Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [22]
So we should acknowledge the figure of the wandering Jew as a good description of how it can feel to be wrong. But that doesn’t mean we need to accept it as the final word on error’s essential meaning and moral status. For one thing, it’s hard to claim any fixed meaning or moral status for error when we have such radically competing ideas about it. In light of that, why cleave any more closely than necessary to the most disagreeable vision of wrongness around? We have, after all, a better alternative. In fact, the idea of erring embodied by the wandering knight is not just preferable to the one embodied by the wandering Jew. It is also, and somewhat remarkably, preferable to not erring at all. To err is to wander, and wandering is the way we discover the world; and, lost in thought, it is also the way we discover ourselves. Being right might be gratifying, but in the end it is static, a mere statement. Being wrong is hard and humbling, and sometimes even dangerous, but in the end it is a journey, and a story. Who really wants to stay home and be right when you can don your armor, spring up on your steed and go forth to explore the world? True, you might get lost along the way, get stranded in a swamp, have a scare at the edge of a cliff; thieves might steal your gold, brigands might imprison you in a cave, sorcerers might turn you into a toad—but what of that? To fuck up is to find adventure: it is in that spirit that this book is written.
PART II
THE ORIGINS OF ERROR
3.
Our Senses
A lady once asked me if I believed in ghosts and apparitions. I answered with truth and simplicity, No, madam, I have seen far too many myself.
—SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
In April of 1818, the Scottish explorer John Ross sailed west from London with two ships, thirty years of naval experience, and a mandate from the British Admiralty to find the Northwest Passage—the much sought-after water route across or around North America. The existence of such a route was an open question, but its potential economic significance was beyond dispute. Because virtually all commercial goods were transported by water at the time, faster transit between Europe and Asia would fuel a surge in global trade. Small wonder, then, that the quest for the Northwest Passage had become an international obsession—a spur to exploration, a screen for the projection of wild fantasies about the New World, and the crucible in which men’s fortunes and reputations were made or broken. By the time the 1818 expedition set sail, explorers and fortune seekers had been looking for the route for more than 300 years. For the last seventy-five of those, the British government had offered a standing prize of £20,000—about $2 million in today’s money—to anyone who could find it.
A decade or so before Ross left port, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s celebrated trek across the United States had shown that there were no navigable rivers connecting the two coasts, so subsequent explorers looked north, to the waters of the Canadian Arctic. This was a place Ross had never been. Although he had joined the navy at the age of nine, his northernmost service prior to 1818 had been in Sweden; the rest had been in the English Channel, the West Indies, and the Mediterranean. It might seem odd to select a man with no regional experience to captain such a pivotal expedition, but as it happened, John Barrow, the subsecretary of the British Admiralty who sponsored the voyage, had little choice. Virtually no explorers had sailed to the Arctic from England since William Baffin,