Kitty leaken

A few months ago, while traveling in Portugal, I paid a visit to one of the most extraordinary shrines ever built to celebrate the enterprise of exploration. Lisbon’s Monument of the Discoveries, inaugurated in 1960, is a formidable structure of ce-ment and rose-tinted stone that takes the shape of a mighty ship’s prow looming over the Tagus River estuary. Along the sides of this figurative vessel, historical luminaries from Portugal’s golden age of exploration — including Vasco da Gama, Prince Henry the Navigator, Bartolomeu Dias and Ferdinand Magellan — struggle heroically toward the sky, as though exploration were a divine activity, synonymous with grandeur itself.

The monument recalls a time when tiny Portugal ruled the seas, when its sleek carracks and caravels were launched from wharves on the Tagus to probe the farthest reaches of the planet, and when Lisbon boasted the world’s preeminent shipbuilders, mapmakers and inventors of ingenious navigational instruments.

The monument seems to be telling us: A great nation is an exploring nation. A great nation soars upward when it ventures outward.

In recent years, a long-overdue reassessment of explorers, particularly European explorers from the Age of Discovery, has been taking place. Statues of once-celebrated pathfinders have been toppled, obelisks of famous navigators vandalized. For modern revisionists, exploration is seen as a suspicious endeavor from the dark era of imperialism, an activity almost exclusively reserved for white males who sought riches and glory while working on behalf of rapacious national interests.

Yet many of the statue-topplers go further, essentially arguing: Those explorers shouldn’t have gone out in the first place. They shouldn’t have wondered, and they shouldn’t have wandered. These critics fail to distinguish between exploration itself and what so often came after exploration — that is, the occupiers, pathogens, al-cohol, whalers, miners and missionaries, the stealing of land and seizing of resources.

In my view, this distinction is an important one. We can celebrate the inquisitive while deploring the acquisitive. We can extol history’s grand feats of exploration while condemning the ruthless colonial chess game that so often fueled them. We can find much to admire in the voyages of early mariners like Vespucci, Magellan, Tasman, Bering, Bougainville and Cook, while renouncing the violence and avarice of imperial conquest. We can recognize the astonishing risks those and other explorers took, the perils and hardships they faced, and the ingenuity they summoned while venturing into the unknown to give us a more complete picture of our vast, wondrous planet.

Disparagers of exploration tend to ignore a fundamental truth about our nature: To be human is to ask questions. What’s over the horizon, over the next mountain range? What does it look like over there? Are there opportunities for a better life, a fuller existence? Nearly everything good and bad about our species is tied up in this boundless, restless curiosity of ours, this nagging, gnawing need to know. Although this impulse sometimes leads us into trouble, it can’t be helped.

Of course, we need to be mindful of exploration’s many unintended consequences and ripple effects. We should be more careful where we step, and how we treat the new worlds we visit. But exploring is what we do.

It’s how we define ourselves, how we get beyond ourselves, maybe even how we reach for the divine.