Matthew Lockwood is an assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama and the author of This Land of Promise: A History of Refugees and Exiles in Britain, To Begin the World Over Again, The Conquest of Death, and the Norton Shorts book Explorers: A New History.
The idea for Explorers began with observations I made while teaching a class on the Age of Exploration and Conquest at the University of Alabama. Students come into the class with certain expectations. What they want and what attracts them to the class is what my wife affectionately refers to as “adventure stories for boys,” stories of risk and endurance, pith helmets and quicksand, swashbuckling tales of derring-do, the Indiana Jones of it all. And I think many historians have a knee-jerk reaction to interests like these, an acquired impulse to reject such interests as shallow or wrong, to roll our eyes at our students’ desire to know more about the things that seem obvious to us, things we assume everyone already knows.
Over time, however, I realized that these students are interested in the world in all its multiplicity; they don’t know where to start. The history of exploration provides a path for them to engage with the world through a familiar lens without entirely leaving their comfort zone.
So now I try to complicate and expand rather than to dismiss. I place new perspectives alongside the familiar and redirect their interests towards new horizons. I place the story of Ibn Battuta alongside Marco Polo, the expeditions of Zheng He alongside those of Columbus and Magellan. I talk about the voyages of Captain Cook and the perspective of the Polynesians who encountered Cook in the Pacific. The class now seeks to provide a bridge between students’ interests in the world as seen through Western eyes and a budding interest in the world in its own right, on its own terms. In teaching as in writing, I try to do this by taking a familiar subject and using it as a jumping off point to tell them about people, places, and events that they might not know about at all.
But as I taught this reimagined class, I also became conscious of the number of times I was saying “discovery” or “discovered” in quotations marks. I would explain that when Columbus “discovered” the Americas, in 1492, people were already there, that the Americas had of course been “discovered” long ago. When teaching the history of exploration from multiple perspectives, it’s important to stress how often moments traditionally understood as moments of discovery were only really discovery from the perspective of Europeans. Discovery is in the eye of the beholder.
And yet, I recognized that even as I contextualized, complicated, questioned, and contested these famous moments of “discovery,” I resisted the impulse to abandon the term altogether. I asked myself why I clung so stubbornly to the term. What value does the term “discovery” still hold?
I decided that retaining the term, while reimagining and reinterpreting it, held more power than rejecting it. For if Columbus could be said to have “discovered” the Americas, then Indigenous peoples from the Americas equally “discovered” Spain and Portugal and England when the first Indigenous peoples from the Caribbean, or Mexico, or North America crossed the seas to what was to them the New World of Europe. And this for me was an important revelation: if discovery is in the eye of the beholder, then exploration and discovery are not limited by time or place or culture, but are universal impulses shared by all human beings, from the first humans to leave the Rift Valley down to present peoples.
Exploration and discovery are thus open to everyone. They are not limited to the “first” to do something or see something or travel somewhere, but are shared by everyone who encounters what is to them or their people a new world. In a time of deep division, this is something that unifies; it is the common inheritance of all human beings. We all explore, have always been driven to discover.
So, if exploration and discovery are not simply about novelty, what unites all the disparate explorers across space, time, and culture? What do traditional explorers like Columbus have in common with the new cast of explorers I was envisioning? I came up with five qualities, characteristics, or actions that for me define this reinterpretation of exploration.
The first factor is imagination. This is quality the starting point for all explorers. Every journey begins in the mind’s eye long before it ever takes physical form. Every explorer must begin by asking what’s beyond the far horizon and imagining what might be found there. The second factor is curiosity. Imagination might inspire, but curiosity drives the explorer to take the first step and transform the imagined world into something tangible. The third factor is wonder or awe, the emotional and psychological reaction to the unknown and the new that motivates them to share what they encounter. The fourth factor is exchange. Contact between two individuals or two peoples is always about negotiation and exchange—exchange of language and objects, but especially exchange of knowledge, ideas, ways of seeing, and ways of knowing. The fifth factor is interpretation and reporting. Explorers gather and process information about places that are new to them or to their culture and situate it within a worldview that their culture will understand. They see and explain the world for people like themselves. We all see the world through the lens of our culture; explorers present the wider world to us through our own eyes. Explorers bring information back to their communities, and in the process revise and remake their understanding of the world beyond.
