Matthew Lockwood is an assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama. His previous books include This Land of Promise: A History of Refugees and Exiles in Britain, To Begin the World Over Again, and The Conquest of Death.
What’s the big idea?
The most famous and historically recognizable explorers are of the European variety because, for the most part, those are the only people textbooks feature as “explorers.” However, a look at the fundamental qualities that make someone an explorer urges historians to expand this category. Lockwood writes a new, inclusive history of exploration that places a diverse cast of new explorers alongside famous figures.
Below, Matthew shares five key insights from his new book, Explorers: A New History. Listen to the audio version—read by Matthew himself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. The first universal quality of exploration is imagination.
While teaching a class about the Age of Exploration and Conquest, I realized that students arrive with certain expectations of “adventure stories for boys.” Treasure, quicksand, and swashbuckling tales of daring—the Indiana Jones of it all. Many historians reject such interests as shallow or wrong and explain all the ways that exploration and imperialism are bad. But at the core, these students are interested in the rich multiplicity of the world.
History of exploration allows students to engage with the world through a familiar lens without entirely leaving their comfort zone. In my class, I push them a little by complicating and expanding rather than dismissing their preconceptions. I place new perspectives alongside the familiar to redirect their interests. I place the European explorers they’ve likely heard of before alongside other traveling scholars from around the globe, like Ibn Battuta. In this way, the class provides a bridge beyond their interest in the world as mediated through European eyes.
As I taught the class, I became conscious of saying discovery or discovered in quotation marks. When teaching the history of exploration, it’s important to stress how often moments traditionally understood as “discovery” are only discovery from the perspective of Europeans. Even as I contextualized and contested famous moments of discovery, I resisted the impulse to abandon the term altogether. Retaining the term while reinterpreting it held more value and power than rejecting it. If Columbus could be said to have discovered the Americas in 1492, then indigenous peoples from the Americas equally discovered Spain, Portugal, and England when they first met Columbus.
If discovery is in the eye of the beholder, then exploration and discovery are not limited by time, place, or culture. Discovery is a universal impulse shared by all human beings. Everyone who encounters what is to them, or their people, a new world shares exploration. Five qualities, the first of which is imagination, unify traditional explorers with my expanded cast of explorers.
Every journey begins in the mind’s eye long before it takes physical form. They all start with a question: What’s beyond the far horizon? This is evident in our earliest literature about travel to distant lands and unknown worlds, such as the narratives in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey. It is also evident in the mythology and origin stories of many peoples around the world.
“Retaining the term while reinterpreting it held more value and power than rejecting it.”
The Yazoo tribes of Louisiana traced their history back to the long migration of their ancestors from somewhere in the northwest. In the 1720s, one of the Yazoo elders claimed to have traveled all the way to the Pacific Northwest in search of his people’s origins. Lewis and Clark carried a copy of this man’s story with them when they made their own expedition across the continent to the Pacific. It’s unclear to historians whether the story told by the Yazoo man is true, but even if it was invented, it reveals how the Yazoo imagined the broader world.
Imagination as a core component of exploration led me to reconsider some groups of people not usually labeled in textbooks as explorers. I read narratives of fugitive slaves with an eye for the ways they imagined the world beyond their own environment and how they talked about the natural world. We talk about enslavement with a focus on the brutality, and that’s important both as a central component of the experience of enslavement and as a reminder to people in the present. But suffering was not the only thing enslaved people experienced, and focusing on suffering alone robs them of their full humanity. They felt love as well as sadness, excitement as well as dread. And they were moved by curiosity, imagination, and wonder as they contemplated the world.
In his narrative of his escape from slavery, Henry Bibb, who was born into slavery in Kentucky, stood on the high bluffs above the Ohio River and imagined what the land of freedom beyond that silver ribbon would be like. His imagination started as dreams of these distant lands and then became a real journey. On his way to freedom, he described the natural landscape with a romantic poet’s curiosity and a naturalist’s attention to detail.
Immigrants and migrants made similar observations and undertook similar expeditions of exploration. Many left their homes because of poverty or violence, and imagined the new worlds waiting for them at the end of their journeys. In their writings about migrating, they retained their sense of curiosity about all they encountered.
2. Wonder and awe go beyond the leader of an expedition.
Wonder and awe (the second uniting quality of explorers) are critical to the experience of people overlooked in classic tales of exploration. Guides, interpreters, and porters are the backbone of any expedition, but are often crowded out of the recorded stories.
