Into the Unknown

He kicked off his shoes and started running madly down a hillside, stumbled, fell, got up and ran until he was splashing in a watery fountain amid tufts of green sod — the springs of Gish Abay, the source of the White Nile.

“I stood in rapture over the principal fountain which rises in the middle of it,” he wrote.

“Travels to discover the Source of the Nile,” his five-volume epic recounting the adventure, was required reading for any serious person of letters. Thomas Jefferson’s copy was part of his personal library that became the foundation of the Library of Congress collections.

(Turns out Bruce’s marshy spring was only one of the many Nile sources, but let the man have his moment — after 10 seconds of rapture, it took him another three years to get back to England.)

These voyages of exploration produced new eras of science, commerce, colonization and conquest. Most took place in what is loosely known as the European Age of Discoveries, and they were often as much (or more) about profit than scientific “discoveries.”

They cost countless lives, mountains of money and staggering amounts of suffering and perseverance. They trafficked in gold, silver, spices (and sometimes slaves), revolutionary political and scientific ideas and, inadvertently, deadly diseases. They produced artifacts, writings, memoirs, maps, scientific papers and zoological samples that altered the way we understood the planet. And the sheer survival of polar explorers such as Ernest Shackleton gave the world stunning tales of endurance and grace under pressure.

Gertrude Bell, the British writer and adventurer in Arabia in the early 20th century, caught the poetic sense of this era, calling it “The world of adventure and enterprise, dark with hurrying storms, glittering in raw sunlight, an unanswered question and an unanswerable doubt hidden in the fold of every hill.”

These explorations, often involving first contact with Indigenous peoples, were fraught with danger for all involved.

The American-born sailor John Ledyard was an eyewitness to the murder of Cook, the legendary British Royal Navy captain, in the Hawaiian Islands. It proved to be one of the most shocking events of the age.

In 1778, Cook’s crew were the first Westerners to land in Hawaii and were warmly welcomed. But when they returned in 1779, the islanders ran out of patience. They stole one of the British crew’s small support boats. Cook then led a raiding party ashore to kidnap an elderly king and hold him until the boat was returned. This was at Kealakekua Bay, on the western coast of the Big Island of Hawaii. Cook and his party made it to the rocky shoreline with the king in tow, but hundreds of enraged warriors were closing fast. He shot at some of the closest to him.

British sailors on boats just offshore began to fire into the crowd, too. Ledyard wrote that Cook “waved with his hat to cease firing and come in, and while he was doing this a chief from behind stabbed him with one of our iron daggers just under the shoulder blade, and passed quite through his body. Cook fell with his face into the water and immediately expired.”

Sailing ships would soon be replaced by steamers, though, and the last of these all-sail naval trips to circumnavigate the globe was the United States South Seas Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842.

The government-sponsored trip was ordered to sail around the world but focus on the Pacific, the world’s largest ocean, for scientific and commercial purposes. The squadron was composed of six ships and 346 men. Maritime historian Nathaniel Philbrick called it “one of the largest voyages of discovery in the history of Western exploration” in “Sea of Glory,” his history of the expedition.

On Aug. 19, 1839, more than 6,000 miles and another hemisphere from the stuffy confines of the expedition’s offices on Capitol Hill, the crew came to what is now known as Taiaro Atoll in French Polynesia.

And yet it teemed with life. There was a small lagoon full of fish and eels and crabs. It was infested with “enormous, voracious sharks” that bit at the oars of the crew’s small exploration boat.

A sense of wonder prevailed, as if this was some primordial, land-of-the-lost island that was untouched by the hands of time:

“The number of birds on the island was incredible, and they were so tame as to require to be pushed off their nest to get their eggs,” wrote Charles Wilkes, the expedition’s tyrannical captain. “… many of the trees were covered with their nests, constructed of a few sticks. The old birds were seen, as they flew off, inflating their blood-red pouches to the size of a child’s head … some droll sights were seen of crabs walking off with snakes, and both again seized by some stout bird and borne away.”

The trip documented, among other major findings, that Antarctica was a separate continent. These results helped turn the U.S. toward a national pursuit of scientific knowledge, collection and investigation. The expedition’s collections became the foundation of what is now the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

Back in 1610, Galileo had mused that his telescopic findings might just be the first step in a long human voyage of understanding not only our world but the entire cosmos.

“Perhaps other things, still more remarkable, will be discovered by me or by other observers with such an instrument,” he wrote.

A little more than 350 years later, men stood on the moon he had seen so clearly in that telescope. And today, the James Webb Space Telescope floats in space, 930,000 miles from Earth, turning humankind’s search of the universe to galaxies of which Galileo could have only dreamed.