In no other’s footsteps

In trying to justify a life spent wandering across some of the world’s farthest corners, travel writer Bruce Chatwin concluded that humans are itinerant by nature. We descend, he reasoned, from nomadic peoples. The roaming instinct is embedded in our genes. Modern man’s malaise stems from his unnatural sedentary existence.

For as long as humans have existed, they have travelled - in search of sustenance, of safety, of the sacred - and told tales about their ramblings. It is not accidental that Herodotus, the fifth-century Greek writer known as the “father of history”, should also be considered the grandfather of the modern travelogue.

The links between past and present accounts of travel are vividly illustrated in “Great Journeys”, a collection of 20 slim volumes to be launched by Penguin. Based on the format of Penguin’s earlier “Great Ideas” series, it features extracts from some of the world’s most memorable travellers’ accounts, beginning with Herodotus (Snakes with Wings and Gold-Digging Ants) and including classic 20th-century writers such as Ryszard Kapuscinski (The Cobra’s Heart) and the late Sir Wilfred Thesiger. There are some obvious choices: Marco Polo, whose Travels In India and Arabia is in the collection, is arguably history’s most famous traveller-turned-storyteller. Others, such as Anton Chekhov’s A Journey to the End of the Russian Empire, are surprising, and demonstrate the genre’s adaptability. All of them show how the need to explore our environment has always been twinned with the need to document our findings.

Anthropologists and historians tend to agree with Chatwin about our peripatetic ancestry. “History has two big stories to tell,” writes Felipe Fernandez-Armesto in the introduction to his spectacular book Pathfinders. “The first is the very long story of how human cultures diverged. The second is... a relatively short and recent story of convergence - of how human groups got back in touch, exchanged culture, copied each other’s lives, and became more like each other again.” At the forefront of both processes were the countless pioneers to whom this compre- hensive study is devoted.

“Societies would never have grown apart without the pathfinders who led them along divergent routes,” says the author. “They would never have resumed mutual relations without later generations of explorers who found the routes of contact, commerce, conflict, and contagion that rejoined them. Explorers were the engineers of history’s infra- structures, the builders of the causeways of culture, forgers of links, spinners of webs.”

Fernandez-Armesto specialises in works of scrupulous scholarship and staggering breadth - Millennium and Civilizations are two of his all-encompassing titles. His global history of exploration is no less ambitious. It begins in the second millennium BC, with the “tentative outreach of the four great civilisations of Eurasia and Africa”, when route-finding between cultures was a specialised activity. “Although we cannot know the identities of the earliest explorers who laid down the routes of cultural convergence, we can be pretty sure that some of them, at least, would have been revered.” It is no surprise that the great heroes of antiquity were travellers.

It was settlements with limited hinterlands, such as the early Greek cities, he argues, that became the first breeding grounds for heroic explorers. Sea travel would soon connect the Mediterranean to the Atlantic seaboard, while contacts were essayed between the Mediterranean and the west African coast across the Sahara. In the meantime, the development of Asian land routes - the Silk Roads - brought Europe and Asia “into mutual knowledge, albeit not direct touch”, while ever-wider reconnoitring of the Indian sea led to the establishment of monsoon navigation patterns.

Pioneers sallied forth, moved by curiosity as much as by material needs. They seldom travelled empty-handed. Wherever those seafarers, merchants, adventurers and roving scholars went, they brought their own peculiar baggage. “Explorers were vectors: they carried culture with them.”

Fernandez-Armesto’s greatest contribution is not in presenting original research, but in juxtaposing contemporary events to offer a truly comparative picture. So we learn that as the Norse and the Irish relied on island-hopping and coast-hugging in their Arctic ventures, the rise of Islam in south-east Asia was turning the Indian ocean into “a sort of Muslim lake”. We are made aware that changing communications in one part of the world had implications elsewhere: “It is hard to resist the conclusion that the revolutionary experiences of western civilisation at the time... were owed in part to influences exerted along the Silk Roads and steppeland routes.”

As Fernandez-Armesto demonstrates, it was not the great powers that made the greatest contributions to exploration. When, in the late middle ages, Europe took a “maritime turn”, it was the peripheral kingdoms of Iberia that led the way. “In the medieval space race,” he says, “a place on the margins of civilisation was a good spot from which to start.” The question we must pose, he argues, is not why it was left to Portugal and Spain to make the great leap across the Atlantic in the 1490s, but rather why they had not done it before.

In an equally thorough and thought-provoking vein, he guides us through the early modern period - notable for the exploration of the Americas and the Pacific - to the 19th century, when the scientific rationale for travel helped enhance the world picture. He closes with the exploits of 20th-century explorers, who strove to discover uncharted corners in an ever-shrinking and increasingly interconnected globe.

The main historic work of pathfinding and mapping is now over, Fernandez-Armesto admits. Adventure, he says, has replaced exploration, while science has degenerated into showmanship. This is not a new complaint. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss famously mourned “the end of travel”. As early as 1933, explorer Peter Fleming had remarked that “adventure in the grand old manner is obsolete... exalted to the specialist’s job or degraded to a stunt.”

