Discovery Is Always in the Eye of the Beholder: A Guest Post by Matthew Lockwood
Expanding our horizons, Lockwood delves into the human desire for exploration. Fueled more by curiosity than imperialist tendencies, this is a diverse perspective on trailblazers across different cultures and walks of life. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Matthew Lockwood on writing Explorers.
Paperback $12.00
Explorers: A New History
Explorers: A New History
In Stock Online
Paperback $12.00
The impulse to seek out new worlds is universal to humanity.
The impulse to seek out new worlds is universal to humanity.
The idea for Explorers first came to me while teaching a class on the history of exploration. As I taught the class, I became conscious of the fact that I kept saying “discovered” and “discovery” with quotation marks. When teaching the history of exploration, it’s important to stress how often moments traditionally understood as moments of discovery were only really discovery from a certain perspective. Discovery is always in the eye of the beholder.
And yet, for some reason I never abandoned the word altogether. I asked myself what value did the term “discovery” still hold?
I realized that retaining the term, while reimagining and reinterpreting it, held more power than rejecting it. For if Columbus could be said to have “discovered” the Americas, then indigenous peoples from the Americas equally “discovered” Spain and Portugal and England when the first indigenous peoples from the Caribbean, or Mexico, or North American crossed the seas to what was to them the New World of Europe. And this for me was a revelation: if discovery is a question of perspective, then exploration and discovery are not limited by time or place or culture, but are universal impulses shared by all human beings from the first humans to leave the Rift Valley down to the present.
Exploration and discovery are thus open to everyone. They are not limited to the “first” to do something or see something or travel somewhere. They are shared by everyone who encounters what is to them or their people a new world. In a time of deep division, this is something that unifies, exploration is the common inheritance of all human beings.
So, if exploration and discovery are not simply about novelty, what is it that unites all the disparate explorers across space and time and culture? I came up with five impulses and actions that for me define exploration: imagination, starting point for all explorers; curiosity, imagination might inspire, but it’s curiosity that drives the explorer to take the first step and transform the imagined world into something tangible; wonder, the emotional and psychological reaction to the unknown and the new that motivates them to share what they encounter; exchange, contact between two individuals or two peoples is always about negotiation and exchange, exchange of language and objects, but especially the exchange of knowledge, ideas, ways of seeing and ways of knowing; and interpretation, explorers gather information about places that are new to them or to their culture and situate it within a worldview that their culture can understand.
This new definition not only provides a more universal picture of exploration and its vital place in human history, it also brings a host of fascinating figures out of the shadows. So alongside Marco Polo, we have the medieval Uyghur monk Rabban Bar Sauma, who traveled from China to the courts of Europe. Beside Christopher Columbus we have Gudrid Far-Traveler, the Viking woman who reached America almost five centuries before Columbus. Alongside Charles Darwin we have John Edmonstone, the former slave from Guyana who taught young Darwin the art of taxidermy, providing him the tools to develop his pioneering theory of evolution. And there are so many more. Indeed, the greatest challenge in writing Explorers was choosing who to include. There are countless stories of exploration still waiting to be discovered.