Glob-a-log

(HMS Terror)

Bestselling author Dan Simmons wrote a fascinating historical horror novel about them but now the British ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror are back in the news again:

A Canadian team is to search for two ships lost in an 1845 expedition to find the Northwest Passage. The British ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were trapped in the Arctic ice as Sir John Franklin sought a northern route from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He and his 128 crew died - although their exact fate remains a mystery - and the ships were never found.

It’s a fascinating story – and if only one or two people reading this post will go on to read Simmons’s book (and then, most probably, the rest of his truly remarkable oeuvre) I’ll be happy enough. Simmons has written SF, horror (and one screwball horror comedy, which also featured Mark Twain), thrillers, main stream and, lately, also historical fiction – next year his historical novel about (a short period in) the life of Charles Dickens will come out.

Anyway, read him: you won’t be disappointed. Back to those two ships though.

Knowing what we know now about the earth’s geography, this obsession with the ‘Northern Route’ can seem like the height of folly – and it is certainly interesting to note that, as late as 1845, no-one knew, or could know, that this route simply didn’t exist.

We’re so used now to the fact of air travel and to satellite photography, that we tend to forget that it’s not that long ago that we were bound to the surface of this planet. For most of human history a bird’s-eye view was not an option; ours was the view of a moderately well-traveled ant.

So, now, sitting in front of our computers and watching Google Earth images, it’s hard to imagine what it must have been like to be a geographer and scientist between the reign of queen Isabella of Spain and queen Victoria of England.

Science and the sum of human knowledge expanded so much during those centuries – and yet, so many things still remained unknown. So much so that God knows how much money and how many human lives were, in essence, wasted on the search for a northern route from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

All that, obviously, should make us wonder how much we are missing ourselves. Yes, our knowledge now has progressed beyond the wildest dreams of most of the scientists and philosophers who lived in the days of Isabella and Victoria – but they themselves would have proudly remarked upon the progress they had made since the days of Aristotle, Pythagoras and the others who came before them.

In other words, it’s easy to imagine how, in some faraway (or much nearer) future people will look back at our short time in the sun and wonder how we could ever have been so short-sighted, naïve and pig-headed  about some of the basic scientific and philosophical assumptions we now make as a matter of cause.

Which should be a sobering, but is, to me, also an exhilarating thought.

(”Columbus’ last appeal to Queen Isabella”)

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This entry was posted on Saturday, August 16th, 2008 at 22:28 and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.