GEOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF VOLTAIRE

But the surface of the earth is more fascinating than its bowels. The progressive exhibition of the diversities of mankind in race, institutions, morals, and creeds was a powerful factor in broadening the borders of the modern mind. Exploration proceeded ever more curiously and acquisitively into the unknown; not for science’s sake but to find raw materials, gold, silver, precious stones, food, markets, colonies, and to chart the seas for safer navigation in peace and war. Even the voyage of the mutinous Bounty (1789) had for its original object the transplantation of the breadfruit tree from the South Seas to the West Indies. The French, the Dutch, and the English competed most eagerly in the game, knowing that the mastery of the world was at stake.

One of the most venturesome explorations originated in the mind of Peter the Great, who, shortly before his death in 1725, commissioned Vitus Bering, a Danish captain in the Russian navy, to explore the northeastern coast of Siberia. The Academy of St. Petersburg appointed an astronomer, a naturalist, and an historian to accompany the expedition. Proceeding overland to Kamchatka, Bering sailed (1728) to 67° north latitude, discovered the strait that bears his name, and then returned to St. Petersburg. On a second expedition he built a fleet at Okhotsk, and sailed eastward till he sighted North America (1741); so a Dane discovered that continent from the west as the Norse Leif Ericson had discovered it from the east. On the voyage back Bering’s ship lost its bearings in a heavy fog, and the crew spent six months on a previously uninhabited island near Kamchatka. On that island, which also carries his name, the great Dane died of scurvy (1741) at the age of sixty. Another vessel in the expedition discovered the Aleutian Islands. Russia took possession of Alaska, and missionaries were sent out to acquaint the Eskimos with Christian theology.

The advance of Russia into America stirred other nations to explore the Pacific. As part of a war with Spain (1740) England dispatched a fleet under George Anson to harass the Spanish settlements in South America. Scurvy decimated his crews, and storms off Cape Horn wrecked some of his ships; but he forced his way into the South Pacific, stopped at the Juan Fernández Islands, and found proof that Alexander Selkirk (Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe) had been there (1704–9); then he crossed the Pacific, captured a Spanish galleon near the Philippines, took its treasure of gold and silver ($1,500,000), crossed the Indian Ocean, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, eluded the Spanish and French fleets that sought to intercept him, and reached England June 15, 1744, after a voyage of three years and nine months. The prize bullion was transported from Spithead to London in thirty-two wagons to the accompaniment of martial music. All England acclaimed Anson, and four editions of his narrative were bought up in one year.

In 1763 the French government sent out a similar expedition under Louis Antoine de Bougainville, with instructions to establish a French settlement in the Falkland Islands; their position three hundred miles east of the Strait of Magellan gave them military value for control of the passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He accomplished his mission and returned to France. In 1765 he sailed again, passed through the strait into the Pacific, reached Tahiti (1768)—which Samuel Wallis had discovered a year before—took possession of it for France, discovered the Samoa group and the New Hebrides Islands, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and reached France in 1769, bringing from the Pacific tropics the bougainvillaea vine. His account of his voyage stressed the pleasant climate of Tahiti and the happy health, good nature, and easy morals of the natives. We shall find Diderot commenting enviously on this report in his Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville.

In 1764 the British government commissioned Captain John Byron to pick up some useful territory in the South Seas. He landed at Fort Egmont in the Falkland Islands and took possession of the islands for England, not knowing that the French were already there. Spain claimed prior possession, France yielded to her, Spain yielded to England (1771), Argentina claims them today. Byron continued around the globe, but left no further mark on history. In an earlier voyage, as midshipman under Anson, he had been shipwrecked on the Chile coast (1741); his account of this was used by his grandson Lord Byron in Don Juan.

For English-speaking peoples the outstanding explorer of the eighteenth century was Captain James Cook. Son of a farm laborer, he was apprenticed at twelve to a haberdasher. Finding insufficient adventure in lingerie, he joined the navy, served as “marine surveyor” along the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador, and acquired a reputation as mathematician, astronomer, and navigator. In 1768, aged forty, he was chosen to lead an expedition for noting the transit of Venus, and making geographical researches, in the South Pacific. He sailed August 25 on the Endeavour, accompanied by several scientists, one of whom, Sir Joseph Banks, had equipped the vessel out of his own funds.X The transit was observed at Tahiti June 3, 1769. Thence Cook sailed in quest of a great continent (Terra Australis) supposed by some geographers to be hiding in the southern seas. He found none, but he explored the Society Islands and the coasts of New Zealand, charting them carefully. He went on to Australia (then known as New Holland), took possession of the eastern coast for Great Britain, sailed around Africa, and reached England on June 12, 1771.

