Charting Uncharted Territory

While scrolling through some photos I’d taken in Newfoundland I ran across a photo of the infamous Captain James Cook taken at a lighthouse in the Gros Morne National Park. Coincidentally, just a few weeks earlier this summer, I found myself face to face with the Captain again in a museum in Sydney, Australia.  

The Captain really got around. I had forgotten about the lighthouse portrait in Newfoundland until I ran across the photo.  Cook, a man of Yorkshire, England, began his career with an apprenticeship in the Merchant Marines and eventually climbed to the level of Captain of the Royal Navy by the time he was killed on the Hawaiian Islands. On voyages that circumnavigated the globe, Cook mapped a good deal of the unknown world of his day. His greatest contributions include surveying and mapping the coastline of Newfoundland in the 1760s, and ten years later discovering and assessing the size and extent of Australia and New Zealand.

In telling my traveling companion that I’d run across the photo of Captain James Cook taken in Newfoundland, he asked, “from Star Trek?”, referring to Captain James Kirk - which actually is somewhat apropos, because William Shatner is Canadian. I laughed and thought it was an amusing play on the name. 

  

But as I am a fairly serious Trekkie, I then did a little research on Captain James Kirk and discovered that Gene Roddenberry actually used Captain James Cook as his model for Captain James Tiberius Kirk – it was no coincidence after all. Captain Cook apparently wrote in his journal entry, “ambition leads me ... farther than any other man has been before me." Roddenberry was inspired by Cook’s exploits and reformulated the statement, to create the Kirk’s iconic soliloquy at the opening of the Star Trek credits:

Space: The final frontier
These are the voyages of the Starship, Enterprise
Its five year mission
To explore strange new worlds
To seek out new life and new civilizations
To boldly go where no man has gone before

If you drop the first line and make a couple of minor adjustments to the statement -such as...

Southern hemisphere: The final frontier
These are the voyages of the HMS, Endeavor (or Resolution)
Its three year mission
To explore strange new worlds
To seek out new life and new civilizations
To boldly go where no Englishman has gone before

...this pretty well describes Cook and his actual historic accomplishments. Although my little travels aren’t on the scale of Cooks, it occurs to me that I am mapping our little planet in my own way, if not mapping it literally for civilization or the Crown. 

When traveling I prefer to go on foot as much as possible and I remember every path I’ve hiked and alley I’ve walked (with the help of my photos). I’m slowly filling in the vast uncharted territories of my mind with memories and impressions of the places that were formerly just a name from my geography lessons and the occasional reference in a book.  The beauty of a mental map is that the details of each voyage expand the map exponentially - in many dimensions – I was thinking of this as I walked a short distance down a path that Charles Darwin took through the Blue Mountains of Australia.

Sixty-five years after Cook arrived in Australia, Darwin arrived on the east coast of Australia aboard the HMS Beagle to gather samples of the flora and fauna of the newly discovered continent. What must Darwin have thought as he encountered a land where mammals’ young mature in pockets outside their bodies, where the colors of corals along the coastline rival the most ornate English gardens but ravage any ship that approaches, where conifers and other exotic flora that grew alongside the dinosaurs still flourish, and where time seemed to have stood still for the hunter gatherer groups that populated the continent?

This was a time when English exploration was still all the rage, but when the power of the Crown had diminished substantially in the southern hemisphere. Like Cook, Darwin spent years of his life circumnavigating the globe, but Darwin was on a voyage to find the connections and patterns in life that would form his subsequent theory of natural selection. While he was not literally charting the islands, he was mapping the biodiversity of the planet with each new specimen.

It is amusing that there is an Australian city named for Darwin, yet Darwin never actually visited this part of Australia. Upon the discovery of the harbor by the English, it was named in tribute to Charles Darwin by his former shipmate and fellow naturalist - Lieutenant John Lort Stokes - during the HMS Beagle's third voyage in 1839. The official name of the city was not changed to Darwin until 1911. Darwin only sailed into Botany Bay, in what is now Sydney and then traveled inland along the riverbeds into the Blue Mountains.

 
As apt as the name Botany Bay seems to be, it was actually discovered and named by Cook for its amazing quantity and diversity of plant life.  This is likely what drew Darwin to the harbor in the first place.   

