalizing world. Ranging widely in their geographical focus - from the Europe and Asia to Australia, and from the polar regions to outer space - they demonstrate the increasing diversity of modern exploration and reveal the continuing political, military, industrial and cultural motivations at play. The result is a major contribution to our understanding of the significance of exploration in the twentieth century. Contributors include: E. Baigent, C. Collis, K. Dodds, F. Driver, M. Godwin, J. Hill, F. Korsmo, F. MacDonald, S. Naylor, J. Ryan, N. Thomas, and K. Yusoff.

1 Exploration and the twentieth century

James R. Ryan and Simon Naylor

The academic study of exploration has undergone something of a renaissance in the last two decades. While exploration has remained a strong theme for publishers and authors aiming at a popular market interested in tales of intrepid individuals venturing into perilous environments¹ it had become, by the 1960s, something of an academic backwater.² This state of affairs was transformed in the wake of the broad ‘crisis in representation’ that spread across the humanities and social sciences from the 1970s, which challenged academic disciplines to reflect critically on how their knowledge-making practices were premised upon various structures of power. Postcolonial approaches in particular took inspiration from key literary analyses of the West’s relationship to the non-Western world such as Edward Said’s 1979 Orientalism.³ Scholars from literary studies such as Paul Carter and Mary Louise Pratt furthered this postcolonial agenda by considering accounts of European exploration as part of Western imperial discourse.⁴ Rather than adopt a conventional approach of treating expedition narratives as historical records of remarkable journeys and impartial ‘discoveries’, such scholars teased open the strategies by which such accounts constructed an epistemological framework into which other places and peoples were relocated. In this way exploration could be regarded less as some impartial means of ‘discovering’ the ‘unknown’ than part of a powerful and enduring projection of Western imperial interests onto other parts of the world.⁵

The analysis of narratives of exploration within literary studies as part of a broader genre of ‘travel literature’ has thus provided some important insights into the conventional and power-laden aspects of such writings. However, as Dane Kennedy has pointed out, a narrow focus on texts and issues of textuality has limited insights into how exploration was shaped as an enterprise, distinct from other forms of travel, ‘with its own scientific protocols, its own trained practitioners, and its own unique partnership with scientific societies, the state, and the public’.⁶ In addition, a preoccupation with texts does little to illuminate key questions of how explorers actually performed in the field, the variety of forms of inscriptions (visual as well as textual) they deployed and, finally, how their cultural frameworks were defended and disrupted in their contact with different places and peoples. These broader kinds of questions have however assumed a prominent place in recent scholarship across a range of fields, notably anthropology, geography, history of art and history of science. In the first part of this introductory chapter we seek to situate the chapters contained in this book within this broad and interdisciplinary setting. We begin our overview of the historiography of exploration by considering four key foci of recent academic enquiry: first, exploration and the production of knowledge; second, exploration and the processes of cultural contact and exchange; third, the textual and pictorial representation of exploration; and, lastly, biographical studies of explorers.

HISTORIOGRAPHIES OF EXPLORATION

The first body of work underpinning this volume is that which takes a critical look at the relationship between exploration and the production of knowledge, particularly knowledge incorporated into Western discourses of science. This has been of central concern to historians of science and technology who have contributed much to a broader understanding of how the practices and technologies of exploration have been related to the production of various kinds of scientific knowledge.⁷ A range of studies have highlighted the significance of institutional sponsors of exploration, from the British Admiralty’s support of Cook’s exploration of the Pacific in the eighteenth century⁸ to the East India Company and British colonial Government of India, which supported terrestrial exploration and survey enterprises such as the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India.⁹

As editors situated within the discipline of geography we have inevitably approached this project with keen awareness of the work by historians of geography and science who have reconsidered practices of exploration as part of more general concerns to understand the geographical discipline’s own historical foundations. Studies have shown how exploration and geographical science developed from the eighteenth century, fuelled by new technologies of navigation and cartography, new ideas and the expanding apparatus of nation states.¹⁰ In the last couple of decades, often with interdisciplinary inspiration from the history of geography, science studies and postcolonialism, scholars have turned their attention to the complex ways in which practices of geographical exploration and knowledge making were aligned with forms of institutional and political power. Studies of nineteenth-century British cultures of exploration and empire have shown how the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in London played a key role as a stage upon which explorers, as well as their patrons, staked their reputations and paraded their contribution to science and empire.¹¹ Institutions of geography and exploration throughout Europe were closely involved in the promotion of exploration as a form of national and imperial interest.¹² Geographical knowledge was thus constructed through a network that included not just individual explorers but scientific societies, government bodies, private organisations, publishers and patrons of various kinds. Geographical disputes and controversies of the age, from the source of the Nile to the location of Timbuctoo, were conducted across these spatial networks. The trustworthiness and credibility of European explorers were cultivated within such networks in a range of ways, from performances of the explorer’s own body to their place within wider circles of power and patronage.¹³

