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Discovering Land and Sea and IceArthur Wang arthur.yzw@gmail.com

By Daniel J. Boorstin
Continue as Arthur
Dec. 1, 1974

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December 1, 1974, Page 407 Buy Reprints

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11/04/2020 Discovering Land and Sea and Ice - The New York Times

Not until the time of Columbus did the peoples of Europe begin to discover how much of
the planet was covered by water and to discover,Sign
too,inthat
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the water with Google
paths covering the
earth promised new treasures of gold, of knowledge, and of adventure. These highways of
the oceans; unlike any known before, could take menArthur Wang
from almost anyplace to almost
arthur.yzw@gmail.com
anyplace else. World history from then until the time of Winston Churchill—the discovery
of “New Worlds,” the rise and fall of colonies and empires,Continue
and several World Wars—was
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a revelation of the opportunities and dangers peculiar to a planet more than 70 per cent
covered with water. Perhaps we may finally give up our misleading Earthly emphasis,
and rechristen our planet with its proper name, “Water.”

Meanwhile, if we are to grasp the large circumstances that have made possible a world
civilization of spectacular collaborations, competitions, holocausts, and achievements, we
would do well to discover the meaning—past, present and future—of the world's
wateriness. Each of these books, in its own way, can help us toward such a discovery.

The most important is THE DISCOVERY OF THE SEA (Dial, $20), by J. H. Parry who is
Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard University. Professor Parry
goes back before the age of seafaring empires to remind us of some of the peculiarities of
our planet's geography (or, rather, hydrography) which made these empires possible. He
tells the story with a rare combination of scholarly knowledge and literary grace.
Drawing on his own intimate acquaintance with many of the landscapes and seascapes
seen by his mariners, he helps the reader find adventure in the grand conundrums and
threatening ambiguities of the world map in that age.

“All the seas of the world are one,” he observes. “A reliable ship, competently manned,
adequately stored, and equipped with means of finding the way, can in time reach any
country in the world which has a sea coast, and can return whence it came.” The
discovery of this fact, and of this possibility of world communication, is what Professor
Parry means by “The Discovery of the Sea.” Incidentally he provides us with an
admirable elementary guide to the history of ship design, the growth of the science of
nevigation and the rise of cartography, all against a background of European geographic
knowledge, myth and ignorance in the 15th and 16th centuries. We can then better
understand how and why the Portuguese sovereigns sent Cadamosto, Gomes, and others
cruising around the west coast of Africa, Bartolomeu Dias around the Cape of Good Hope,
and Vasco da Gama all the way to India; why the Spanish sovereigns sent Columbus and
Magellan westward.

Why did tiny, resource-weak Portugal take the lead? Portugal, Professor Parry tells us,
was “The Street Corner of Europe,” strategically located to draw together the divergent
traditions of Mediterranean Europe and Atlantic Europe—in ship design, cartography
and navigation. He helps us understand that myths—the legends of Prester John, the out-
of-date reports of Marco Polo, the fancies of “Sir John Mandeville” and others—were
often more potent than solid facts in enticing men to risk their lives across the Lea. He

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reminds us of the power of the horoscope. Prince Henry the Navigator's astrologer had
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and above all,with Google the
to attempt
discovery of things which were hidden from other men.” And he suggests how the very
Arthur Wang
backwardness of Portuguese society in the 15th century prodded her noble gentlemen to
arthur.yzw@gmail.com
the first steps: “a romantic knight - errantry, bookish and somewhat brutal, was a positive
asset in recruiting leaders for dangerous ventures of unknown or unpromising
Continue as Arthur outcome.”
These are only a few of the suggestions in this wonderfully suggestive book. For
Professor Parry is subtle and ingenious in uncovering the unintended conspiracy of the
irrational, the wonderful convergence of the miscellaneous, toward helping men
everywhere discover the unity of the seas, and so lead them to share and increase their
knowledge of the world.

Parry's voyagers were not seeking knowledge. Rather (under the aegis of the Cross) they
were seeking wealth: gold and silver, slaves and spices. When Sebastian del Cano landed
at Seville in September, 1522, with the 18 feeble survivors of the round-theworld voyage
planned and begun by Magellan, the discovery of the unity of the seas had been
accomplished. And there Professor Parry ends his story.

The novel innuendo which would entice and tantalize men for the coming centuries was
expressed in the title to Ribeiro's chart of 1529: “All the world which has been discovered
up to this time.” Up to this time! A wonderfully pregnant new confession—a confession
that the most revered, most authoritative maps were imperfect and incomplete. The
omni-fertilizing discovery that the world was full of an unfathomed unknown! This
discovery had taken less than a century from the days when Prince Henry the Navigator
had sent out his first tentative, but carefully planned, feelers into the Ocean Sea, with the
voyages to the Azores and Madeira, and on the west coast of Africa beyond Cape Bojador,
which had been thought the wind-imposed terminus to safe two-way voyage by sea.

