discovery. It found conceptual ties with other uninhabited (or uninhabitable) regions in the solar system, witnessed the invention of new techniques for penetrating The Ice, and posed immense, often unprecedented legal and geopolitical questions.
The first empirical work of discovery around Antarctica, the second of Cook’s celebrated voyages (1772–1775), put the hypothetical southern continent center stage in exploration. Curiously, already the abstract and intellectual attributes of Antarctica were apparent, for Cook’s objective was to prove or disprove the existence of the continent. “You are to proceed upon farther Discoveries … keeping in as high a Latitude as you can, & prosecuting your discoveries as near to the South Pole as possible,” his “secret instructions” read, “in further Search of the said Continent….”4 But Cook’s voyages were themselves a transitional event in the evolution of the exploring tradition of the West, and it is worth examining the nature of this metamorphosis for what it reveals about the relationship of Antarctica to Western civilization.
Captain James Cook was the most prominent of a swarm of eighteenth-century circumnavigators who brought to a culmination an era of predominantly maritime exploration which had its origins in Renaissance Europe. More than their mere fact or the data they shipped back to an awestruck Europe, those voyages set in motion a social dynamic: exploration became an institution, the explorer a role. There are many ways by which one culture can learn about other lands and peoples. But exploration—as an institution, a concept, and a tradition—is apparently an invention of Western civilization, and it appeared, not accidentally, with that other Western invention, modern science. By themselves, the voyages of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were logical successors to centuries of European travel, trade, conquest, and seafaring. The exploits of Alexander the Great, for example, may be thought of as a kind of exploration by conquest; the sudden acquisition of lands, wealth, exotic peoples, and knowledge created problems in intellectual and geopolitical assimilation identical to those posed by the voyages of the Renaissance. The Hellenistic synthesis achieved by the Alexandrian school, symbolized by the school’s magnificent library, is an archetype for the information explosions that would typically follow future eras of discovery.
Yet the pattern in the fifteenth century was different, too. Other times and other peoples had experienced challenges similar to that posed by Alexander in the ancient world without becoming the basis for a world system. By contrast, the process set in motion by the European voyages of discovery was a process of world discovery, and it would result in a single world geography. It established a unique activity, exploration, and it created a unique if syncretic role, that of the explorer. A composite of old activities and preexisting technologies, the result was, like modern science, peculiarly new. Geographic discovery, the articulation of a scientific philosophy, a religious reformation, a rebirth of trade, art, and maritime city-states—all reinforced each other to make the nation-states of modern Europe different from the tribal entities and empires of antiquity, the scientific outlook distinct from earlier natural philosophies, and the process of discovery something curiously different from travel, adventure, pilgrimage, and trade.
In a sense, there was one world to be discovered, and Europe would discover it. Other periods of travel and exploration had had a self-arresting, ethnocentric quality. But this new era had a self-reinforcing mechanism that continually thrust outward and would, sooner rather than later, absorb European civilization as it did other societies. It would challenge the explorer as much as the explored. The events surrounding the first great voyages set in motion a dynamic of exploration—tied on one hand to the geopolitics of European expansion and on the other to the equally aggressive principles of modern science—that would prove irreversible. Although in some ways a model for the new empirical sciences, especially in its challenge to authoritative texts of the ancients and to Holy Scripture, geographic discovery was a beneficiary of the new philosophy. Experimental science was limited only by the ingenuity and technology of its practitioners; the limitations on the growth of knowledge lay in society, not in nature. Unlike geographic exploration on the traditional model, the experimental philosophy did not depend on the availability of new lands and new peoples.
The great vehicle for European discovery was the ship. Exploration was predominantly maritime, intimately bound to the founding of coastal cities, the development of oceanic empires, and the mapping of the world’s coastlines. Its outstanding revelation was the unity of the world’s oceans; its grand expression, a voyage of circumnavigation; and its intellectual achievement, a mappa mundi of the Earth’s coastlines. The process began with the interior seas of Europe, then spread into the Atlantic and beyond. The Mediterranean and the Baltic were themselves composites of smaller seas, seas dotted with islands large and small and joined by straits of greater and lesser significance. No continent has a higher ratio of coastline to land mass than Europe, although North America has an analogous system of interior seas with the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, and Hudson Bay. Not surprisingly, Europe’s outward expansion came by water, beginning with the hybridization of Europe’s northern (Baltic) and southern (Mediterranean) seafaring traditions.
Seafaring and the establishment of maritime empires were not unique to Europe. As J. H. Parry has observed, there were many maritime cultures around the globe, and the problem of European “discovery” was really a process of connecting these various maritime states.5 Marco Polo, after all, returned from Cathay to Venice by sea, hopping from one maritime network to another. The essence of the European achievement was to recognize that these various enclaves of maritime prowess collectively formed a single world ocean, to join these various civilizations into a general geopolitical economy, and to organize the geographic and technological knowledge of these peoples into a larger intellectual construct. The process was often one of adaptation and translation; interpreters were fundamental to the success of the enterprise. Vasco da Gama made the Indian Ocean crossing after seizing an Arab pilot along the coast of Africa. Magellan’s crew, after the massacre of its leaders on Luzon, wandered aimlessly in the South China Sea until they captured a local pilot who took them to the Moluccas. And Columbus relied on indigenous peoples to find his way around the islands of the Caribbean.
Nor was the exchange limited to geographic lore. Other bodies of information found their way into European consciousness. Although Western civilization would be the vehicle for discovery, the intellectual universe of the West would be as profoundly altered by the revelation of this information as were the cultures and lands it visited. Europe’s inherited systems of thought gradually crumbled—not merely expanded by the infusion of data, but utterly redesigned from new, sometimes alien points of view. The effects would ramify throughout that entire intellectual universe of art, science, natural philosophy, political theory, natural history, jurisprudence, literature.
To the voyages of discovery the continents—other than Asia, the objective—were impediments. Instead seaborne explorers searched eagerly, even maniacally, for passages around or straits through the land masses. The conviction slowly grew, some of it based on inherited speculation from the sages of antiquity, that the various oceans were united, and the European experience in the Mediterranean and the Baltic-Atlantic had suggested that connections would be found by probing coastlines, bays, and inlets. The search for a Northwest Passage around North America and a Northeast Passage around Scandinavia; the quest for saltwater straits, such as that discovered by Magellan and those, such as the Anian or Buenaventura, which existed only in the imagination; the hunt for an isthmus, like that at Panama, which would connect two seas by a brief overland passage—all amplified prior European experience. Ultimately, the successful circumnavigation of the globe by Magellan demonstrated that the world’s oceans were one, and throughout the era European exploration remained true to its maritime origins. Outposts for trade in the Far East, Africa, and the New World required a maritime nexus sustained by a succession of maritime empires. Portuguese, Dutch, and English mercantile and political ambitions began with the establishment of port cities; before New World conquistadores ventured inland to topple Precolumbian empires they first constructed seaports; new colonies were coastal, never venturing far from their maritime lifeline. Expeditions into the interior proceeded along waterways, by river or lake, if not by saltwater inlet.
During
