Exploration, Geography and

Exploration, as an individual act or event and as a process that involves discovery, examination, recording, and reporting, is a key constituent of geography and geographic understanding. In terms of knowledge in the past about the earth's dimensions and content and about geography's development as a science, exploration is associated with oceanic voyaging and global circumnavigation—with the penetration of continental interiors, imperial expansion, tales of discovery and heroic endeavor, and major mapping projects. Yet exploration at a variety of scales and in different ways is also commonplace of modern life. Traveling in space, examining the world's oceans, using a tourist map, examining familiar places through educational fieldwork, and even poring over maps or consulting encyclopedia entries are all geographic explorations of various sorts. In these senses, geography has an origin and a continuing existence as a science of action through exploration. Because this is the case, exploration embraces important methodological questions about the making of reliable geographic knowledge, the disciplining of the senses through fieldwork, and the authority of different knowledge claims. And its history may be told from different perspectives.

The term the Age of Exploration is conventionally applied to that period between the late 15th and late 17th centuries when the world was discovered and geographically “enlarged” by European navigators. The achievements of Bartholomeu Diaz in rounding what is now known as the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, of Christopher Columbus in discovering the Americas in 1492, and of Vasco da Gama in establishing trade connections with the Orient in 1497 changed forever previous conceptions of the earth. Ferdinand Magellan and Sebsatian del Cano were the first to circumnavigate the globe between 1519 and 1522, repaying the expense of the voyage with spices. Where the Portuguese led, the English, Spanish, Dutch, and French followed. Trade routes to the Far East and to the Americas and voyages of global circumnavigation were paralleled by exploration in search of the Northeast Passage and the Northwest Passage. These hoped-for trade routes between Europe and the Orient that would eliminate the need to voyage around the southernmost capes of South America or Africa did not materialize.

In the Age of Exploration, exploration was rooted in a belief in the supremacy of Christianity and in the unquestioned benefits to Europe of global trade, principally in spices and precious metals. Geographic knowledge was advanced because ancient views about the world were overturned. Columbus and those who followed in his wake demonstrated the existence of a continent hitherto unknown to Europeans (if well known to its inhabitants). The earth was shown to have more land than was previously believed, to be habitable at and beyond the equatorial regions, and to have great human and natural diversity. By the mid-1640s, Dutch navigator Abel Tasman reached the southwest coast of modern Australia and parts of what is today New Zealand but did not recognize the full extent of the lands in the Southern Ocean.

By the late 18th century, British navigator James Cook had added to the knowledge derived from men such as Tasman and William Dampier and decisively[Page 145] challenged the belief in Terra Australis Incognita (or unknown southern lands). Cook's three voyages between 1768 and 1780 added significantly to understanding of the world's continents and of the North and South Pacific. Enlightenment exploration by the British and others, French voyageurs–naturalistes Louis Antoine de Bougainville and Jean-François de Galaup, Comte de La Pérouse, and Alejandro Malaspina (the Genoan working for the Spanish), to name only a few, provided texts, specimens, and illustrations of people and landscapes. Thus, exploration provided the very “stuff” of geography, new material for natural philosophers, and accounts of exotic novelty for European audiences. By the later 18th century, oceanic navigators had charted the shape of the world's continents but not revealed their content. When the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa was established in London in 1788, the view held at that time was that nothing worthy of research by sea, except the poles themselves, remained to be examined. But by land, the objects of discovery still were so vast as to include at least a third of the habitable surface of the earth. Much of Asia, a still larger proportion of America, and nearly the whole of Africa were unknown.

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