‘Age of Discovery’ were by-products of com-
mercial, evangelistic and colonial motives.
Ostensibly more scientific were the Pacific
exploits of Enlightenment figures such as
Louis Antoine de Bougainville, James Cook,
Joseph Banks, the Forsters, Jean Franc ̧ois de la
Pe ́rouse and George Vancouver (Beaglehole,
1966). And yet with them too political factors
loomed as large as scientific ones: pre-voyage
briefings on settlement possibility,resource
inventory and the staking of colonial claims all
revealed the strategic significance of everything
from cartographic survey to ethnographic
illustration (Frost, 1988). Still, the scientific
achievements were substantial – Cook, for
instance, took with him astronomers, surgeons
and naturalists, and successfully completed an
accurate recording of the transit of Venus.
Precisely the same was true of later explor-
ations in South America and Central Africa.
Alexander von Humboldt and Aime ́Bonpland,
for example, used their South American find-
ings at the turn of the nineteenth century to
break the bonds of the static taxonomic system
of Linnaeus, and ultimately to create a dis-
tinctive mode of scientific investigation – what
Cannon labelled ‘Humboldtian science’ – in
which ‘the accurate, measured study of wide-
spread but interconnected real phenomena’
was interrogated ‘in order to find a definite
law and a dynamic cause’ (Cannon, 1978,
p. 105; cf. Dettelbach, 1996). Again, Roderick
Murchison, who has been dubbed England’s
scientist ofempire, virtually orchestrated the
British colonial assault on Central Africa in
the Victorian period through his oversight of
the Royal Geographical Society, and used a
variety of explorers to test his own geological
theories there (Stafford, 1989).
There is not space here to delineate in any
detail the scientific contributions of a host of
other exploratory ventures: the Napoleonic
survey of Egypt, Baudin’s deadly mission to
‘New Holland’, the succession of Russian voy-
ages into the Pacific by Krusentern, Kotzebue
and Lu ̈tke, the Royal Geographical Society’s
efforts to reduce the Australian outback
to cartographic enclosure, Lewis and Clark’s
western territorial expedition, Darwin’sBeagle
circumnavigation, the United States Exploring
Expedition under Charles Wilkes, the voyage
of T.H. Huxley onThe Rattlesnake,a variety
of late Victorian ventures to West Africa, A.R.
Wallace’s sojourn in Borneo, the oceano-
graphic survey ofThe Challenger, and exped-
itions to the poles in the early decades of the
twentieth century, to name but a very few.
Chief among their scientific achievements
were the discovery of numerous unknown
species of plants andanimals, new theories
of organic dispersal, novel interpretations of
human cultures, the mapping of fossils and
strata on a global scale, cartographic intensifi-
cation and advances in astronomical observa-
tion. The power of this scientific legacy is
so engrained in the discipline’s collective
memory that various expeditionary ventures
continue to receive the sponsorship of institu-
tions such as the Royal Geographical Society
and the National Geographic Society, and
to provide a language in which to speak of
geographical excursions into other threatening
environments, such as urban ethnic ‘no-go’
areas.
The acquisition of scientific knowledge by
explorers was a multifaceted enterprise and
raised critical epistemological questions that
have persisted up to the present day (seeepis-
temology), not least in settings where exped-
itionary space is itself experimental space
(Powell, 2007). The accumulation of scientific
knowledge required careful management.
First, the crying need to discipline distant
observers in the effort to standardize their
findings found expression in works such as
the Admiralty’s 1832Hints for collecting ani-
mals and their products, Richard Owen’s
Directions for collecting and preserving animals
(1835) and later the RGS’sHints to travellers
(1854). Works of this stripe continued a
long-standing tradition that included John
Woodward’sBrief instructions for making obser-
vations in all parts of the world(1696). The
production of manuals such as these was part
of an exercise in what might be called the
geography oftrust; namely, how to ensure
observational reliability and disciplined data-
gathering (Carey, 1997, 2006). Second, the
scientific knowledge gleaned from explor-
ations involved not only the assemblage
and movement of objects, both natural and
cultural, around the world, but their re-
conceptualization and reclassification acc-
ording to some prevailing norm or taste
(Thomas, 1991; Dritsas, 2005; Hill, 2006a,
b). Third, the transformation of local data
into universal knowledge that was critical to
exploration science involved metrological
standardization and thus the production and
calibration of precision instruments (see
instrumentation).
The significance of expeditionary exploits,
however, cannot be restricted to matters of
cognitive ‘progress’. And merely stating that
the growth of these scientific knowledges was
situated within the framework ofimperialismGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_E Final Proof page 231 1.4.2009 3:17pmEXPLORATION