Roy Chapman Andrews was eventually an important paleontologist, but as a young American man, he was an explorer. In 1911, one of his first ventures was the Andrews Whaling Expedition, which he led under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History. For this expedition, he recruited a couple of local Korean guides and horsemen. The whole party went through thick jungles, muddy with constant rain. The terrain was so difficult, and the conditions were so poor that Andrews was constantly worried that his guides would abandon or attack him while he was asleep. But after weeks of struggle, they reached a long white mountain, sacred in Korean mythology and religion. Andrews noticed the Korean guides’ awe, joy, and wonder at the sight of this mountain. For them, it was central to their understanding of the world, yet it had been something that no one they knew had seen. The guides, interpreters, and porters play an important role as explorers.
“Andrews noticed the Korean guides’ awe, joy, and wonder at the sight of this mountain.”
It is often assumed that a person can’t be considered an explorer if they are from the place being explored, but often these locals are traveling far beyond their known world. Most discussions of exploration ignore these figures entirely or focus on their exploitation. This flattens their experience. They did more than shoulder heavy burdens. They looked up and around at what to them were new worlds, too, with interest and with awe. They told people back home what they saw and were transformed in the eyes of their own cultures by what they had done and the things they had seen.
For another example, in 1871, when Henry Morton Stanley set out to make his name by finding the disappeared Dr. Livingstone, he had no idea what he was doing. When he arrived in Zanzibar to organize his expedition, he sought the guides and porters used by the explorers Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke, who had recently become famous for discovering the source of the Nile. All six of these “faithfuls” as Stanley called them, still had the medals given to them by the Royal Geographical Society of England for their role in the Nile expedition. If all that expedition had meant to them was a paycheck, they would have pawned the metals long ago. Instead, they kept them because they represented their status as explorers.
A similar account comes from the work of Francis Younghusband, who traveled through Central Asia and East Asia. At one point, he was traveling with a Mongol guide named Ma-te-la. Younghusband was perplexed and a bit frustrated by Ma-te-la’s habit of collecting what Younghusband considered trash: bits of string, wrappers, an old sock. But when they arrived in Ma-te-la’s hometown, Ma-te-la reverently showed the objects to his friends and family as artifacts of his own adventures—proof of his own experience as an explorer and the symbols of his status as a person who had seen the world beyond.
3. Negotiations and exchanges always follow contact.
Contact is the third uniting quality of explorers. Whether between two individuals or two peoples, contact is always about an exchange: of language, objects, knowledge, or ideas. When Carlos del Pino, an indigenous man from what is now Venezuela, met the great German explorer Alexander von Humboldt, it would be all too easy to characterize the encounter as one between a towering representative of European Enlightenment knowledge and the humble representative of native ignorance. But this is not the case at all.
As Humboldt himself recognized, Humboldt provided Del Pino with the opportunity to take advantage of European knowledge. Del Pino looked through a telescope and a microscope, opening new worlds for him. But Del Pino taught Humboldt, too. He taught Humboldt about the local flora and fauna, as well as the history and customs in Venezuela. In so doing, he provided some building blocks for Humboldt’s pioneering theories about earthquakes and climate change.
4. Explorers interpret information through their unique lens.
The fourth uniting quality of explorers is their ability to process information about new places and cultures in ways that their people back home will understand. They see and explain the world to people like themselves.
“He described these cities in new ways because of the unique eyes he saw them through.”
David Dorr, born into slavery in New Orleans, agreed to accompany his master on a trip through Europe and the Near East in return for his freedom when they returned. Dorr wrote of his travels and described London, Paris, Constantinople, and Jerusalem—all places that had been well-traveled and written about by countless Europeans before him. But he described these cities in new ways because of the unique eyes he saw them through.
When he traveled to London, he described entering a hotel and the feeling he got when a porter held the door for him. He described the feeling of being in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and treading on the graves of kings and queens. Above all, he described the experience of standing before the pyramids in Cairo. For him, this was a symbol of his and his people’s humanity. The pyramids were from a civilization that had provided the building blocks for Greece and Rome. Crucially for him, the civilization that influenced the Greek and Roman foundations of the modern civilized world was African.
5. Reporting back to communities revises notions of the world beyond.
The fifth uniting quality of explorers is the finale of their journey: reporting back to their communities. Explorers bring back information from their travels and thus revise their communities’ understanding of the world beyond. David Dorr did this, too. He returned to America as a free man, moved to Ohio, and published his account of traveling abroad. It was important to him that it was published both for the white community and his own community. He wanted his account to demonstrate his own humanity and the wonders of African civilization.
Based on these five characteristics—imagination, wonder, contact, interpretation, and reporting—new people and groups qualify as explorers: fugitives, slaves, immigrants, Indigenous people, porters, guides, and translators. In my book, I place the stories of these new explorers alongside the stories of famous figures to present an exciting new history of exploration.
To listen to the audio version read by author Matthew Lockwood, download the Next Big Idea App today:
