The Explorers Read online

  Curiosity is a sign of high intelligence, high self-esteem, and autonomy. There is a great connection between curiosity and creativity. And while curiosity peaks in childhood, when the entire world is new, a lifelong habit of curiosity is empowering. Studies have shown that elderly adults who are high in curiosity have longer lives, perhaps because the autonomy that accompanies curiosity develops its own skill set of survival. On the other hand, individuals who whether by nature or nurture shut off the natural human instinct to explore the world in a physical and intellectual manner, often succumb to lethargy.

  Curiosity plays such a powerful role in all great accomplishments that there is evidence the act of discovery triggers the human body’s narcotic-like dopamine chemical to flood the brain, a positive stimulus that ensures an individual would want to re-create the sensation through newer and greater discoveries. It’s worth noting that abnormal dopamine levels also play a role in drug addiction, schizophrenia, and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)—all of which seem to appear more among explorers and creative geniuses than among the vast majority of the population.

  But the body also splits curiosity into the two camps of “wanting” and “liking.”

  This is vital.

  When one merely wants something, but does not like the sensation, there can be “no motivation for further reward.”IV

  Though they were only just beginning to learn about its rewards, Burton and Speke knew a great deal about curiosity—the desire to know as much as humanly possible about the known world was almost like a parlor game in London, best denoted in the number of special academic societies devoted to every field of study from numismatics to horticulture and geology. There would even be a society devoted to aeronautics in 1866, almost a half century before man learned to fly. The best of these collectives would receive the blessing of Queen Victoria, and earned the right to append the sobriquet “Royal Society” to their name. None of these, of course, would ever transcend the magnificence of the original royal society, that of the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge—or just the Royal Society, as it is known to this day. The legacy of their relentless pursuit of knowledge is evidenced in the modern age, and the NASA Mars rover named Curiosity, tasked with slowly surveying the Red Planet in much the same way as the Royal Society, founded in 1660, and its nascent, exploration-centric offspring the Royal Geographical Society once surveyed Earth.

  So Speke and Burton were quite aware of the concept of curiosity. But they knew absolutely nothing about dopamine, which would not be discovered until 1957. All Speke and Burton knew was that every now and again they were overcome by an unexplained euphoria when they did something special.

  But as little as they knew about dopamine or the chemistry of their brains, Jack Speke and Dick Burton knew even less about the interior of Africa.

  It was this lack of knowledge that fired their curiosity with such a deep and immeasurable force that they were willing to risk their very lives just to unlock Africa’s secrets.

  But for curiosity, the amazing story of Burton and Speke would have never come to pass.

  They might never have had the chance to venture into Africa, however, were it not for a single grisly murder that took place before either man was born. The executed man’s name was James Cook. He had no middle initial. And he died far from Africa, almost halfway around the world, in an ironically idyllic clear blue Pacific cove.

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  On the western edge of the Pacific Rim, quietly nestled between a golf course and a former US Navy bombing range in Southern California, there stands a small and rather overlooked monument to curiosity. It comes in the form of a plaque noting that on July 25, 1769, Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portola led a party of soldiers inland from where their ship was anchored in the Pacific Ocean, searching for new sites to build Catholic missions on the California coast. Leaving the beach in the early morning, they marched in ragged formation up a low valley. Oaks and sycamores provided shade from the searing summer sun. They stepped carefully, wary of rattlesnakes, mountain lions, and grizzly bears. A small dry creekbed paralleled their path, but water was nowhere to be found.

  After three hours Portola called a halt. His men stretched out in the shade and took off the steel morion helmets that made sweat roll down their faces in great salty rivulets. One of them lost his gun, a small blunderbuss known as a trabuco. It would never be found—at least not by Portola or that unfortunate soldier—and to this day, that resting spot is known as the Plano Trabuco.

  At precisely the same moment Portola’s men were taking a rest from the dry heat, a thirty-five-year-old former Quaker named Daniel Boone was 2,500 miles to the east in Tennessee, traveling through the Appalachian Mountains. He was soon building a road through the Cumberland Gap that would become known as the Wilderness Road, bringing about the westward expansion that led to the purchase of the Louisiana Territory and to the opening of the American frontier.