It is easy to retrospectively take much of Darwin’s theory for granted because it is now so entrenched in our understanding of evolution, but upon his arrival in Australia Darwin was grappling with how and why a creator would have experimented with such variety in different parts of the world and gradually became convinced some biological mechanism was at work that operated independently of a god. It took experiencing the richness of the earth’s biodiversity - and a lot of courage - to conceive of a perpetually changing planet;  to move beyond thinking in terms of the ‘exotic’ versus the ‘ordinary’ and toward identifying patterns of similarity at the root of all life. Darwin was not privy to our current understanding of plate tectonics; he was from a world of creationist views that held the earth to be a fixed and static globe. Yet he surmised that life was connected at its roots, even across the hemispheres and across oceans separating isolated island continents such as Australia from their nearest neighboring land masses. Darwin was making mental maps that wove information together dimensionally on geographic, botanical, anthropological and philosophical planes. This is the dimensional beauty of mental maps.

Did Darwin travel to fill his own uncharted inner territory? Do we all travel to map the landscape of our minds?  Or do we fill in our uncharted territory simply because we travel?

Man has a history of wanderlust - some of us inheriting a bigger dose of it than others. We feel an innate need to travel, as if our existence depends on it; we yearn to explore the world in the same way others might yearn for a shiny new car or pair of boots. I’m not sure that it’s essential to identify why man travels, but what seems more important and compelling is that travel motivates man – it works the mind – stimulating, relaxing, and expanding its boundaries. When traveling the usual biases, boundaries, routines, and surroundings are replaced with the ‘new,’ the ‘unusual’ and the ‘boundless’. Travel also seems to be what we adults might label ‘play time.’  There is a sense of childlike freedom associated with travel that opens our minds. We experience raptures of joy, curiosity and awe while playing in our new environments. We pause, observe, we puzzle over what we’ve seen, we learn, and we actually occasionally change. Even the oldest dogs among us learn new tricks! Our mind’s map expands, our spectrum of knowledge is stretched and deepened. On occasion we even make connections across the vast landscape of our mind that open up whole new vistas and dimensions of thought. And isn’t this essentially what Darwin experienced on the HMS Beagle so long ago? And on a much more mundane level, isn’t this what I did with Captain Cook and Captain Kirk?

But I found many other parallels with parts of the planet in my travels across Australia. Being from the western desert country of the U.S.A., I felt very at home in the red cliffs of Litchfield National Park and the Blue Mountains, and for me, the red monoliths of Uluru and Kata Tjuta exude the same drama as red rock cliffs found in Zions National Park or Snow Canyon.

While the yellow soil of Australia is the stage for the Pinacles near Perth, the landscape is not unlike Goblin Valley in southern Utah – only Goblin Valley is painted in red tones rather than in yellows.

The Great Ocean Road is a coastal stretch of highway that rivals Route 101 through California and Oregon - running from Melbourne up the coast to Adelaide - with its stunning cliffs, churning seas and luscious beaches.

The Barossa Valley has a charm and history that echoes Napa Valley or Sonoma County.

While each place is unique, one begins to understand that there is red or yellow soil in many lands, that the sea carves remarkable coastal vistas on many continents, and that man has sculpted the lush landscapes of many beautiful valleys all over the world into wine producing Meccas.    

One of the icons of western tradition is Ulysses and his Odyssey – or perhaps both of them. Both sailed into the unknown and found new worlds – one of mythic proportions, one of a more mundane experiential nature. But still, both voyaged deeper into themselves in the process, which leads to whether it is necessary to physically travel to another land to experience the new and be changed by it. Joyce makes clear that each day is a new voyage of sorts for his protagonist. But in our familiar milieu it is much harder to change when we close our eyes to the same wallpaper each night, eat the same two slices of toast each morning, and passively await the rare disruption of our routine. Routine generally makes us ‘check out’ mentally - that’s the intention really, to take action that we want or need to take with the minimum level of effort or thought. We perfect the fine art of living on rote, and become a bit numb to the world we pass by each day. It usually takes something new or different to grab our attention, and jar us into taking notice. Since travel usually involves a change of routine and often in novel settings, this novelty invites our attention and stimulates like nothing else can.

When traveling, my attention is first outward toward the new sensory input I’m experiencing. But as I contemplate the new stimuli, I start to see connections - to absorb the new and make it my own. The world becomes both bigger and smaller – bigger in scope, depth and variety, yet smaller in the root similarities of life and landscape that bind things into unities on a global plane. The vast uncharted territory of my mind is formed through memories of my voyage through life - memories that shape my actions and expand my understanding of this odyssey we call existence.