In Search of the True Explorer

By Benedict Allen

With the Golden Age of Discovery long since passed, most of the
world's surface mapped in detail, motorised transport,
satellite phones and GPS receivers readily available,
you would think it was time for explorers to hang up their
pith helmets.

But rather than consigning exploration to the dustbin of history, we simply need to redefine
what we understand by the term.

Think of an explorer and the image that typically jumps to mind depicts a man in a pith
helmet, sweating his way through the undergrowth, a troupe of overburdened porters
trailing behind him. He's most likely wearing khaki, probably in the tropics and almost
definitely Victorian. He's certainly a man and always white.

This caricature, which is gradually evolving into someone resembling Indiana Jones, is a
powerful, defining image. But as a portrayal of someone at the forefront of discovery, it is
clearly incorrect.

Caver, Andrew Eavis, has made his way through some 500 kilometres of previously unknown
underground networks around the world. He has discovered not only more physical terrain
than anyone alive, but also more of what was genuinely unknown than most of the great
trailblazers of yesteryear.

Meanwhile, his fellow subterranean explorer Michael Ray Taylor has been wriggling his way
deep into the Earth's crust, sometimes more than a kilometre below the surface. There he's
encountered previously unrecorded organisms that live in underground corridors dripping
with sulphuric acid, and some of the world's oldest-known life forms.

However, even in the past there were a great many faces other than ours that were crucial
to the charting of the world. In fact, the Europeans often arrived extremely late on the
scene. James Bruce (1730-94) claimed to have found the source of the Nile, a place that he
believed had "baffled the genius, industry and enquiry of both ancients and modern, for the
course of near 3,000 years". However, not only had he failed to find the river's true origin -
it was that of a tributary, the Blue Nile - his claim indicates the narrowness of European
experience, which had simply failed to penetrate the extensive Middle Eastern trading
knowledge and scholarship of that time.

COMPREHENSION QUESTIONS:

a) What image of an explorer does the writer expect the reader to have?
b) Why does the writer think this image of an explorer is out-of date?
c) Write down two facts the writer includes about explorers
d) Write down two opinions the writer includes about explorers