The Explorers Read online

  Suddenly, everything changed.

  “My jailer,” wrote Speke in lucid detail, “who was still holding the string, stepped up close to me, and coolly stabbed me with his spear. I then raised my body a little in defence, when he knocked me down by jabbing his spear violently on my shoulder, almost cutting the jugular arteries. I rose again as he poised his spear, and caught the next prod, which was intended for my heart, on the back of one of my shackled hands; this gouged the flesh up to the bone. The cruel villain now stepped back a pace or two, to get me off my guard, and dashed his spear down to the bone of my left thigh. I seized it violently with both my hands, and would not relinquish the grip until he drew a shillelah from his girdle, and gave me such a violent blow on my left arm, I thought the bone was broken, and the spear fell helplessly from my hands. Finding his spear too blunt for running me through by a simple job when standing still, he now dropped the rope-end, walked back a dozen paces, and, rushing on me with savage fury, plunged his spear through the thick part of my right thigh into the ground, passing it between the thigh-bone and large sinew below.”

  In a final act of desperation, Speke struggled to his feet. “I sprang upon my legs and gave the miscreant such a sharp backhander in the face with my double bound fists that he lost his presence of mind,” Speke wrote. Somehow, despite the spear wounds and blood loss and tied wrists, he then managed to sprint away from his jailer, dodging forty other Somalis and a number of hurled spears as he ran farther and farther down the beach. That the run continued for any length of time was due to the fact that Speke’s attackers were losing interest in him and had begun looting the camp. Yet after almost four hours of torture and mutilation, his flight was by no means easy. Somehow, the naked explorer wandered more than three miles down the beach and linked up with his companions. In an even greater stroke of luck, a British mail ship was laying to just offshore. The camp having been deserted after the attack, a party was sent to retrieve Stroyan’s mutilated body.VII

  The first Burton African expedition was over. Speke’s eleven wounds were so severe that he was given three years’ convalescence by the army. Making matters worse, the beatings had inflicted bouts of temporary blindness.

  Burton’s palate and tongue were sliced, and he would bear a scar on his cheeks from the spear’s entry wound for the rest of his life.

  Unrelated to the attack, he was also suffering from syphilis.

  The exploration careers of Jack Speke and Dick Burton appeared to be over as well. Burton was soon censured for the failed expedition, with its losses of lives and money, and no tangible success that might help the British gain a toehold in East Africa. Hoping to redeem himself, he returned to the army, where he saw service in the Crimean War, despite his disfigured face and difficulty in speaking.

  Speke experienced a rather miraculous recovery, and soon found himself serving on the front lines in Turkey as well. When the Crimean War ended, he tramped about the Asian subcontinent once again, back to his familiar ritual of hunting and collecting plants.

  Problem was, Dick Burton and Jack Speke’s curiosity was still very much alive. The sharp stab of spears impaling their bodies and the smell of a dead and rotting friend did nothing to lessen that drive. And while an unscathed G. E. Herne never entered the annals of exploration again, Burton and Speke were soon dreaming anew of finding the source of the Nile—though they had made such a mess of things that it was clear their chances of receiving the funding or permissions for a second chance were almost nonexistent.

  Curiosity was no longer enough. Now they also needed something stronger to get them to the next leg of their journey.

  Something stronger called hope.

  * * *

  I. The Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company was founded in 1822, and reigned as Britain’s leading shipping firm until after World War II. It still exists, having been sold in 2006 for £3.9 billion to the container giant Dubai Ports World.

  II. Some hunters took as many as 250 buffalo a day. The new transcontinental railroad took advantage of the great herds by letting passengers fire their weapons from trains. The fallen animals were left to rot, which infuriated the Native American tribes who depended upon them as a food source, and became a primary reason for waging war on incoming settlers.

  III. Burton spoke fluent Arabic, Gujurati, Hindustani, Punjabi, Sindhi, Marathi, and Persian. However, owing to his outcast status within the Royal Army, he was failed when he took the exam that would qualify him as an Arab translator.

  IV. Kent C. Berridge, Physiology & Behavior, 16 February 2009.

  V. Ironically, La Perouse was lost at sea at almost the exact same time the African Association was being formed. On January 26, 1788, he arrived at Botany Bay, where Cook had made landfall in Australia. But Sir Arthur Philip and the British First Fleet had arrived two days earlier, thus denying France the new continent. La Perouse sailed from Botany Bay on March 10. His ships sank in a storm two months later.

  VI. Though at great risk to his life. His Somali guides revealed his identity early in the journey, and he was forced to remove his native clothing and travel as a British officer. Burton was held prisoner by the local amir for ten days in Harar before being released.

  VII. The oppressive heat took its toll on Stroyan’s corpse during the voyage back to Aden. It bloated and began to smell so badly that he was thrown overboard and buried at sea.

  HOPE

  Shall I abandon, O King of mysteries, the soft comforts of home?

  Shall I turn my back on my native land, and turn my face towards the sea?

  Shall I put myself wholly at Your mercy, without silver, without a horse, without fame, without honor?

  Shall I throw myself wholly upon You, without sword and shield, without food and drink, without a bed to lie on?

