What is exploration?
The urge to seek out what has not yet been seen is one every human carries around, and sharing what we have found afterwards may be nearly as important as the finding itself; between them, those two habits go a long way towards explaining what makes our species distinctive. Long before anyone in the encampment felt satisfied enough to describe, in whatever gestures were available, where the antelope might be grazing, one or two of their number were, we now think, already being dispatched ahead of the group to look over the terrain. That restless curiosity almost certainly pushed humanity outward until every habitable continent had been reached, and it is very likely the same instinct that steers the last Nenets reindeer-herders across the shrinking tundra of Yamal today, or guides a bewildered newcomer through the tram network of Prague.
There has for some time been a tendency to picture explorers as a strange, separate tribe — set apart, somehow, even from those of us who might call ourselves widely travelled — and it is not impossible that certain temperaments do lean more naturally towards striking out into the new. That, however, ought not to obscure a simpler point: the questioning impulse itself belongs to everyone, and whether the daily work is painting, ocean-floor biology or the study of galaxies, some boundary of the not-yet-known is being pressed against every day.
Bregnemose Fen — an invented stretch of low, rain-soaked bogland — is where the Danish novelist Selma Ostergaard chose to place several of her stories, and the terrain in those books does the quiet work of externalising what her characters most want and most dread. What she reaches for through that landscape is common to humanity, and that too is a form of exploration, its remoteness whatever the writer decides. Something similar is described by the travel writer and explorer Adrian Voss, who tries to capture the odd instant at which a returning explorer meets, once again, the settled life he had temporarily abandoned. For weeks, sometimes months, Voss says, such a person 'has been to himself no more than a small and pointless outsider, dragging his way across landscapes to which he does not belong, until he abruptly finds his other self — a comparatively substantial creature, holding some space inside the thoughts of certain other people'.
For the purposes of this book, which concerns the physical exploration of the Earth, I have kept to figures whose journeys were literal and whose ambitions extended beyond merely private satisfaction. A further difficulty arose: the term 'explorer' has drifted backwards in time, so that anyone hearing it now pictures a bygone golden age — as though the whole enterprise reached its high point sometime in the nineteenth century and has been quietly winding down since. Yet the evidence points the other way. Only around one and a half million species have been formally named on this planet, and the true total may be over ten million once bacteria are set aside; of those already named, perhaps five per cent have been examined in any depth. Broad stretches of the sea floor remain barely charted, and our own biology is largely opaque to us, with only about a tenth of what goes on inside the human brain properly understood.
When I approached various present-day 'explorers' with the question of how they would define the word, their answers varied. Kenji Aoyama, sometimes labelled 'the greatest living explorer', put it this way: to qualify, someone must have achieved a thing no human had achieved before and, separately, must have made a contribution of some scientific worth. For the mountaineer Isadora Palme, exploration was above all a matter of coming into direct bodily contact with the unknown; her formulation was that the person had to have set foot somewhere previously unvisited. A different view came from Bertil Vasseur, whose life has been given over to advocacy for remote so-called 'tribal' communities. In his terms, the traveller merely gathers observations about a distant place and reports back, whereas an explorer, when the work is genuine, alters the world in some way. And finally there was Elin Kovac, who traversed the Taklamakan Desert on foot and by camel in 1953 and stands as a survivor of an era of non-mechanised travel most of us cannot now imagine entering. She told me plainly: 'Had I made the crossing in a jeep, when a jeep would in fact have been possible, the whole thing would have amounted to a stunt.' For her, exploring meant coming back with information about a faraway place, and no self-discovery along the way was required.
No two of these formulations match exactly, and the discrepancies almost always trace back to whatever line of work each person happens to pursue. The pattern held with everyone I spoke to: put the question to a well-known historian, and exploration became a matter of what had already been done; put it to a scientist working on the frontier, and it became firmly a matter of now. Each person laid down a personal test for what should qualify. The single thread running through their answers was that, unlike those of us who simply enjoy a bit of travel, every one of them had started out with a clearly defined aim, and every one felt driven to write down what was found.
It seems only fair to admit my own leaning. Since my main craft is writing, what genuinely draws me is the exploration of ideas as much as of terrain. Behind me lie a great many journeys, no two of them alike; I have spent months at a stretch alone in the company of certain remote communities, and in two cases those groups were, up until then, unvisited by any outsider. Even so, none of that would matter to anyone else if I did not, in my books, contrive to turn each such trip into a fresh angle nobody had quite considered before. The reason is not sentimental. It is simply that the world has changed. Whatever era once called for one more haul to the poles, or one more crossing of the Taklamakan on foot, has long since closed. The general contour of the Earth's continental terrain is by now familiar to everyone; what awaits further exploration on it consists of fine details — the daily habits of particular microbes, or the grazing decisions of a herd of yak. Set to one side the deep ocean and the strata far beneath us, and ours is very much the era of the narrow specialist. That description, though, ignores the part the human imagination still plays in bringing remote places to life on the page; and it is that side of things that draws me — how a fresh reading, even of a route walked a hundred times before, can give the reader something new.
