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Exploration, discovery, learning: mapping the unknown

Across Europe—and colonial North America—the eighteenth century saw the Age of Reason at its zenith. Its leading names still resonate: Hume, Kant, Rousseau, Diderot, Euler, Lomonosov, Smith, Voltaire. They famously contributed to an age of philosophy and science, speculation and discovery, which—even if of late rather too commonly denigrated as ‘Enlightenment thinking’—forms the basis of contemporary science and scholarship. And if some intellectuals were ‘merely’ thinking, speculating and writing, others were also experimenting: Franklin, Halley, Herschel, Lavoisier, Linnaeus, Priestley spring to mind. Indeed, the combination of speculative and empirical was fundamental to the rational and scientific approach which made the Enlightenment. In the telling, history is often Darwinian. The fittest survive; their records survive; it is their stories that seem worth telling—and get told. So it is in scientific and intellectual history. We hear of the great discoveries and inventions—Newton’s laws, the Manhattan Project, Higgs’ Boson—but science’s myriad failures and cul-de-sacs are understandably consigned to obscurity. Understandably, but perhaps inadvisably: for how are we to comprehend the provisionality of what we think we know—unless we reflect on science’s dead ends, as well as on its highways? There is a lesson in the history of maps and exploration. Through the eighteenth century, substantial areas of the geographical world were unknown to Europeans. The names of many explorers who charted distant coasts and seas became, and have remained, justly renowned: James Cook is among the most noted, with his detailed mapping of the coasts of Australasia and much of the south Pacific. But explorers such as Cook—and if he was the most distinguished, he was one of many—were generally putting to experimental test the theorisations of speculative cartographers. When Cook complained at how his ships had been ‘frequently misled’ and hindered by modern maps, he was castigating not only the sloppy workmanship of other explorers, but the irresponsibility of speculative theorists. His main target in this case was Jacob von Stählin, a translation of whose Account of the New Northern Archipelago, Lately Discovered by the Russians was published in 1774 by the Secretary of the Royal Society. A detailed