  Shall I say farewell to my beautiful land, placing myself under Your yoke?

  Shall I pour out my heart to You, confessing my manifold sins and begging forgiveness, tears streaming down my cheeks?

  Shall I leave the prints of my knees on the sandy beach, a record of my final prayer in my native land?

  Shall I then suffer every kind of wound that the sea can inflict?

  Shall I take my tiny boat across the wide sparkling ocean?

  O King of the Glorious Heaven, shall I go of my own choice upon the sea?

  O Christ, will You help me on the wild waves?

  —Prayer of St. Brendan the Navigator

  1

  Imagine a world without exploration. Try to comprehend a time when people lived their entire lives without traveling from one valley to the next, let alone sailing across oceans with no visible end. This is what life is like on the western coast of Ireland in roughly AD 530, more than a thousand years before Christopher Columbus sets sail from the port of Cadiz en route to what will come to be known as the New World. An Irish monk named Brendan is about to undertake a most extraordinary adventure. In a time where little is known about navigation, or the height and depth and breadth of the oceans, he has built a very small boat known as a curragh. The construction is rather crude, with a hull made of interwoven twigs, reeds, and branches. This was covered in ox hides tanned in oak bark and then softened with butter. A sail and mast were rigged. Once skins were laid atop the 36-foot-long open boat to provide shelter from the elements, Brendan and a dozen other monks set forth from what is now Dingle Bay. He has just fasted for forty days and nights to clear his head for the arduous journey to come, which makes him perhaps the first man in exploration history to undertake the deprivation and hardship of an expedition before actually leaving home.

  What Brendan hopes to find is a mythical land of milk and honey; a heaven on Earth, and a “land of promise and of the saints.” The reasons are unclear. He doesn’t appear to be driven by the need to proselytize or colonize. Money is not an issue, for
as a monk Brendan’s life is one of self-chosen poverty. But for some reason, at the ripe old age of forty-four, Brendan has gotten tired of looking out over the horizon and wondering whether this legendary paradise exists. So he is going to do something about it.

  2

  As long as there have been oceans, men have longed to know what lies on the other side—or if there is another side. The ancient age of nautical exploration was led by the Greeks and Egyptians, who plied the Mediterranean and Indian Oceans. The Ancients were the first explorers to introduce mapmaking and travel writing, marking the first permanent records of exploration. One of the earliest recorded expeditions was led by the Egyptian nobleman Hannu. In 2750 BC he sailed a ship down the length of the Red Sea to the tip of the Arabian Peninsula. What he hoped to find is unclear, because when he got to his destination he had landed at none other than what would one day be called Aden, that dusty volcanic hellhole Burton and Speke would label “the Devil’s Punchbowl.”

  In 600 BC the Egyptian pharaoh Necho funded a three-year expedition that reportedly circumnavigated the coast of Africa. This beat Portuguese discoverer Vasco da Gama by two thousand years, and took place a full millennium before Brendan began his prevoyage fast.

  But what made Brendan’s voyage unique, separating him from the three thousand years of sailors that preceded him, was that he aimed his curragh straight out into the ocean rather than sailing within sight of the coast. It was the nautical equivalent of stepping off the edge of a cliff. With that simple act of turning mere curiosity into the hope that his actions would result in a discovery, Brendan began exploration’s nautical era.

  It was an epoch that would not end until the death of James Cook thirteen centuries later, whereupon it was universally agreed that, with the exception of the odd archipelago, the oceans had all been completely charted. Mankind thereupon focused almost completely on land-based exploration and solving great geographical mysteries, such as finding the source of the Nile River.

  A book detailing the oral history of Brendan’s seven-year odyssey, The Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot, published nearly a thousand years after he set sail, recounts his discoveries of such oddities as icebergs, walrus, Eskimos, and even the fiery volcanoes of what we now call Iceland. He island-hopped across the Atlantic on a circuitous path that also took him to North America, and then back home via the Azores. It is said that in his younger days as an up-and-coming sailor, Christopher Columbus passed through western Ireland and visited the Dingle Peninsula in search of information about Brendan’s voyage. Whether this is true is unclear. What is for sure, however, is that Columbus owned a copy of The Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot (in Latin: Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abatis) and was a believer in a mythical island in the Atlantic named for the monk, which appeared on many nautical maps in the Middle Ages.

  It has been suggested by the eminent historian Barbara Tuchman that Columbus’s four voyages of discovery were so revolutionary that the common man shifted his worldview from “the hereafter to the here and now,” setting aside the Catholic Church’s orthodox view of a known and finite world in favor of a vast, unknown planet whose mysteries would be revealed by those intrepid and curious enough to go looking. This not only led to the Age of Enlightenment, with its deep thirst for knowledge,I but also to that schism in the Church known as the Reformation.

  So it’s ironic that this upheaval began with a very pious Catholic adventurer. The hope Brendan had in finding an earthly paradise was transferred, over the centuries, to Columbus, and also to the countless navigators in the thirteen-hundred-year span ranging from Brendan to Cook who endured the unpredictable terrors and delights of life at sea.

