This World and Nearer Ones. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ philosophers of the time, Berkeley in particular, were more effectively working changes in perception. But new philosophies filter only slowly through the general populace; it was the voyages of men like Cook in undiscovered places which immediately caught the public imagination.

      The motives behind the exploration of those distant regions were mixed, as man’s motives generally are, as the motives for the Apollo flights to the Moon in the sixties were. Unlike the discovery and opening up of the North American continent, the story of the South Seas must remind us of our own generation’s experience of space travel – not least in a remark Cook makes in one of his letters; in his reference to his ‘ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for man to go’, even the phraseology forges an unsought parallel between the Endeavour and the starship Enterprise.

      To an eighteenth-century man, that distant part of the globe was the equivalent of a new planet, a watery planet like Perelandra. In some respects very like Perelandra; for, as in C. S. Lewis’s novel the inhabitants of Venus act out a religious drama, an allegory, so the inhabitants of the South Pacific served to act out some of the preoccupations of eighteenth-century man. Were they models of what the Ancient Greeks had been, enlightened people in a state of grace with nature; were they corrupt savages in need of a missionary; or were they sinless, Adams and Eves before the Fall, inhabitants of multitudinous Edens?

      More than one construction can generally be made from one set of facts. Just as SF writers become accustomed to hearing from uninformed reviewers that they are ‘new Wellses’ or ‘latter-day Vernes’, so Europeans, striving to focus on the essential qualities of newly discovered races, claimed that they were ‘what the ancient Britons were before civilisation’, while the Australian aborigines were compared with Gaelic bards. Not analogies only but morals were to be drawn. As William Cowper put it, in the first book of his poem, The Task:

      E’en the favoured isles,

      So lately found, although the constant sun

      Cheer all their seasons with a grateful smile,

      Can boast but little virtue; and, inert

      Through plenty, lose in morals what they gain

      In manners – victims of luxurious ease.

      It is a Protestant viewpoint not entirely dead today.

      From the discoveries, from the debates, new sciences sprang. ‘Geography is a science of fact,’ said Bougainville, knowing he challenged an older and contradictory point of view. The depressing story of Tasmania – its history of the slaughter of the indigenous population boding ill for the inhabitants of any possible future planet any possible future space-travellers might come across – is lightened only by the French expedition there in 1802, when François Péron made the first anthropological record. Péron established amiable relations with the Tasmanians, and brought back to Europe 100,000 animal specimens, of which 2500 were of unknown species. Numerous meetings with the inhabitants were faithfully recorded.

      All such findings were closely linked to the continuing search for the nature of man. Péron himself, addressing the French authorities, declared, ‘No doubt it is wonderful to gather the inert moss which grows on the eternal ice of the Poles, or to pursue into the burning heart of the Sahara those hideous reptiles which Nature seems to have exiled in order to protect us from their fury; but – let us have the courage to say it – would it be less wonderful, less useful to society, to send with the naturalists on this mission some young doctors specially trained in the study of man himself, to record everything of interest in both moral and physical matters which diverse peoples may have to reveal – their habitat, their traditions, their customs, their maladies both internal and external, and the cures which they use?’

      The study of man himself. It was a sensible and enlightened goal. Yet, only a year after the French expedition to Tasmania, the British established a penal colony there. The wretched Tasmanians were then hunted to death, suffering alike at the hands of criminals and philanthropists. All became extinct within thirty years. The unfittest had not survived. Neither the most enlightened statesmen, nor all the rococo in all the churches in Europe could stem a general extermination.

      Ideas or ideologies always arise which cushion us from clear perceptions of our own cruelty; the Victorians took refuge in a popular view of Darwinism, garbled in a loose phrase, ‘the survival of the fittest’; the Nazis believed they were ridding the German race of impurity by massacring six million Jews; Stalinists justified the Great Purge by their sterile belief in the entrails of Marx and Lenin; and the West turned a blind eye to the killing of perhaps a million Chinese in Indonesia in 1965 and 1966 because the victims were labelled Communist.

      Despite the slaughters, the findings brought back by British and French three-masters stimulated a debate on the nature of man and his place in the universe which still continues. The slow, creaking three-masters have been replaced by speedy surrealist kitchen utensils cutting up the sky. The findings of Mariner spacecraft, with their startling crop of pictures, the harvest from Pioneers, Vikings and Voyagers, give impetus to the quest for extraterrestrial life. But our modern findings are undoubtedly less corporeal: eighteenth-century sailors copulated on warm sands with the dusky ladies of the South Seas in exchange for nails. The rewards of technology were never better or more immediately demonstrated.

      The more efficiently the early engines could be seen to work, the faster they multiplied. The faster they multiplied, the more dominant they became. It was like a re-run of the story of prehistoric reptiles. Samuel Butler observed this phenomenon clearly and, in Erewhon (1872), gives one of his scribes this ominous sentence: ‘The present machines are to the future as the early Saurians are to man.’ The argument goes on, ‘I would repeat that I fear none of the existing machines; what I fear is the extraordinary rapidity with which they are becoming something very different to what they are at present.’

      Butler’s fear was not a particularly common one, judging by the success of technology. When Cook was killed in 1779, Britain was rapidly becoming covered with a network of canals – the first modern transport system, the biggest thing since Roman roads. Soon no major city lay farther than fifteen miles from a busy water link. In another generation, the new roads had arrived; 1600 Road Acts went through Parliament between 1751 and 1790. On new roads, new light coaches – a new thing; all classes could afford to travel. And in a further generation, at the moment when coaching had reached its zenith of speed and organisation, in came the men from the North with their railways, and swept into darkness with a vast exhalation of coal smoke, the slow moving past.

      When the painter J. M. W. Turner, born as the American War of Independence began, died in 1851, the Western world had undergone one of its greatest periods of transition – and was undergoing another.

      New landscapes required new perceptions. The interpretation by trained artists of those exotic panoramas first sighted over the taffrail of the Endeavour or the Bounty led to the overthrow of a classical generalised style of art in favour of the art of the closely studied and the particular. This is what Ruskin means when he says in Modern Painters, apropos of Turner, that, ‘For the better comfort of the non-imaginative painter, be it observed, that it is not possible to find a landscape, which if painted precisely as it is, will not make an impressive picture.’ So Zoffany and Reynolds give place to Constable and Ward, and early Turner to late.

      The earthworks thrown up all over England to accommodate the railway line left their mark in the minds of men. When Brunel built his Great Western Railway from Paddington to Bristol, the comparative feebleness of his steam-power meant that the track had to run level to within 1/12,000th of an inch for the whole hundred-mile journey. One can see Brunel’s cuttings still, guarding the line up the Thames valley to Oxford. There lie the chalk strata, put down millions of СКАЧАТЬ