Bold Explorers, Present and Past

“How would you do if you went to space for eight days and were gone for six months?” The New York Times asked on Dec. 27. Not very well, but I wouldn’t go into space at all so it’s a moot point. As a claustrophobic, I’m not sure I could stand the confinement long enough to take a short tour of the international space station while it was still on the ground

“Most of us would panic if we were stranded in space without a firm return date. But Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore aren’t like most of us,” the Times   writer continues. These two brave NASA astronauts left for the international space station on June 4. Due to technical problems on the spacecraft, the return was considered too risky for human flight, and now NASA has further postponed the retrieval mission from this February to who knows when.

I’m glad the astronauts are being brave and upbeat, because I find just the thought of this very disturbing and I hope that they can get this sorted and return the astronauts to Earth as soon as possible. Isn’t it remarkable how some people are so bold and daring, while others, including me, get stressed and anxious when faced with a two-hour flight delay?

I’ve also been reading a new book about another bold explorer, Captain James Cook, and his 18^th century voyages around the Pacific from Tahiti to Hawaii to Alaska. He set off from England on his third Pacific voyage in 1776 on the ship HMS Resolution. It did not end well for him.

 The book is “The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook” by Hampton Sides, and it is so full of interesting bits that I can’t do it justice in just a few paragraphs. Many people know about Captain Cook’s death after a conflict with native Hawaiians on his third Pacific visit, after his very successful first meeting there previously.

But I hadn’t realized that Cook was also in the Pacific navigating the coast of Alaska, looking for that elusive Northwest Passage. He and his men were the first Western Europeans to explore the Pacific Northwest coast, a few decades before Lewis and Clark’s overland expedition. When they finally returned to Britain after two and a half years, the sailors (minus Cook) were shocked to hear about the war with the American colonies.

We visited the Cook Memorial Museum in Whitby on England’s Northeast Coast a few years ago. I pictured a young sailor looking out over Whitby Harbor at the 18^th century sailing ships, and thought how far he traveled and what adventures he had before things went wrong for him. The author includes a current photo of the Cook Memorial (now splattered with red paint reading You Are on Native Land) in a secluded part of the Hawaiian coast. First contact between two very different groups of people over the ages was usually fraught, what with the arriving group invading the other’s territory.

One of the most amusing parts of “The Wide Wide Sea” is a sailor’s very detailed description of surfing. The British sailors were astounded by this athletic display and wanted to tell the folks back home how amazing this was. It wasn’t like now when you can find a gazillion surfing videos on YouTube.

While Captain Cook and his men probably wouldn’t be surprised that the balmy and beautiful Pacific islands they explored have become popular tourist destinations, they might be surprised by the steady stream of tourist ships in Alaska, where they barely survived some terrible storms at sea.

You can imagine the sailors’ dismay at having to leave a tropical paradise to head back up into the gloomy north, going from warm tropical breezes and a tasty fresh diet to the cold and bleak weather, subsiding on blubber from walrus. This would be grim indeed, risking their lives in a wooden 18^th century ship with almost nothing in the way of comfort.

So, while the spirit of adventure still persists today, the frontier is now far beyond this Earth. Whatever perils the explorers of long ago encountered in their travels, they could still breath the air and know they were on Earth, whether on land or sea. While going on a long sea voyage has never appealed to me, I think of going into space as terrifying beyond words.