Thinking about these categories as core components of exploration led me to reconsider who belongs in a reimagined history of exploration. The countless guides, interpreters, and porters who led and carried the expeditions of Western adventurers aren’t usually included in the ranks of “real” explorers. Most discussers of exploration have either ignored these groups as they might ignore horses or camels or other beasts of burden or have focused on their suffering and exploitation. It’s suggested that they were forced to go or went only because they were desperate or were paid. But this flattens their experience. They did more than shoulder heavy loads. They looked up and around at what to them were new worlds too, with interest and with awe, curiosity, and wonder. And they told people back home what they saw, transforming their people’s worldview just as surely as European worldviews were transformed by the voyage of Columbus or American worldviews were altered by the reports of Lewis and Clark.
The same can be said of immigrants. Many of them left their homes because they were forced out by poverty or violence. And yet, while striking out to avoid persecution, they were driven too by the worlds they imagined were waiting for them at the end of their journeys, and in their writings, they retained their sense of curiosity and wonder about the new worlds they were discovering. The letters they dispatched to people back home so often read just like classic accounts of exploration and discovery.1
I began to read the narratives of fugitive slaves2 with an eye for the ways they imagined the world beyond their own environment and the ways they talked about the natural world. When we talk about enslavement we tend to focus on the brutality, the violence, the suffering, and that’s important, both as a central component of the experience of enslavement, but also as a reminder to people in the present. Enslaved people were under extreme duress or worse and experienced unimaginable suffering. As human beings, however, they would have also felt the entire spectrum of human emotions. They felt love as well as sadness, excitement as well as dread, and they would have at times been moved by curiosity and imagination and wonder. Their transport to places far from their homes was not by choice, but they would have imagined what new worlds were like. They were, in a word, explorers.
Teaching history is more than the recitation of facts handed down from generation to generation. It is, instead, a living, breathing subject, always growing and changing. It is about interpreting the past in a way that speaks to the present, that excites, engages, inspires, and instructs. Reexamining and reimagining history is a question not of what is lost, but of what is gained. And what is gained is the opportunity not simply to meet students where they are, but to take their interests seriously as chance to guide them from the comfortable and familiar to the overlooked and unexplored corners of the past, to lead them to parts unknown.
Interested in reviewing a copy of Explorers: A New History for your course? Request your print copy here and keep exploring the Norton Shorts series.
- For Mary Antin’s narrative, see Ronald Sanders, Shores of Refuge: A Hundred Years of Jewish Emigration (New York: Schocken, 1989), 156, 158–59, 160. For the stories of Mexican migrants, see Marilyn Davis, Mexican Voices/American Dreams: An Oral History of Mexican Immigration to the United States (New York: Holt, 1991), 15–16, 36–37, 117–22. For Allyson Williams and the Windrush generation, see David Matthews, Voices of the Windrush Generation: The Real Story Told by the People Themselves (London: Blink, 2018), 122–58. ↩︎
- For the travels of David Dorr, see David Dorr, A Colored Man Round the World (Cleveland, 1858). For the quote from William Wells Brown on London, see William Wells Brown, The American Fugitive in Europe: Sketches of Places and People Abroad (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1855), 40–41. ↩︎
Additional Sources From Explorers: A New History
For more on African American travel in the antebellum period, see Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
For more on fugitive slaves in Britain, see Matthew Lockwood, Island Refuge: A History of Refugees in Britain (London: HarperCollins, 2024).
For the Anne Sofie Beck Knudsen study of immigration and individualism, see Anne Sofie Beck Knudsen, “Thoe Who Stayed: Individualism, Self-Selection and Cultural Change during the Age of Mass Migration,” Social Science Research Network (SSRN), January 24, 2019.
MEET THE AUTHOR
Matthew Lockwood is an assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama and the author of This Land of Promise: A History of Refugees and Exiles in Britain, To Begin the World Over Again, The Conquest of Death, and the Norton Shorts book Explorers: A New History. He lives in Northport, Alabama.
Image credit: Matthew Lockwood.