  On the same date, in what is now the African nation of Sudan, Scotsman James Bruce was on the verge of laying eyes on the source of a tributary known as the Blue Nile, but still years from tumbling down a flight of stairs to his death while answering the door in his own home.

  Finally, a fourth explorer was changing the world at the exact same time. Lieutenant James Cook was sailing away from Tahiti on his first circumnavigation of the globe aboard His Majesty’s Bark (HMB) Endeavour, just months away from charting the coast of New Zealand and then inadvertently discovering the east coast of Australia.

  Portola, meanwhile, enjoyed his resting spot so much that he ordered his men to make camp there for the night. Come morning, having found water, he chose to build a small fort of mud and grass. It would become the first Spanish fort built in what is now Orange County, California. During World War II, the US Navy used the grasslands of the Plano Trabuco as a bombing range, but the remains of Portola’s simple fort can still be seen. A golf course and a housing development now stand just two hundred yards away, and a simple gravel trail winds past the monument marking the spot. The fort is just half of one wall now, protected from the elements by a corrugated tin shack. But it is still there, and that counts for something rather marvelous. The plaque that has been erected on the site informs passing hikers that this mundane location is a link to a chain of events that changed mankind’s view of the planet on which we live.

  Not in his wildest dreams could Portola have foreseen that his explorations would one day culminate in suburbia. Nor could Cook have envisioned glass and steel cities like Sydney or Auckland on lands he discovered; nor Boone the interstate highway running through the Cumberland Gap (or the coonskin cap fad, or a Disney TV show); nor could Bruce envision the amazing fact that the Blue Nile is still very much the same ripping, lonesome waterway he traced more than two hundred years ago. They were ordinary men doing extraordinary things, putting one foot in front of another in the name of exploration. They lived in the moment. Even if they had known what those same lands would look like two and a quarter centuries later, they wouldn’t have spent much time thinking about it. Any distraction from the moment-by-moment process of exploration could have meant a mistake that might lead to death.

  Of those four explorers who were simultaneously charting the planet on July 25, 1769, Cook would prove the most pivotal. He mapped almost the entire Pacific Rim, including what is now Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. He discovered the continent of Antarctica. He sailed the Pacific in a random pattern until he stumbled upon the Hawaiian Islands, among many others. The stoic Cook endured everything from 100-foot waves to shipwreck as he sailed around the world twice. Most important of all, he was so taken with his calling that he spent almost the entire last decade of his life at sea. It was a heady time for a man born the second son of an itinerant farm laborer, and it is proper and fitting that Cook be remembered for the courage, fastidiousness, and enduring curiosity that led him to amble slow
ly around the Pacific on his three epic voyages, discovering as many new lands as possible before inevitably sailing back to the London dockyards to report on all he had seen and done.

  And yet Cook’s greatest legacy is his murder. For it was his savage execution that unwittingly began the great Victorian age of discovery taking place between 1779 and 1922.

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  It all went wrong in an otherwise idyllic anchorage off the coast of Hawaii known as Kealakekua Bay, a spot now favored by snorkelers and tour boats. There, the fifty-year-old Cook was set upon by a mob of locals and stabbed more than one hundred times. As his crew watched helplessly from the decks of his flagship, Resolution, their captain’s body was then borne off into the jungle by Hawaiian warriors. There, the local chieftains cut his newly dead heart from his chest and ate it raw. The rest of the body was lowered into a pit and slow-cooked like a pig. Cook’s bones were later pulled from the coals and scattered about the island. When the crew of Resolution demanded that Cook’s remains be returned, the only items worthy of burial were a left hand and a shoe. To this day, his bones have not been found.

  Until Cook’s death on February 14, 1779—Valentine’s Day, ironically, given what became of his heart—the focus of Britain’s global exploration was the ocean. By charting the seas, and finding new lands to colonize and exploit, that small island nation slowly began assembling what would one day be known as the British Empire—spanning the globe so completely that the sun never set on it.

