January 2011

America is a wonderful country, endowed by the Omnipotent with natural advantages which no other can boast of; and the mind can hardly calculate upon the degree of perfection and power to which, whether the States are eventually separated or not, it may in the course of two centuries arrive. At present all is energy and enterprise; every thing is in a state of transition, but of rapid improvement—so rapid, indeed, that those who would describe America now would have to correct all in the short space of ten years; for ten years in America is almost equal to a century in the old continent. Now, you may pass through a wild forest, where the elk browses and the panther howls. In ten years, that very forest, with its denizens, will, most likely, have disappeared, and in their place you will find towns with thousands of inhabitants; with arts, manufactures, and machinery, all in full activity.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serions tilings. They are but improved means Io tin unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate … As if the main object were to talk last and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring llie Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. —Henry Thoreau, WALDEN

And so, of course, did Christopher Columbus. This greatest and most fascinating of all explorers went looking for a short cut to the East and found instead the infinite West; and although he never quite realized what he had done—the enormous dimensions of his achievement were in fact too big for any of his contemporaries to grasp—he was very well aware that he had sailed out of one era and into another, and that nothing again would ever be quite the same. He compelled men to remake all of their maps, a process which would last for four centuries and more, and the business changed the mapmakers as much as it changed the maps. Mankind behaves differently when the world grows larger. It finds new capacities and develops the urge to use them.

It ended, apparently, in Africa, just about a century ago, and no one who had anything to do with it thought for one moment that anything was ending. On the contrary, men supposed that a new threshold had been crossed, and that more doors would be opened as the years went on. But the last blank places on the map were at last being filled, and without any warning at all the old driving energy went to seed. The moment of final triumph was also the beginning of the end. The great age of discovery was nickering out; as it did so, Western man’s confidence, his inbred certainty that he and no one else was in charge of what was going to happen to the world, began to flicker out with it. It took a century for this fact to become apparent, but the process was at work.

The idea is worth dwelling with for a while. Suppose, just for the sake of supposing, that something happens to push the horizons back once more, to restore the old feeling that we live in a world of infinite possibilities. What then takes place back in the adrenal glands? Do we then, in other words, find the dynamic force that goes with the unlimited view? Do the two actually go together?

Ernest S. Dodge has written a book called Northwest by Sea , which examines some of the steps which were taken, or at least attempted, back at the very dawn of the great age of exploration—the efforts to find a way through or around the unknown American continents, the search for the Northwest Passage, the long struggle to determine whether America was an obstacle or an opportunity or possibly a blend of both. It has a haunting overtone.

Louis Agassiz, the enthusiastic Swiss naturalist, appeared on the American scene at exactly the right time and place. The place was Boston, the time, the mid-nineteenth century. Science was beginning to challenge religious concepts long held sacred. Public attention was increasingly directed toward scientific advance and toward the study of nature. Now came Agassiz, the scientist “with the Gallic power of pleasing,” to demonstrate that the physical world was full of wonders and undiscovered secrets. It was just the thing that practical, intelligent young Americans were seeking: a new frontier—a glacial theory, expeditions to Brazil, mountain peaks to scale, and ocean depths to plumb. Agassiz was eager to teach, and he found an America eager to be taught.