exploration

exploration The notion of Europeans discovering other peoples and telling them who they were and where they lived is now suspect. Exploration has been linked with the exercise of political and economic power and sometimes religious evangelism. Britain's increasing domination of exploration broadly accompanied the rise of the English and then the British state to world power after 1500.

Explorers became the pattern for heroes of boys' adventure stories and subjects for numerous biographers. Hakluyt began with his Principall Navigations … of 1589. The great 18th‐cent. travel collections continued the tradition and in 1846 William Desborough Cooley founded the Hakluyt Society to publish historical accounts of voyages.

Despite Hakluyt, the English contribution to primary exploration in the great age of maritime discovery was modest. John and Sebastian Cabot, English by adoption, contributed to the discovery of the Americas in 1497 and 1509, but most English maritime adventurers in the Tudor period merely followed the Portuguese and Spanish and attempted to steal some of their treasures. This was true of Drake although his circumnavigation of 1577–8 involved the discovery of California. But the English did try to open up new routes to the Orient—the North‐East and North‐West Passages with the voyages of Willoughby and Chancellor to Russia in 1558 and the contemporary travels in central Asia of Jenkinson matched by the voyages to the west of Frobisher in 1576 and Davis in 1585–7. Hudson reached the bay bearing his name in 1607–11.

The Pacific attracted much British attention in the 18th cent. with Dampier's New Voyage round the World of 1697 and the circumnavigations of Anson in 1740–4. Cook's first voyage of 1768–71 revealed New Zealand and eastern Australia but the second voyage of 1772–5 effectively disproved the existence of a southern continent. Cook's third voyage was to the northern Pacific, so completing the greatest series of scientific expeditions ever undertaken. Banks had been on the first voyage and then came to dominate British exploratory activity, being instrumental in founding the African Association in 1788. This aimed to do for the interior of Africa what Cook had done for the Pacific. Mungo Park reached the upper Niger in 1795–6. Government took over the organization of expeditions by Clapperton and others and in 1830 Lander solved the vexed question of where the Niger debouched into the sea. The mantle of the African Association was taken on by the Royal Geographical Society, founded in 1830, which sent explorers especially to eastern and central Africa and to the Polar regions. Livingstone, Burton, Speke—who reached the source of the Nile— Cameron, Stanley, and Thomson were the great African explorers, while the old obsession with the North‐West Passage led to the expeditions of Parry, and especially of Franklin whose disappearance after 1845 led to no fewer than 40 search expeditions. In the south polar region, Ross, Bruce, Shackleton, and Scott are the great names.