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Geography, Geographers, and Exploration JAMES W. SCOTT Professor, Department of Geography and Regional Planning Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA 98225 Presidential address delivered to the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, Bellingham, Washington, 12 September, 1992 T H E CELEBRATION OF THE Columbus quincentenary and the bicentennial of George Vancouver’s 1792 Expedition to the North Pacific suggested to the organizing committee the theme chosen for the 1992 meeting: Explore and Discover: 1492, 1792, 1892, 1992, 2092} It should be no surprise then that I have chosen the theme of exploration for my address. Only one previous president of the asso­ ciation, Gary Dunbar, has taken exploration as the topic for his presidential address, choosing to speak on the Barrett-Huntington Expedition to Central Asia in 1905.2One other previous president, Margaret Trussell, in her address on five women geographers of the West, included Louise Boyd, a noted twentieth-century explorer of, among other places, Greenland.3 7 8 APCG YEARBOOK • VOLUME 55 • 1993 Wonderinghow besttodeal withsuch an open-endedtopic, it seemed to me appropriate that I should begin by reviewing my lifelong fascina­ tion with the literature of exploration. Other geographers—the name of Peirce Lewis4springs to mind—have singled out a love of maps to ex­ plain their later choice of geography as a major in college and their eventual decision to make geography their career. My own childhood fascination, however, was with stories of far-off lands and places, par­ ticularly with their initial discovery and exploration, rather than with maps and other illustrative materials. Not that the latter were totally ig­ nored. I can still see in my mind’s eye Sir John Millais’s well-known painting “The Boyhood ofRaleigh,” in which the young WalterRaleigh is depicted scanning the watery horizon to the west. Among the earliest books I can remember reading on my own were a number of adventure novels. They included Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho!, R.M. Ballantyne’s Coral Island and, most exciting of all, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Some years later came my introduc­ tion to stories of actual events and to real explorers like Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Francis Drake, and Captain Cook. I was especially attracted to accounts of polar exploration. These I devoured rapidly and, I suspect, quite uncritically. And because they were the ones that were most readily available, the volumes I read were usually about famous British heroes, such as “Scott of the Antarctic,” Sir Ernest Shackleton and Sir John Franklin. Eventually I was able to widen my field of reading and to include the heroes of other na­ tions—the Norwegians Raoul Amundsen and Fridthof Nansen, and the Americans Robert Peary and Admiral Richard Byrd come easily to mind. High-school years brought increasing demands on my time, but also greater appreciation and more critical appraisal of the geographi­ cal, historical, and cultural aspects of exploration, and almost inevitably—for I was already an avid book collector—a desire to create my own library of essential works of travel and exploration. SCOTT: Geography, Geographers, and Exploration 9 How fortunate it was that the Everyman Library, with its vast and seemingly comprehensive coverage of the world’s literature, had a large section devoted to travel and topography! To the eight-volume set ofRichard Haklyut’s The PrincipalNavi­ gations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries ofthe English Nation,5 I added Cook’s Voyages ofDiscovery6and works by Anson, Mungo Park, Speke, Burton, and others. Weekly visits to one or more of the many used book stores we had then in Liverpool and nearby towns enabled me to add Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the “Beagle,”7 Raymond Beazley’s biography of Prince Henry the Navigator,8and Samuel Eliot Morison’s incomparable biography of Columbus, Ad­ miral of the Ocean Sea.9Like John Keats, I felt that Much had I travelled in the realms of gold And many goodly states and kingdoms seen........1 0 Unlike Keats, however, I knew that it was Balboa and not Cortez who had with “eagle eyes star’d at the Pacific.” Those high-school years went by all too quickly, but by the end of them I...

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