was really a process of connecting these various maritime states.5 Marco Polo, after all, returned from Cathay to Venice by sea, hopping from one maritime network to another. The essence of the European achievement was to recognize that these various enclaves of maritime prowess collectively formed a single world ocean, to join these various civilizations into a general geopolitical economy, and to organize the geographic and technological knowledge of these peoples into a larger intellectual construct. The process was often one of adaptation and translation; interpreters were fundamental to the success of the enterprise. Vasco da Gama made the Indian Ocean crossing after seizing an Arab pilot along the coast of Africa. Magellan’s crew, after the massacre of its leaders on Luzon, wandered aimlessly in the South China Sea until they captured a local pilot who took them to the Moluccas. And Columbus relied on indigenous peoples to find his way around the islands of the Caribbean.
Nor was the exchange limited to geographic lore. Other bodies of information found their way into European consciousness. Although Western civilization would be the vehicle for discovery, the intellectual universe of the West would be as profoundly altered by the revelation of this information as were the cultures and lands it visited. Europe’s inherited systems of thought gradually crumbled—not merely expanded by the infusion of data, but utterly redesigned from new, sometimes alien points of view. The effects would ramify throughout that entire intellectual universe of art, science, natural philosophy, political theory, natural history, jurisprudence, literature.
To the voyages of discovery the continents—other than Asia, the objective—were impediments. Instead seaborne explorers searched eagerly, even maniacally, for passages around or straits through the land masses. The conviction slowly grew, some of it based on inherited speculation from the sages of antiquity, that the various oceans were united, and the European experience in the Mediterranean and the Baltic-Atlantic had suggested that connections would be found by probing coastlines, bays, and inlets. The search for a Northwest Passage around North America and a Northeast Passage around Scandinavia; the quest for saltwater straits, such as that discovered by Magellan and those, such as the Anian or Buenaventura, which existed only in the imagination; the hunt for an isthmus, like that at Panama, which would connect two seas by a brief overland passage—all amplified prior European experience. Ultimately, the successful circumnavigation of the globe by Magellan demonstrated that the world’s oceans were one, and throughout the era European exploration remained true to its maritime origins. Outposts for trade in the Far East, Africa, and the New World required a maritime nexus sustained by a succession of maritime empires. Portuguese, Dutch, and English mercantile and political ambitions began with the establishment of port cities; before New World conquistadores ventured inland to topple Precolumbian empires they first constructed seaports; new colonies were coastal, never venturing far from their maritime lifeline. Expeditions into the interior proceeded along waterways, by river or lake, if not by saltwater inlet.
During this process of discovery, the techniques used to explore new regions and the interpretive systems within which information about them was incorporated broke down. The world ocean could not be assimilated by a simple elaboration of piloting skills and portolan charts developed for the Mediterranean and the Baltic-North seas. There were problems of scale that could not be solved through a simple enlargement but that demanded new principles of organization. Because of the voyages, the Geographia of Claudius Ptolemy, the summa of ancient geographic wisdom, would be superseded instead of merely revised, much as the De Revolutionibus of Nicolaus Copernicus would replace, not merely redesign, the inherited lore contained in Ptolemy’s companion cosmology, the Almagest.
In many ways, Antarctica conformed to this pattern. The myth of a great southern land and sea, the fabled terra australis—an inheritance from Hellenistic lore—was among the last of the Cíbolas, El Dorados, and Brasils to dissolve beneath the harsh gaze of exploration. The Greek passion for symmetry demanded that the globe contain an immense land mass south of the torrid zone (the equator) to balance the vast known lands to the north. For centuries, while cartographers invented new techniques of projection and radically redrew the known outline of the world’s coastlines, incorporating a New World unimagined by the ancients, mappae mundi contained the hypothetical Southern Continent. The discovery of the Straits of Magellan and even the Drake Passage did not destroy this tradition. Magellan saw land to both sides, and his strait could be envisioned as a New World equivalent to the Dardanelles. Drake did not see land to the south, but that fact, when accepted, only shrank the dimensions of the imagined continent. Meanwhile, intermittent landfalls on large masses in the Pacific announced what might be peninsulas from the terra australis.
Here the voyages of Cook assume their importance. Systematically, Cook investigated the remaining coastlines of the Pacific. The reputed outliers from the Southern Continent were, in reality, the islands of New Zealand and Australia—whose great size earned it the old name. The Northwest Passage did not exist. The Southern Continent, if it existed, was in a forbidding region of polar ice, wholly uninhabitable. During Cook’s second voyage (1772–1775), on which he enjoyed favorable pack-ice conditions, he circumnavigated the Southern Ocean, crossed the Antarctic Circle, and penetrated to latitude 71 degrees 10 minutes South, near the Amundsen Sea. Though he found abundant marine riches—his popular account, A Voyage towards the South Pole (1777), started a veritable rush of whalers and fur sealers to the subpolar area—he fatally wounded the vision of a flourishing civilization near the pole. Cook did not make landfall or even see the coast, though he “firmly believed” that some land existed farther south which was responsible for the ice. Instead he had to content himself with threading his two ships through the decaying perimeter of the pack and around enormous “ice islands.” In exploration, as in other dimensions of natural history, the pack ice defined the effective perimeter—the littoral—of the continent. Interestingly, Cook’s greatest geographic discoveries did not reveal new lands so much as they defined the dimensions of known coastlines and erased whole continents of a hypothetical geography. Cook summarized:
I have now made the circuit of the Southern Ocean in a high Latitude, and traversed it in such a manner as to leave not the least room for the Possibility of there being a continent, unless near the Pole and out of the reach of Navigation…. Thus I flatter myself that the intention of the Voyage has in every respect been fully Answered, the Southern Hemisphere sufficiently explored and a final end put to the searching after a Southern Continent, which has at times ingrossed the attention of some of the Maritime Powers for near two Centuries past and the Geographers of all ages.6
Cook thus became the great practitioner of “negative discovery,” and it is appropriate that the scene of his grandest triumph should be the Antarctic—the “country of Refusal,” as poet Katha Pollitt describes it, where “No was final.”7
Even the indomitable Cook, however, backed away, sensibly enough, from deeper penetrations into The Ice. “The risk one runs in exploreing a coast in these unknown and Icy Seas, is so very great, that I can be bold to say, that no man will ever venture farther than I have done and that the lands which may lie to the South will never be explored.”8 Should anyone have “the resolution and perseverance to find … beyond where I have been,” he concluded, “I shall not envy him the honour of the discovery, but I will be bold to say, that the world will not be benefited by it.”9 The challenge was not merely technological but intellectual. There were no means to enter The Ice and no purpose to justify the attempt.
It was recognized even in the eighteenth century that Cook’s remarkable voyages were special, that they combined new skills with new purposes of exploration. Yet they were not isolated phenomena. Cook was only the highest expression of the era; other circumnavigators sailed the unknown seas, and scientific inquiry had begun to move inland from the coast. New lands were discovered and old ones resurveyed in the spirit and with the intellectual apparatus of the Enlightenment. Especially in the Antarctic, where the true coastline had not yet been visited, there was ample room for both amateur and professional. Cook’s travels became an exemplar and stimulant for further voyages of discovery, and his published reports inspired a good deal of political and economic rivalry for the lands and resources he had observed.
But the North Pacific was more promising than the Southern Ocean; the northwest coast of North America was already an active