  By the time Cook was murdered in 1779, it was felt that he had found all there was to find on the high seas. Based on this belief, Britain officially ceased all voyages of exploration in 1781.

  This didn’t deter adventurers, scientists, and other thinkers in the least. Their focus turned to privately funded land-based journeys. The typical British explorer was no longer a military man, but a private voyager. Instead of ships, these explorers journeyed on foot, or the back of an ass or a camel, threading their narrow paths into the spots on the maps shaded dark and labeled “Unknown.” Some sought gold or silver. A few had designs on colonization. But for the most part these men and women just wanted to go someplace no one else had ever been, or to help others get there so they might also know about it.

  The one place that held the public in thrall like no other was Africa—unknown, unexplored, infinitely dangerous Africa.

  So it came to pass on Monday, June 9, 1788, that nine wealthy, hard-drinking Englishmen known as the Saturday’s Club met in a rented upstairs room at the St. Alban’s Pub, on a dingy cobbled alley of a street just a block south of Piccadilly.

  It might have just as easily been called the Curiosity Club, because the men who filled that small room were insatiable in their desire to know all there was about the world around them. Their sole intention was to discuss their greatest thirst of all—that for knowledge. Sir William Fordyce was a physician who had published books on venereal disease. Thirty-three-year-old Irishman Francis Rawdon had just returned from fighting in the American War of Independence and would soon be named governor-general of India. Seventy-year-old general Rufus Conway was retired from the military and had taken up the study of botany and linguistics to pass the time. The Earl of Galloway was fond of spouting the latest theories on subjects as diverse as slavery and agriculture. Henry Beaufoy was a Member of Parliament. Andrew Stuart used to be. Sir Adam Ferguson was His Majesty’s commissioner of trade and plantations. And William Pulteney was merely rich.

  Their soft-spoken leader, and the most curious thinker of them all, was Sir Joseph Banks. Playboy, bon vivant, philanthropist, naturalist, erstwhile world traveler, and incumbent president of Europe’s most esteemed intellectual body, the Royal Society, Banks had lived forty-five intense years, collecting critics and worshipers the world over. He sailed with Cook on the famed Endeavour circumnavigation, acquiring plants and sexual consorts on the newly discovered islands of the South Pacific; funded the ill-fated Bounty voyage after befriending a former ship’s master named William Bligh; and convinced the British government that the new continent of Australia was the ideal location to send Britain’s prison population, replacing the legendary hellholes of Georgia and Florida that had been lost to the newly anointed “Americans.” Indeed, as the naturalist took his seat at St. Alban’s, Sir Arthur Philip’s First Fleet and its inaugural load of prisoners were constructing the new penal colony. Philip would name it for Thomas Townshend, a nobleman friend of Banks’s who also went by the name Viscount Sydney.

  Philip should have named it for Banks.

  One day he would be portly, but in June 1788 Joseph Banks was merely robust. His reddish-brown hair had almost all gone gray. There was still plenty of it, however, and the naturalist wore it in a ponytail tied with a ribbon. He was shy at formal dinner parties, but had a reputation for leaning in when the discussion caught his fancy, fixing his piercing blue eyes on the person with whom he was speaking. He dressed in a subdued fashion, although the insightful would notice that the ruffled cuffs of Banks’s shirts were made by the finest tailors on Bond Street. This was made possible by the considerable fortune Banks had inherited in his teens, back in the days before he discovered that his hunger for knowledge was even greater than his formidable hunger for sex. Very often the agenda for a meeting of the Saturday’s Club combined a little of both: dinner, scholarly debate, and then the arrival of the finest local prostitutes, whereupon the doors were locked from the inside for the duration.

  But not on the second Monday in June 1788. On this night, Banks’s preoccupation with knowledge won out. Wine was served, then a hot meal. Once the dinner plates had been removed, Banks hoisted his wineglass and proposed a toast to, of all places, Africa.

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  Specifically, Banks wanted to know more about it.

