The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [152]
The power of the paradigm was witnessed again shortly after Columbus’s epic voyages when Ferdinand Magellan set out to circumnavigate the globe in 1519. Once it was established that there was a continental land mass between Europe and Asia, explorers, cartographers, and scholars had two great unanswered geographical questions: (1) Is there a “northern passage” through or around the North American continent linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans that ships sailing west from Europe could traverse and save months of travel time? (2) Is there really a great southern land mass, the Terra Australis Incognita of Ptolemy’s imagination? This second question became the provocation for a slew of negative discoveries—looking for X but finding Y.
Naval surveyor James Cook secured the headship for these voyages on the premise that he would seek out this unknown territory until he would “discover it or fall in with the eastern side of the land discovered by Tasman and now called New Zealand.” (Abel Janszoon Tasman also discovered the large island off the southeastern tip of Australia, which now bears his name—Tasmania.) There was putative evidence for the existence of this lost continent. The mysterious territory was reportedly first sighted by Marco Polo, later by Spanish and French voyagers, and most recently by the pirate Edward Davis. The continent was estimated to be as large as Asia and loaded with precious gems and minerals. Lush tropical surroundings were reportedly dotted with temples, and the people traveled about the land on the backs of elephants. It was an eighteenth-century El Dorado, the Shangri-la of the South Pacific.4
Prior to Cook, many adventurers crusaded for such voyages of negative discovery. Maupertuis cajoled Frederick the Great into financing a trip. In 1756, Charles de Brosses of Dijon published his Histoire des Navigations aux Terres Australes, in which he developed the theory that this continent must exist to counterbalance the weight of the landmasses of the Northern Hemisphere and prevent the earth from toppling over. To modern ears this sounds positively daffy because we know that the earth is not “floating” in any medium that would cause it to “right” itself, as an out-of-balance log might do in a pond of water. But, in fact, it was long believed—right up through the early part of the twentieth century—that the earth was, in fact, floating in an invisible substance called the ether.
A decade later, in 1766, a Scotsman named John Callander published a book ambitiously entitled Terra Australis Cognita. Callander proposed immediate colonization of this no longer incognito new continent. The following year the chief hydrographer to the British East India Company, Alexander Dalrymple, wrote his Account of the Discoveries Made in the South Pacific Ocean, reiterating the “global equilibrium theory” and offering precise latitude and longitude figures for the land that he estimated contained more than fifty million inhabitants. He insisted that its wealth would far exceed that of the American colonies, which would free England from the political and economic tribulations those troublemaker Americans were stirring up. Dalrymple believed that since he was so well informed about this southern land he should be given command of an expeditionary force. He would be the new (and last, he believed) Columbus. Since Dalrymple was not a naval officer, the command of Britain’s voyage of discovery went to the virtually unknown