On July 13, 1772, with the Resolution and the Endeavour, he set out again to find the imaginary southern continent. He searched the sea eastward and southward between the Cape of Good Hope and New Zealand, and crossed the Antarctic Circle to 71° south latitude without seeing land; then the mounting danger from ice floes compelled him to turn back. He visited Easter Island, and wrote a description of its gigantic statues. He charted the Marquesas and Tonga Islands, and called the latter “Friendly” because of the gentleness of the natives. He discovered New Caledonia, Norfolk Island, and the Isle of Pines (Kunie). He traversed the South Pacific eastward to Cape Horn, continued over the South Atlantic to the Cape of Good Hope, sailed north to England, and reached port July 25, 1775, after a voyage of over sixty thousand miles and 1,107 days.

His third expedition sought a water route from Alaska across North America to the Atlantic. He left Plymouth July 12, 1776, with the Resolution and the Discovery, sailed around the Cape of Good Hope, touched again at Tahiti, proceeded northeast, and chanced upon his greatest discovery, the Hawaiian Islands (February, 1778). These had been seen by the Spanish navigator Juan Gaetano in 1555, but they had been forgotten by Europe for over two centuries. After continuing northeast, Cook reached what is now the state of Oregon, and surveyed the North American coast up to and beyond Bering Strait to the northern limits of Alaska. At 70° 41’ north latitude his advance was barred by a wall of ice rising twelve feet above the sea and stretching as far as the crow’s-nest eye could reach. Defeated in his search for a Northeast Passage across America, Cook returned to Hawaii. There, where previously he had received a friendly welcome, he met his end. The natives were kind but thievish; they stole one of the Discovery’s boats; Cook led a group of his men to recapture it; they succeeded, but Cook, who insisted on being the last to leave the shore, was surrounded by the angry natives, and was beaten to death (February 14, 1779), aged fifty-one. England honors him as the greatest and noblest of her maritime explorers, an accomplished scientist, a fearless captain loved by all his crews.

Almost as heroic was the expedition led by Jean François de Galaup, Comte de La Pérouse, commissioned by the French government to follow up Cook’s discoveries. He sailed in 1785 around South America and up to Alaska, crossed to Asia, and was the first European to pass through the strait (which till lately bore his name) between Russian Sakhalin and Japanese Hokkaido. Turning south, he explored the coast of Australia and reached the Santa Cruz Islands. There, apparently, he was shipwrecked (1788), for he was never heard of again.

Land exploration was also a challenge to the lust for adventure and gain. In 1716 a Jesuit missionary reached Lhasa, the “Forbidden City” of Tibet. Carsten Niebuhr explored and described Arabia, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, and Persia (1761). James Bruce traveled through East Africa and rediscovered the source of the Blue Nile (1768). In North America French explorers founded New Orleans (1718) and moved north along the Mississippi to the Missouri; in Canada they struggled to reach the Pacific, but the Rocky Mountains proved insurmountable. Meanwhile English settlers pushed inland to the Ohio River, and Spanish friars led the way from Mexico through California to Monterey, and up the Colorado River basin into Utah; soon North America would be one of the prizes in the Seven Years’ War. In South America La Condamine, after measuring a degree of latitude at the equator, led an expedition from the sources of the Amazon near Quito to its mouth at the Atlantic, four thousand miles away.

The mapmakers could never quite keep up with the explorers. Through half a century (1744–93) César François Cassini and his son Jacques Dominique issued in 184 successive sheets a map of France thirty-six feet long by thirty-six feet wide, showing in unprecedented detail all roads, rivers, abbeys, farms, mills, even wayside crosses and gallows. Torbern Olof Bergman, not content with being one of the greatest chemists of the eighteenth century, published in 1766 a Werlds Beskribning, or world description, summarizing the meteorology, geology, and physical geography of his time. He suggested that many islands were peaks of mountain ranges now mostly submerged; so the West Indies might be the remains of a range that had connected Florida with South America. Horace de Saussure, after twenty-four years as professor of philosophy at the University of Geneva, made famous ascents of Mont Blanc (1787) and the Klein Matterhorn (1792), and composed voluminous studies of Swiss mountains in their atmospheric conditions, formations, strata, fossils, and plants, making a marvelous mixture of meteorology, geology, geography, and botany. Let us remember, when we are told that history is the Newgate Calendar of nations, that it is also the record of a thousand forms of heroism and nobility.

Written by Will & Ariel Durant in "The Story of Civilization -Volume IX- The Age of Voltaire", Simon and Schuster, New York, USA, 1965, excerpts chapter VI. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be post by Leopoldo Costa.