Explorers: A New History by Matthew Lockwood
The word “explorer” still calls certain images to mind. He (and it’s always he) is usually of Western European ancestry, hacking his way through jungle or wilderness with native porters at the rear. Explorers sets forth to tell a fuller story.
Author Matthew Lockwood teaches history at the University of Alabama and writes wonderfully, unlike too many of his academic colleagues. He knows how to tell stories to support his thesis that explorers have come from many backgrounds and traveled in many directions. Take Rabban Bar Sauma. The Nestorian Christian Uyghur embarked on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land (circa 1250) but after a sojourn in Bagdad became an emissary to Western Europe for the Mongols. He reached as far as Bordeaux. In the 1400s China sent enormous fleets to India, Arabia and East Africa for trading with the locals, “the most extensive maritime voyages in history to that point,” Lockwood writes.
Why China surrendered the seas to Europe is a story for another book, as are the many other pilgrimages to Jerusalem from across the Muslim and Christian worlds. Some of the stories Lockwood tells are familiar, including Marco Polo’s Silk Road journey to China and the precarious Viking colonies in North America. Others are less known, including the Indigenous leaders Christopher Columbus brought back to Spain in the role of ambassadors (as opposed to those Indians he took as slaves). Here history becomes speculative. The Indigenous leader Guacanagari and his companions left no diaries or letters as they explored the strange land of the Spaniards.
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But others did leave accounts of their journeys with Western explorers. Witness Ghulam Rassul Galwan from the frontiers of what is now Pakistan. He accompanied several British and American parties into Central Asia, dangerous expeditions across deserts and mountains, and left behind an account in 1906. Galwan comes across as no mere drudge hauling supplies but a man of courage and adventure. He wanted to see the world beyond his village and his travels gained him stature in his hometown.
As Lockwood insists, there is a “universal impulse to explore,” unconfined by the borders of any one culture.
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