The saga of the unified sea does not end with the tales of exploitation, the migration of
peoples, and the rise and fall of empires, which begin when Professor Parry's book ends.
A much later chapter is recounted by David Mountfleld in his readable and vividly-
illustrated A HISTORY OF POLAR EXPLORATION (Dial, $14.95 until Dec. 31, thereafter
$17.50). He properly treats the exploring of the Arctic and of the Antarctic as a single
story. For despite the differences between the Arctic (a sea) end the Antarctic (a
continent), in recent times they have commanded the energies of the same men, offered
similar obstacles, and enlisted similar techniques.

The first stage of Mr. Mountfield's story was mainly a search for a Northwest or a
Northeast Passage between Europe and East Asia. It was dominated by heroes quite
unlike those who play the leading roles in Parry's story. Captain Cook, who sailed both the
Arctic and the Antarctic regions, was one of the first of this new breed. They, too, went in
quest of glory, but they also sought knowledge. Like their predecessors they were cursed

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by legends, traditions, and myths—the legend of a Northwest Passage, the myth of a vast
Terra Australis somewhere in the South Pacific. Sign
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predecessors they were
haunted by belief in symmetry and system—a balancing of lands on the two poles.
Arthur Wang
arthur.yzw@gmail.com
By the latter 19th century, when world-wide telegraphic communications had made
instant celebrity possible, explorers found still another new objective: to reach
Continue as Arthur
somewhere or other first. The combination of speedy communications with the sea-given
ability to go rapidly from one end of the earth to another, enabled Roald Amundsen to
salvage glory (when he learned he had lost his race to the North Pole) by turning around
and winning the race to the only remaining Pole.

At this time, too, the Scandinavians resumed the role of bold seafaring explorers that they
had not played since the first Viking age. The Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen did not quite fit
the pattern. “Love truth more, and victory less,” was his motto. He learned the Eskimo
language before setting off across Greenland (imagine da Gama learning Hindi!),
attached sails to his sledges, and designed his own ship, the Fram. to ride above the ice
instead of being crushed by it. On his trips across the ice toward the North Pole, he used
dogs to pull his sledges, then, to avoid carrying extra food, he would kill off one of the
weaker animals every few days and feed it to the others. “It makes me shudder even
now,” Nansen recalled, “when I think of how we beat them with thick ash sticks when,
hardly able to move, they stopped from sheer exhaustion. . . . It was necessary; forward
we must go, and to this end everything must give place. It is the sad part of expeditions of
this kind that one systematically kills all better feelings, until only hard-hearted egoism
remains.” This same Nansen became renowned as one of the great humanitarians of the
age. When the League of Nations appointed him commissioner in charge of repatriating
Russian prisoners after World War I, the Russians would not recognize the League, but
they would recognize Nansen. So he set up his own organization, issued his own
passports, and repatriated a half-million men. After Nansen's service to famine relief in
Russia, Greece, and Armenia, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922.

The chronicle of polar exploration in the last century is full of heroics. The American
Robert E. Peary, who secured his leaves from the navy with the enthusiastic support of
Theodore Roosevelt, took his wife with him to the Arctic (where one of their children was
born), lust all his toes from frostbite on his 1898–1902 expedition, and then went back for
another race to the North Pole, which he finally reached on April 6, 1909, with his Negro
companion Matthew Henson and four Eskimos. “The Pole at last!!!” Peary exclaimed.
“The prize of three centuries, my dream and ambition for 23 years. Mine at last.”

Polar explcration, as Mr. Mountfield recounts, showed a new face of this watery planet. If
the earlier seafarers had to conquer the ocean waters, the polar explorers had to conquer
the weather—and the ice. And the polar ice, neither water nor land, offered the perils of
both —of mountain ridges and crevasses, of deceptively inviting hard smooth surfaces,
suddenly interrupted by treacherous “leads” — unannounced open channels. Yet it was

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still possible for a heterodox and imaginative Vilhjalmur Stefansson to proclaim “the
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friendly arctic,” and prove his point by courage, ingenuity with Google
and the ability to learn from
others. He became adept at igloo building, lived by gun and spear, made clothes from the
animals he shot and dared set up his camp on the Arthur
floatingWangice.
arthur.yzw@gmail.com

A whole other realm, with new threats and new promises all its own, is sketched for us by
Continue as Arthur
Joseph E. Brown in THE GOLDEN SEA (Playboy Press, $16.95). Underneath the single
Ocean Sea there was still another New World which had only begun to be explored by the
mid-20th century. While many of us have glimpsed the tropical paradises open to the
snorkeller and the scuba-diver, these give only a hint of an element which, if Mr. Brown is
correct, cannot fail to be the Indies of the 21st century. Of course the sea has long been the
fortune and the adventure of a few treasure-seekers, recovering the gold of lost armadas.
But that is not half the story.

The sea may be as rich a source for the dinner tables of the future as the Indies, with their
pepper and spices and sugar, were for the 16th century. Some of Mr. Brown's most
tantalizing suggestions offer the hopes of oceanographers for ways of making it possible
for mankind to live on and under the sea. He tells of the experiments which promise that
dolphins, sea lions and whales may be domesticated to become the dogs, horses, camels
and elephants for a sea-dwelling man, and how man himself may be adapted for
underwater life.

All these books, which help us discover the sea, are even more important for helping us
discover our planet. For they reveal the peculiar medium that has made a land-dwelling
mammal into a citizen of the world. ■

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