Global Positioning System Reference
In-Depth Information
British Columbia. In the decade after Lewis and Clark's journey, David
Thompson mapped much of the Pacific Northwest and became the first
man to navigate the entire length of the Columbia River. Thompson and
Lewis both made celestial observations to estimate the positions of key
landmarks along their routes.
19
South America had been traveled by Europeans since the time of the
Conquistadors, but the interior was only really explored much later, by la
Condamine, von Humboldt, Ferreira, and others. The Russian expansion
eastward into, and exploration of, Siberia took longer and started earlier
than the American expansion westward. The vast new territory attracted
many explorers, from Semyon Remezov, a cartographer and geographer
born in the seventeenth century, to Vladimir Arsenyev, who lived into the
twentieth. The coastline of Australia had been studied from the sea well
before the interior of that dry continent was explored by Sturt, Leichardt,
Burke and Wills, and many others. The first Europeans to explore the
interior of Africa did so as late as the Victorian era at the end of the
nineteenth century: the expeditions of Mungo Park, Burton and Speke,
and Livingston and Stanley were read avidly in the English-speaking world.
Much of the European exploration was connected with the carving up of
Africa in the scramble for empires during this period.
In sharp contrast with the expeditions to the interior of Africa, in terms
of both temperature and purpose, were the expeditions to Antarctica by
Amundsen, Shackleton, Scott, Byrd, and others. The other end of the
world was more extensively investigated in a search for the Northwest
Passage: Parry, John and James Ross, Franklin, Peary, and Amundsen at-
tempted to sail through or trudge across Arctic ice. The story of heroic
failures in the far north or south (Franklin, Scott) make for reading that is
every bit as inspiring as the successes.
20
I close this chapter with a land exploration story but not of the regions
just mentioned. For its navigational relevance I choose to tell you about the
surveying of India, a land which has been occupied since the beginning of
history but which was surveyed (with impressive accuracy) in a mammoth
undertaking only during the age of sail and steam.
19. The Lewis and Clark expedition has generated many topics: see, e.g., Ambrose
(2003) and Owen (1979). For more on Thompson and Mackenzie, see, e.g., Hayes (1999)
and Warkentin (2007).
20. There is a large literature about land exploration in general, and about particular
expeditions, that covers the explorers mentioned here. See, e.g., Fernández-Armesto (2006,
chap. 9), Fleming (1998), Hurley et al. (2001), Rice (1990), and Whitfield (1998).
