To infinity and beyond… ...Middle East

Add James May’s Great Explorers to your watchlist

I don’t think I would make a great explorer. I know from my experiences in TV that anything approaching “exploration” brings with it an increased risk of camping and a great deal of unhealthy beige food.

Or am I simply a product of my age? I’ve heard it said that the spirit of discovery is absent in the modern world when compared with the zeal that possessed our forebears. The usually cited reason? Risk aversion.

But I’m not convinced. The sailors on Columbus’s first voyage faced terrible dangers, certainly, even though they weren’t aware of many of them. Their mission to find a quicker route to Asia (which was the original brief) didn’t acknowledge their huge miscalculation of the size of the world. If they hadn’t run into the Americas halfway there, they would have certainly perished at sea from starvation.

Even putting that aside, life for the sailors was pretty grim, with the constant threat of disease, injury, malnutrition, drowning, communal living, shocking sanitation and descent into madness. Then again, life ashore in the 15th Century wasn’t exactly rosy for most people, with the constant threat of, well, disease, injury, malnutrition, communal living, shocking sanitation and descent into madness. Drowning could be swapped for religious persecution. The culinary horror of “hard tack” (ship’s biscuits) could be swapped for rancid meats.

So Columbus’s crews in 1492 were probably no less risk averse than people of today. It’s just that the base level of risk in simply existing as a human was a lot higher.

Plenty of people are still prepared to take risks. Extreme sports and wild camping are surprisingly popular. Thousands of people have conquered Everest. The producer of my Great Explorers show on Channel 5 has sailed the very same voyage that Columbus made but in an even smaller boat and with a crew of only two. Even I have been to the North Pole, an expedition greatly facilitated by a Toyota pick-up and a Fortnum & Mason hamper. The spirit of exploration is alive and well; it just needs an objective.

This, I believe, is what creates the erroneous impression that humanity no longer wants to discover. Captain Cook famously said, “Ambition leads me not only farther than any man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go.” He achieved this, completing our view of the world, and it’s true that humans cannot travel further than the opposite side of the globe without going into space. Only a handful of astronauts have been further from home.

We know of everything between us and our personal antipode. We know that there is no El Dorado, Atlantis or Australian inland sea. We know that there is no “great southern continent” that philosophers of old thought must exist to balance the known land mass in the northern hemisphere. Cook proved it long ago.

Space, and perhaps the mysterious depths of our oceans, are where humans now direct their exploratory urges. Since discoveries eventually become holiday destinations (the Caribbean, Tahiti, Botany Bay, the wreck of the Titanic) I’m convinced we will one day visit resorts on the Moon. I’m sure we will eventually colonise Mars or more distant planets.

Some will argue, of course, that we’d do better to put our own planet in order than attempt to move to another one. But the same could have been said of Spain in the 15th Century or England in the 18th. And still Columbus set sail for Asia and discovered the Americas, and Cook set off for the unknown south and mapped our cameraman’s home, New Zealand.

Because, as Michael Collins, command module pilot of Apollo 11, once put it: “Exploration is not a choice, really; it’s an imperative.”

Mars, here we come. At least we already know it’s there.

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