  Strangely, this hope deserted Brendan in his final hours. He died in 577 while visiting his sister, Briga, the abbess of a convent some distance from Dingle Bay. The ninety-one-year-old Brendan was terrified of what lay beyond the grave. “I fear the unknown land, the presence of my King and the sentence of my judge,” he told Briga with his dying breath. Though not normally words associated with a man of deep faith, they suggest that the staggering natural wonders like waterspouts and gale-force winds and mighty waves twice the size of a house he had seen during his journeys had left a deep impression on his imagination. If that sort of thing existed on Earth, what sort of hell awaited him if his day of judgment went poorly?

  Or perhaps it was the lack of a goal. The connection between hope and a longed-for outcome is paramount. Among explorers, belief in themselves and their mission was pandemic. Though many possessed stoic dispositions, or were unable to express their emotions in the sort of upbeat manner that so often corresponds with optimism, the journals of explorers are shining examples of hope and optimism against long odds: Henry Morton Stanley’s belief that he was destined to find David Livingstone, who had been lost in Africa for more than five years and was presumed dead; Ernest Shackleton’s conviction that his improbable open-boat journey across the Southern Ocean would lead him and his men to safety; and Charles Lindbergh’s apparent fearlessness upon taking off for Paris, despite the fact that he was attempting to become the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.

  Without hope, of course, there is little sense undertaking an expedition. But to summon hope daily, even when there seems no point in going on, was one of the explorer’s most engaging qualities. To give up hope was to quit, and that was not an option. It was hope that led Robert Peary to repeatedly battle the Arctic, even when others began to perceive him as a fool. “I tried to realize,” he wrote of his success after finally reaching the North Pole, “that after twenty-three years of struggles and discouragement I had at last succeeded in placing the flag of my country at the goal of the world’s desire.”

  Hope is not just a happy feeling. It is a dynamic cognitive emotional system that is markedly different from mere optimism. When an individual dreams (or daydreams, as is more often the case) of some ultimate goal they would like to achieve, the process of hope uses creative intelligence and the intricate workings of the brain to find a road map toward the eventual completion of that goal. Goals fostered by hope are what are known as learning goals, which psychologists attribute to success and fulfillment in many areas of life, thanks to their focus on strategies to attain these goals.

  3

  Consider the fourth voyage of Christopher Columbus. His first, and most famous, journey in 1492 had seen him discover the New World. He had been trying to reach Asia by sailing west across “the Ocean Sea” to help Spain capture the market in pepper, silk, and opiates. It had been decreed by the pope that rival nation Portugal controlled the coast of Africa and all routes eastward to the Orient. For this reason Portugal would soon dominate trade on that continent for centuries to come—particularly slavery. The path Burton and Speke followed in their search for the source was the same trail Arab slavers used to march newly captured slaves to Portuguese traders on the coast.

  Columbus was obsessed with the goal of finding that westward route to Asia, for it would enrich not only his Spanish patrons, but himself as well. For a man born into the middle class, exploration represented a chance at wealth and nobility. This is important, because outside of sailing, Columbus had no other marketable skills. He was a nominal cartographer and a poor businessman who had a deep fondness for powerful women. “The Admiral of the Ocean Sea,” as he would one day be known, stood roughly six feet tall, had red hair, and a fair, perhaps even freckled, complexion. No one knows for sure, because he never once had his image painted or drawn.

  In 1492 he discovered the New World. In 1493 he undertook a second voyage, to colonize his new empire (Columbus’s agreement with the Spanish crown gave him control of much of the New World’s land and wealth), while also continuing to search for that elusive path to Asia. By 1498 the colonists were disenchanted with their new lives and Columbus returned in an attempt to bring about order. Once again, he used this voyage to find the Orient. He failed, but did manage to stumble upon S
outh America.

  The third voyage ended badly. The Spanish crown had him thrown in chains and returned to Spain. He was almost fifty years old by then, a decade beyond the average life expectancy of the time. His hair was gray and his hands were shriveled from rheumatoid arthritis. And when he asked Queen Isabella, the biggest advocate of his adventures, for a royal audience, she refused.

  But then she changed her mind. Columbus literally got down on his knees to beg for one more chance to find that path to Asia.

  Isabella could be aloof and distant. She was a very small woman who wielded power brilliantly, and was the equal of any man when it came to planning war or running a government. But she was not insensitive to Columbus’s pleas. Though a very devout Catholic (so pious, in fact, that she refused to bathe because it was considered licentious), she seems to have had a thing for the tall, rugged sailor. There is no evidence that there was an improper relationship between them, but for more than a decade there had been a flirtation. Now, seated in her throne room at the Alhambra with her husband, Ferdinand, she took pity on Columbus and granted him one last voyage.

  What a voyage it was. He set sail from Spain on May 11, 1502. In short order, Columbus raced to Africa to intervene in a military dispute with the Moors, predicted a hurricane as he finally reached the New World, was ignored when he attempted to warn the colonists at Hispaniola (modern-day Dominican Republic and Haiti), and successfully found shelter from the storm, even as twenty-nine of the thirty ships in port at Hispaniola were destroyed, along with five hundred lives.