Trailblazing down the centuries

You might think it's all been covered before, but when a real scholar tackles the subject, there's always a lot more to learn.

Such is the case with Filipe Fernandez-Armesto, a Spanish historian who's produced a startling new work called "Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration". His premise is simple: the early history of Homo Sapiens was one of diffusion and the rise of disparate cultures and languages. Modern history begins with explorers who started knitting the world back together again, culminating eventually in our own age of globalisation.

Fernandez-Armesto starts at the beginning. The two big physical advantages of our species were that its frame was adapted to a variety of climates and its hand-eye coordination produced prowess at throwing missiles.

"Other primates also throw objects but they rarely hit anything," he observes.

About 60,000 years ago Homo Sapiens had migrated from Africa along the Asian littoral as far as Australia. The last great diffusion happened only a few thousand years ago with the spread of the Polynesians throughout the South Pacific.

Among the many fascinating nuggets of ancient prehistory that the author digs up, in the course of explaining war as a stimulus for human migration, is some of the earliest archaeological evidence for a full-scale battle, one fought 11,000 years ago at Jebel Sahaba, near the modern Egyptian-Sudanese border. Men, women and children were hacked repeatedly to death. Refugee migration, it seems reasonable to infer, goes back a long way.

What's unique in the author's account is its global perspective. His survey of explorers is not limited to the usual Europeans, but includes the ancient Arab and Persian seamen who opened up the trade routes to India, the mighty expeditions of Chinese admiral Zheng Ho before the arrival of the Portuguese, and the astonishing colonisation of Madagascar by Malay voyagers.

He also demolishes some favourite European shibboleths, such as the saintly character of Prince Henry the Navigator, who got the Portuguese ball rolling: "An Arthurian figure, surrounded by Merlinesque cosmographers and adventurous knights and squires, riding the waves on missions of knightly and Christian virtue, doing battle with swart Paynims, discovering exotic islands, braving supernatural terrors in Seas of Darkness, and fighting for the faith."

Not only did Henry get his start as a pirate in the Mediterranean, but his prime motives had always been ethnic hatred and greed for gold and slaves.

While he gives Marco Polo his due, the author also recognises the Arab traveller Ibn Battuta as the greatest of the medieval age. And another curious historical nugget - just at the time of Marco Polo's travels, a young Mongol Christian monk named Rabban Sar Sauma embarked upon a journey eastward from Beijing to the kingdoms of Europe.

He made it to Rome and the Holy Land and retired in Persia, dying there in 1294. In fact, 900 years earlier, the Chinese emperor had sent an ambassador to the Roman Empire but he turned back at the Black Sea in fear of fierce tribes ahead. Who knows how history might have changed?

These are the sort of questions that arise from a non-Euro-centric perspective on the history of exploration.

The author unearths plenty of unsung heroes. The English colonists in Virginia had the idea that they inhabited a small strip of land bordering on the Pacific. In 1673-4, a trader's servant named George Arthur took up with a war party of Tomahitan Indians on the other side of the Appalachian mountains and travelled north to the Ohio Valley and south almost to the Gulf of Mexico. "The vastness of the continent was crushing English hopes of crossing it easily and quickly," Fernandez-Armesto notes.

Africa served as the stage for the greatest feats of exploration, beginning with Mungo Park's two excruciating treks to the Niger River in 1795 and 1805. Besides a mysterious immunity to tropical diseases (shared by Henry Morton Stanley), Mungo Park turned out perfect for the job: "Restless, vainglorious, irrepressible, penniless, easily biddable, insatiably curious, and indefeasibly tough".

Through the three epic voyages (1768-1779) of Captain James Cook, the last isolated populations of Australia, New Zealand and islands in the Polynesian Pacific like Hawaii were brought back into contact with the rest of the world. But there were still surprises going into the 20th century. In June 1930, a gold prospector named Michael Leahy stumbled into the unknown Goroka river valley in the central highlands of New Guinea. Here he found a population totalling 100,000, each of the many tribes happily at war with each other. "In all, there were well over a half a million people living in the highland area unknown before the 1930s," Fernandez-Armesto reports.

The last holdouts now are some 40 Indian tribes in the depths of the Amazon.

The author cautions that they should not be considered failed communities which have missed out on progress: "Really they should be considered the most successful societies in history: they had achieved a conservative nirvana, preserving their culture against change, resisting the convulsive lurches of 'modernity'."

James Eckardt's eighth book, "Singapore Girl: a Memoir", published by Monsoon Books, is on sale at Kinokuniya, Asia Books and Bookazine bookstores.