  The shape of the continent was that of an eastward-facing skull, as had been known by mapmakers for centuries. In fact, the entire coastline had been charted, and the southern tip had even become a trade enclave known as Cape Town. But the remainder of Africa, an area so vast that all of Europe could fit inside it three times, was a massive question mark. Little was known about rivers like the Niger and Nile, except that they flowed thousands of miles from the interior of Africa before emptying into the seas. No one knew from where they came. There was talk that they were the same river. There were theories of fabled lands like the biblical desert kingdom of Meroe; and Timbuktu, a so-called city of gold. No one knew for sure.

  A smattering of expeditions had been launched into Africa over the centuries, but their results weren’t completely believed: the secretive Portuguese claimed that a pair of their explorers had walked across central Africa from east to west in the sixteenth century; and a Scot named James Bruce was currently boasting that he had found a source of the Nile. Banks, along with other great thinkers such as Edmund Burke, Horace Walpole, and the aging Dr. Samuel Johnson, didn’t believe him. Bruce’s claims were even mocked in a new book about a fallacious adventurer named Baron Munchhausen.

  Nothing of substance, in the minds of the Saturday’s Club, was known about the interior of sub-Saharan Africa. Banks proposed they remedy that immediately. His plan was that they spin off to form a new society.

  All agreed. A resolution was written to give the new undertaking suitable gravitas. “As the vast continent of Africa, notwithstanding the efforts of the ancients, and the wishes of the moderns, is still in a measure unexplored, the members of this Club do form themselves into an association for promoting the discovery of the inland parts of that quarter of the world.”

  The African Association, as the nine called this new undertaking (abbreviated from the mouthier “Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa”), would not be a mere social gathering. They would pinpoint areas of Africa they wished to see explored, find the man capable of making the journey, then fund and equip the entire expedition.

  “Of the objects of inquiry which engage o
ur attention the most, there are none, perhaps, that so much excite continued curiosity. From childhood to age; none that the learned or unlearned so equally wish to investigate,” Henry Beaufoy, the Member of Parliament, wrote of Africa.

  Curiosity was something of an epidemic in London society at the time, thanks to the Age of Reason. Once merely a philosophical movement dedicated to rationalism, equality, and political freedom, it had expanded to become a search for all forms of scholarly wisdom. Possession of knowledge was so trendy as to be an aphrodisiac, in the manner of wealth or power. There were societies and associations for every conceivable form of curiosity, from the Linnaean Association and their study of botany, to a group dedicated to investigating the high cost of butchers’ meat. But the African Association’s aim was to be different. It would be curiosity in action rather than a passive sifting and reappraisal of current knowledge; a thoughtful step from the wish for an answer to its zealous pursuit.

  To Banks, curiosity also carried an incumbent nostalgia. Once upon a time he would have proposed himself as the man to represent the Association in Africa. But gone were the days when he set forth into the wilds. The onset of gout and a fondness for fancy breakfasts in his Soho Square mansion made that unrealistic. But Banks could well recall the thrill of hands-on discovery, just as he could also vividly remember his fear on the day he first went to sea with Cook in 1768. Banks had been rowed, hung over, to where Endeavour lay at anchor off Plymouth. He had then demanded the ship’s great cabin as his living quarters, an outrageous request to which Cook, a lifelong commoner, quietly acquiesced in the name of class consciousness.

  Banks had been a newcomer to science at the time. He considered this lower-class sailor, who had only recently been elevated to a commissioned rank, to be nothing more than the dim-witted driver of the ship that would lead him to glory. But over the course of their two years together, Cook quietly asserted his authority—and his brilliance. In the process he indoctrinated Banks into the joys of exploration. The tall, introspective lieutenant (Cook would not be named a captain until after their return) did not travel in linear fashion, sprinting around the globe. He wandered the seas, tirelessly searching for the unknown just over the horizon. When a new land was discovered, that simple wandering was supplanted by an even deeper level of curiosity. Coastlines were sounded and charted until every last inch was recorded. Local peoples were observed. Plants were pressed. Animal specimens were preserved. As the French admiral Jean François de la Perouse so famously noted of Cook, “He carried out work that was so all-encompassing that there was little for his successors to do but admire it.”V