While Fernandez-Armesto amply documents the commercial, migratory, scientific or religious imperatives behind the historic trail-blazing, it is often harder to fathom what makes modern explorers tick. Even in the age of satellite mapping and instant communications, the romantic ambition of being the first to chart terrae incognitae occasionally persists. “Are you sure this godforsaken place is where you want to go?” a Russian acquaintance asks explorer Benedict Allen upon learning about his plans to cross northernmost Siberia. “It’s because it’s godforsaken that I’m going there,” he replies.

Known for his solo expeditions across the Namib and Gobi deserts, and for his forays into the Amazon jungle, Allen decided to undertake the most demanding of voyages to satisfy a lifelong yearning. “Even as a child . . . it seemed to me that Siberia must be a place much like a no-man’s land,” he writes in Into the Abyss. “It seemed only a matter of time before I sought out those who made a home of such a desolate place, the greatest no-man’s land of all: the tundra, that empty stage on which even the dimmest pulse of life was extraordinary.”

The final decision to travel to the Arctic was taken when he was 24, lost in a West Papuan lowland forest after a close escape from a hostile tribe. It was hard, he explains, “to discern anything much, surrounded by all the confusion and complexity of the tropical forest. And in that respect, I decided, the jungle wasn’t so different from home: the everyday clutter of our lives stopped us from seeing clearly.” The Arctic offered something special: “a perspective on how to go about the business of coping with disappointment, not to say downright ruin. The tundra was patterned by the deeds of those who refused to lie down and die; those who knew, in their agony, how to reach out and grasp at life.”

It is partly hubris, and partly curiosity - about oneself, about one’s strength’s and shortcomings - that makes anyone want to be “in the worst place in all”. And if ever a landscape corresponded to that description, it is surely Chukotka, the Siberian province where local magnate Roman Abramovich made his fortune in oil. Allen’s goal was to reach the province’s easternmost point, where the Chukchi Peninsula juts out into the Bering Strait, unaided except for a team of dogs. If weather conditions permitted (that is, if the temperature dropped so low that a sheet of flexible salt-water ice covered the sea), he might attempt crossing the Strait itself.

“Being an adventurer, I had a professional interest in not dying,” Allen says, coyly. Yet in the book’s opening pages, we find him hurtling into an abyss after the lead dog makes a fatal mistake. Over and over, the armchair traveller asks: why? Only when Allen has partly accomplished what he set out to do, and is standing on a fragile sheet of ice halfway between Asia and America, can we glean what pushes him - and others like him. “Perhaps no one will ever again stand here so alone and isolated again,” he thinks. That, it seems, is a feeling worth sledding through the Arctic for.

Proving other people wrong has been one of the main driving forces for Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge, the first person to walk alone to the South Pole. “On my first expeditions I reckon that my fear of gratifying the negative expectations of the nay-sayers was at times an important motivation,” he writes in Philosophy for Polar Explorers. Also known as the first to reach both poles and the summit of Mount Everest, Kagge is not shy about his need for public recognition.

Kagge’s book - a handsomely produced little volume originally released by his own publishing house - is less about the specific details of exploring and more about the cliched generalities of living life. “I will now try to show through a simplified graphic model how the possibilities of realising our dreams and ambitions evolve in proportion to our belief that we can achieve them,” is a typical Kagge proposition.

Lest he be accused of dumbing down, Kagge name-drops Aristotle, Schopenhauer, Robert Frost, Garry Kasparov, Dante, Blaise Pascal, Knut Hamsun, Socrates, Michel de Montaigne, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Beethoven, Rembrandt, Seneca, J.P. Morgan, Ronaldinho and many, many others. He also earnestly discusses Ringo Starr (an example of someone who benefited from pure luck), Harry Potter, The Matrix, Tony Soprano’s angst and Paris Hilton’s autobiography (”I took note of a number of things, among them her way of travelling - utterly different to my own”). This suggests that Kagge wrote the book for 15-year-olds - but then he also enjoys discussing how satisfying his sex life was with former girlfriends. Like some of his more perilous enterprises, one feels, this book was conceived primarily to boost Kagge’s ego.

He does, nevertheless, offer a morsel of real insight when replying to the old query: “We seek out danger because experiencing intense situations and having the ability to surmount them feels like a confirmation of our own power of existence. Out in the wide world those momentary flashes of experience can be compared to eternity.” That, he says, is a good reason for walking to the South Pole instead of flying there. Those of us whose toughest journey is the daily commute can merely wonder.

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PATHFINDERS: A Global History of Exploration
by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
OUP ₤25, 428 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤20

INTO THE ABYSS: Explorers On the Edge of Survival
by Benedict Allen
Faber ₤16.99, 266 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤13.59

PHILOSOPHY FOR POLAR EXPLORERS: What They Don’t Teach You In School
by Erling Kagge, translated by Kenneth Steven
Pushkin Press ₤10.99, 177 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤8.79

‘GREAT JOURNEYS’ SERIES
by various authors
Penguin ₤4.99, pages vary