exploration. The notion of Europeans discovering other peoples and telling them who they are and where they live is now suspect, especially as an explorer's discourse is said to be determined by his mind-set rather than any objective reality. Yet descriptions of the surface of the globe and its peoples have been put into a framework of knowledge which has affected historical development. In fact 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. From the late 18th cent., Britain not only organized the most important expeditions but also set the agenda by insisting that exploration be ‘scientific’—which meant at the very least that latitudes and longitudes must be established.

More science did not lessen the connections between exploration and other aspects of British life. The state continued to be closely involved, partly for strategic reasons and partly because naval or military personnel so often led expeditions. The upper-class tradition of the grand tour with travel seen as heightening knowledge and experience had a powerful effect on the organization of exploration and the way it was written up. Another spur to expeditions from the 1790s was the desire of British protestant churches to evangelize overseas. Livingstone is the perfect example of the missionary becoming a great scientist and associating with aristocratic hunters and travellers before writing a best-selling travel work.

Exploration entered British consciousness in other ways: explorers became the pattern for heroes of boys' adventure stories and the subjects of numerous anthologizers and biographers. Hakluyt began the anthologies 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 and travels, as it has done ever since. Biographies abound. We learn that Livingstone was a victim of cyclothymia, or that Speke had a mother fixation. This sort of writing has had the unfortunate effect of grossly distorting the true significance of explorers in the history both of Britain and of the regions they explored.

Despite Hakluyt, the English contribution to primary exploration in the great age of maritime discovery was rather 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 landward travels in central Asia of Jenkinson matched by the voyages to the west of Frobisher in 1576 and Davis in 1585–7. The North-West Passage was to preoccupy Britain for 300 years, no doubt because of its comparative proximity to Canada. Hudson reached the bay bearing his name in 1607–11 and in the following century attempts on the passage were to be made from the Pacific as well as the Atlantic.

Partly for this reason, 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 and Byron of 1764–6 adding interest. The prize would be the trade of the great southern continent believed to exist. Cook's first voyage of 1768–71 did reveal 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, sending out more naturalist travellers and 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, often in association with government, 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.

Scott's failure to be first to the South Pole in 1912 was perhaps a sign that the age of British dominance in exploration was coming to an end. Perhaps the era did end when a British expedition was the first to conquer Everest in 1953, albeit with a New Zealander and a Nepalese actually reaching the summit.

Roy C. Bridges