The RGS was one of a number of organisations in Victorian Britain—others included Kew Gardens and the British Natural History Museum—which provided explorers with institutional support and scientific justification for their journeys and specimen gathering.¹⁴ Such institutions not only promoted popular cultures of exploration but set important parameters for how explorers should behave, both at home and, more particularly, in ‘the field’. In the second half of the nineteenth century the RGS, for example, put forward increasingly refined guidelines in its publication Hints to Travellers, which set out how and what explorers should observe.¹⁵ Explorers were charged, for example, with the accurate recording of written geographical, meteorological and ethnographic observations and the collection of botanical, zoological and geological specimens. These formal duties of expeditionary work in turn necessitated the deployment of instruments, from sextants to barometers, and the development of particular technical skills on the part of their human operators. The role of instruments, as historians of science have noted, was to assist in standardisation and comparability of explorers’ observations.¹⁶ Institutions such as the RGS regarded training for explorers in field observation—both with and without instruments—as a means of protecting its reputation as the centre of authority in relation to knowledge in geographical science. However, as Felix Driver has shown, such attempts to control knowledge production were not always coherent and were fraught with ‘fundamental dilemmas about the means and status of observation in the field’.¹⁷ Recent studies of exploration, particularly those that draw on the literature in science studies, have thus paid close attention to the contextual, contingent and situated nature of knowledge. Scientific knowledge in particular, as David Livingstone has argued, also bears the marks of geography in its production and consumption across a range of sites, from the laboratory to the fieldsite.¹⁸ This and other work has scrutinised ‘the field’ as a particular kind of space for the production of scientific knowledge.¹⁹ This critical attitude to ‘the field’, to observation and to knowledge production informs many of the essays in this volume, from Simon Naylor’s discussion of the meaning of ‘fieldwork’ for the mid-twentieth century geographer Griffith Taylor, to Kathryn Yusoff’s analysis of how different visual and textual practices constituted ‘the field’ of Antarctic exploration in the early twentieth century.

The relationship between knowledge and forms of power lies at the heart of much recent work on exploration. However, this relationship is complex and dynamic. Scholars have thus begun to show the wide spectrum of philosophical frameworks and psychological motives that underpinned the ideas and actions of individual explorers operating within the context of European empire building. For Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904), for example, exploration was a form of military conquest and geographical knowledge, a tool to the commercial and colonial exploitation of Africa. The French explorer of North Africa, Henri Duveyrier (1840–92), by contrast, embraced a Saint Simonian philosophy that rejected such aggressive colonial expansionism and practiced geographical exploration as part of peaceful commercial and cultural exchange between Europe and Africa.²⁰ This volume of essays seeks to examine further the relationships between knowledge and power within twentieth-century exploration practice across a range of sites. For instance, Collis’s chapter analyses the recent re-enactment of Victorian imperial expeditions across the Australian deserts, insisting that imperial exploration was not restricted to the British Empire or to the nineteenth century, but that it is a significant constituent of contemporary Australian spatiality.

The second area of recent scholarship to inform this volume is that which seeks to understand exploration as a process of physical and material contact and exchange. Such work builds on the postcolonial critique of exploration practices and the epistemological frameworks that underpinned them, something of which we noted above. Mary Louise Pratt’s examination of Western travel and exploration narratives thus considered processes of ‘transculturation’ that brought together Europeans and non-Europeans across various ‘contact zones’.²¹ Processes of encounter and epistemology were also central to Bernard Smith’s study of early European visual representation of the South Pacific, which showed how European cultural perceptions were altered in the face of new encounters that could not be easily accommodated by existing cultural frameworks.²²

Building upon such foundations, anthropologists and historians of anthropology have been particularly concerned to trace the physical and human spaces of cultural contact and material exchange involved in voyages of exploration. Investigation into the nature of encounters between European explorers, traders and settlers and indigenous peoples reveals how these unequal exchanges—of objects, cultures and power—could disturb perceptions and identities of Europeans as well as indigenous peoples.²³ An understanding of exploration as a process of contact and exchange is central to many of the authors in this collection. Jude Hill and Nicola Thomas, for example, consider how the physical geographer Harding King relied upon indigenous people in the planning and execution of his expeditions to the Libyan desert and the degree to which this was reflected in the resulting forms of knowledge. European explorers, however ‘heroic’ at home, were often entirely dependent upon the skills, knowledge and labour of non-Europeans in the field, and large-scale imperial surveys and expeditions could simply not have happened without the direct involvement of indigenous people.²⁴ Physical environments could also play a formative role in shaping explorers’ ideas about nature and human identity.²⁵ Encounters with radically new environments—from the equator to the poles—combined with the psychological pressures of expeditionary practices could even threaten explorers’ sense of rationality and consciousness.²⁶

