Geographical Record. A Map of the World

Bibliographic Data

ID4486779
AuthorsW George Lovell (corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume98
Issue1
Pages103-122
Publication date2008-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueGeographical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0016-7428 • E-ISSN: 1931-0846
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1931-0846.2008.tb00290.x
OpenAlexW2047710755
LanguageEN
References cited19

One's destination is never a place, but a new way of looking at things. --Henry Miller, 1891-1980 I had barely one-quarter the time that Jules Verne allotted Phileas Fogg, but when the opportunity arose I took it: a journey around the world, by the fictional gentleman's varied at times unconventional means of transport but by private jet. The invitation arrived courtesy of the American Geographical Society, whose travel program forms part of its mission link the business, professional, scholarly worlds. Although I had some reservations about the cultural environmental implications of such a lavish undertaking, discussions with AGS colleagues who had previous experience of similar forays convinced me that it was too enticing a prospect to miss. Seattle-based TCS Expeditions had promoted the trip under the banner Natural Wonders around the World, but we would encounter little that had been shaped in some manner by human hand. As we made our way, my interests training meant that I could emphasize the connections between culture history over the face of the earth. The lectures I prepared for our journey, organized loosely around the impact of Europe on the non-European world, were designed to appeal to an educated but general public, a planeload of avid specialists. A log (of sorts) follows. DAY 1 Where better to begin than Seville? Its pivotal role in the age of European expansion made it for two centuries, in the words of Fernando de Herrera (1536-1599), not a city but a (Lovell 2001). It was from Seville that the expedition led by Ferdinand Magellan set off to be the first to circumnavigate the globe. Of the five ships that departed on 10 August 1519, only the Victoria made it back to the banks of the Guadalquivir on 8 September 1522. Out of the original crew of 243, 18 returned. Magellan was among them, for he had been killed by hostile natives in the Philippines. Buried on a far shore in the is how Fernando Pessoa (1974) put it in one of his poems, a valediction that reminds us that lands discovered by explorers like Magellan had been home to disparate peoples for centuries if millennia. A plaque by the river records that the historic feat was completed under the seamanship of Juan Sebastian del Cano. It is Magellan, however, who invariably receives the credit. Pessoa (1974, 27) evokes the phantom captain thus: They dance knowing the dead man's Daring soul is still in command, At the helm a wrist with no body, to steer The ships through the rest of the end of space: That he can compass the entire Earth--even absent--with his embrace. In voyages of exploration financed by Spain Portugal in the fifteenth sixteenth centuries lie the roots of globalization (McGillivray 2006). They were enshrined in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, when two Iberian monarchs convened under papal blessing to partition the reaches of a world soon to be exploited, ravaged, as never before. The Catholic faith Crown ambitions were engaged by a mix of men, many of them motivated by naked greed. We came here to serve God the King, wrote Bernal Diaz of the conquest of Mexico, and also to get rich (Diaz 1632, quoted in Elliot 1963, 65). After teaching a class in Seville I fly to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. There I am to meet with staff passengers before we board the specially rigged Boeing 757 that will carry us to ten remarkable destinations. Crossing the Atlantic I reread Eric Wolf's magnum opus, Europe the People without History (1982). I admire the breadth of his research, the directness of his prose, the power of his ideas. How our globalized world came to be is an epic tragic tale, as Wolf makes pertinently clear. Although by vocation he was an anthropologist, geography geographical concerns lie at the heart of Wolf's analysis, furnishing me only with historical facts but also with conceptual inspiration

Appeal · Archaeology · Art history · Banner · Courtesy · Face (sociological concept · Media studies · Miller · Political science · Quarter (Canadian coin · Social science · Sociology · Amazonian Archaeology and Ethnohistory · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Environmental and Cultural Studies in Latin America and Beyond · History · Law

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