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February 2, 2003
REVIEWS: Explorers’ exploits
This is a truly wonderful book harking back to a time when books were things to be treasured and referred to over a life-time. It is handsome and beautifully produced: a star for everybody’s bookshelf. Benedict Allen, the editor, is not only an explorer himself but also a writer whose interest, as he says, is skewed to the exploration of ideas. And this he does superbly well.
He roves discursively and teasingly in and around his contentious topic. His introduction opens up a veritable can of worms as to what precisely exploration consists of, especially nowadays when most of the earth is thoroughly well known to even the most timid traveller. Indeed he says rather engagingly, that we are all explorers, because of our all too human desire to discover and then share our new-found knowledge. So on this score Allen includes Gilbert Wright, who on his daily rambles around his eighteenth century village in Hampshire examined minutely how nature went about its business.
This is diametrically opposed to those extraordinary folks who roared off across oceans and then crashed through continents in their pursuit of gold, utopia, fame and fortune; and on their way totally disregarded and often annihilated the indigenous people. This was the hey day of exploration and often seen in the west as romantic and exciting but Allen emphatically points out the downside. He also comments that in most cases they were so focused on their wealth plundering and people domination that they forgot about reporting back in any detail what they had found.
To him this is the essential part of exploration. He commends women explorers for being adept at description often reporting back matters that had escaped their more predatory minded colleagues. Josephine Peary’s gruesome account of a night in an igloo is particularly graphic.
Allen for the purposes of the book divides the explorers’ world into six parts. He himself has savoured the rigours of each of the terrains and in a short introduction to each he includes an anecdote based on his own adventures. His journey across the Torres Straits which introduces seas and landfalls is a brilliantly succinct account of the troubles that can befall one on even the shortest of journeys. There’s even a sea snake and snacking on raw shell fish. This part ingeniously begins with St Brendan’s sixth century voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to America related in a tenth century manuscript and ends with Tim Severin’s reenactment in a similar leather boat in the 1970s.
Allen is great on deserts. His intoxication with the hot variety is palpable: once you have been in one you will be for ever haunted by the experience, he says. He is less enthusiastic about cold deserts: Standing in minus 60 degrees, the awesome feeling comes a little less readily. Polar exploration he opines is at once one of the cleanest and most isolated ways of having a bad time which has been devised.
Forest exploration too can be an isolating experience — all those species crowding in on one. Allen got lost in the Amazon and likened it to being alone in a bedsitter in the middle of an uncaring metropolis.
I have concentrated on Allen’s commentaries but this is quite wrong because the book is about the 150 explorers he has chosen and their own words about their exploits. The pen sketches of each one are admirably done. After reading this book I was a little less sure about why I spend so much of my time at home and I’m sure you will be too.
The Faber book of exploration
Edited by Benedict Allen
Faber and Faber
ISBN 0-571-20696-4
811pp. £25
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