A third broad seam of scholarship that we take seriously as a backdrop to this volume includes work from a range of disciplines that seeks to move beyond the analysis solely of written texts. Exploration and its sponsorship by institutions of state and science from the eighteenth century onwards offered artists new career opportunities as expeditionary artists. As studies by historians of art and exploration have shown, the resulting visual records—from paintings to sketches—were located within dynamic categories of both ‘art’ and ‘science’. Moreover, a number of expeditionary artists struggled in their attempts to use contemporary European visual conventions in the depiction of radically different environments, and developed their own representational styles in response.²⁷

The making of maps and charts has, along with pictorial representations, long been central to exploration. Moreover, perhaps even more directly, cartography enabled explorers to symbolically possess the terrain that they traversed, naming places and plotting the expedition routes in a language of European cartographic conventions and spatial measurement. However, as studies of nineteenth-century cartographic endeavours have demonstrated, different kinds of survey, from the traverse surveys undertaken by explorers to the larger and longer lasting trigonometric survey undertaken by colonial states, served the interests of empire in quite different ways.²⁸

As a new technology of the second half of the nineteenth century, photography was adopted with enthusiasm by explorers as a means of providing accurate and objective visual records of expeditions. However, photography was also, at least until the 1890s, an unreliable and cumbersome technology and many efforts failed through lack of knowledge or inclement conditions. Photography was certainly used on European expeditions as a means of visually mapping and colonising territory. As with painting and mapping, however, the practice of photography encompassed a broad range of skills and attitudes, each with potentially different relationships to expeditionary practice.²⁹ More important, as historians of science and photography have shown, the cultural currency of photography as an objective or truthful medium was culturally constructed and the use of photography as evidence in science was, from its earliest application, invariably contested.³⁰

As the range of studies noted here show, visual representations, including maps, photographs and paintings, played important roles—often in dynamic relation to exploration texts—in the practice of exploration and the processes by which knowledge about non-European people and environments was assembled and disseminated. The essays in this volume contribute further to this work in their embrace of different kinds of expeditionary inscription, from the photographs of Antarctica examined by Kathryn Yusoff to the popular depictions of rocket science analysed by Fraser MacDonald, and in their appreciation of the dynamic and contested nature of such cultural objects.

The final key scholarly theme on exploration drawn upon by this volume is that of explorer biography. The renaissance in studies of exploration noted above has in many ways reanimated biographical studies of explorers. For as many recent studies of exploration have noted, ‘explorers’ were not born with this label; it was bestowed upon them through a complex process of cultural accretion and textual mediation. Indeed, an explorer’s exploits became public knowledge not because what they achieved in the field had intrinsic value but because of a whole series of treatments and translations by other individuals and institutions. ‘Acts of exploration’, as Felix Driver puts it, ‘are always mediated in some way, if not by the act of authorship itself, then through the labours of others—sponsors, patrons, reporters, publishers, and image-makers.’³¹ As Elizabeth Baigent’s essay in this volume shows, British polar explorers of the first half of the twentieth century were both ‘made and unmade’ as heroes and celebrities through the interpretation of the printed biographical record. Public esteem depended not just on an individual’s achievements but on how their celebrity was valued as a commodity in a shifting cultural market. S...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Exploration and the twentieth century
• 2. ‘Deeds not words’? Life writing and early twentieth-century British polar exploration
• 3. Configuring the field: Photography in early twentieth-century Antarctic exploration
• 4. Explorations in the Libyan Desert: William J. Harding King
• 5. Fieldwork and the geographical career: T. Griffith Taylor and the exploration of Australia
• 6. Glaciology, the Arctic, and the US Military, 1945–58
• 7. Assault on the unknown: Geopolitics, Antarctic science and the International Geophysical Year (1957–8)
• 8. ‘Britnik’: How America made and destroyed Britain’s first satellite
• 9. High empire: Rocketry and the popular geopolitics of space exploration, 1944–62
• 10. Walking in your footsteps: ‘Footsteps of the explorers’ expeditions and the contest for Australian desert space
• 11. Modern explorers
• Notes
• Select Bibliography