As a fan of STNG – that’s Star Trek: Next Generation – I know by heart the opening remarks by Captain Jean Luc Picard

Five centuries ago, on October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus thought he had boldly gone where no one had gone before and landed on the shores of an island at a place he called ‘San Salvador’, now thought to be one of the Bahamas (2).

Many Americans and Europeans still mistakenly attribute to him the ‘discovery of the Americas’. Of course this is arrant nonsense because there were already people living on the islands when he arrived, not to mention also on the mainland of North and South America. The ‘discovery’ of the New World by Europeans can be traced back almost a thousand years of recorded history. Further, Christopher Columbus (the Anglicization of the Latin Christophorus Columbus, in modern Italian, Cristoforo Colombo and in Spanish as Cristóbal Colón) was not going where "where no one has gone before". As Rodney Broome reminds us in his fascinating book Terra Incognita, Europeans were constantly crossing the Atlantic. There is a legend about an Irish monk reaching America; archaeological remains prove the Vikings settled in Greenland and northeastern Canada; Portuguese sailors claimed to have visited the Caribbean in 1424; Basques reached Newfoundland in the late 1400s; a Dane claimed he discovered it in 1472; and John Cabot, a fisherman from Bristol, England visited the mainland many times since approximately 1480. Even the Chinese lay claims to have ‘discovered’ America in  1421, before Columbus.

Another misconception is that Christopher Columbus was solely responsible for the ‘discovery’. While he was captain of the Santa Maria, he was in fact the ‘co-discoverer’. As the modern citizens of Palos in Spain are keen to point, his navigator was Martin Alonzo Pinzón (3). Pinzón was part-owner of the Niña and Pinta, the other two ships in the flotilla. Martin Alonzo Pinzón was captain of the Pinta and the brother of Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, who was pilot of the Niña. Without Martin or Vicente, Christopher would likely not have assembled the ships he needed, neither the crew nor been able to navigate his route west.

Unlike Picard and the USS Enterprise, Columbus and his three vessels had set out to find places that were very well known: China and India. Traders knew these nations well by travelling to them by land. But it was slow and expensive. Columbus and the Pinzón brothers were trying to reach the riches of the Orient by the fastest route, which was then believed to be way of the west, by sea. It would have been true too had they not first bumped into the Americas, which according to maps and globes of the day, should not have been there. It is a reminder of just how imperfect the knowledge our ancestors had of our world (4). In fact, for the largest time in recorded history, much of the world has lain unknown - or at least unknown to Europeans.

In the course of researching my novel, which is set in Europe of 1^st century BCE and follows Rome’s wars of conquest, I was struck by just how murky was the understanding of the lands laying beyond the empire’s borders. As Robin Lane Fox notes, the Romans did not have a clear idea of the frontiers of their empire (5). Various attempts were made to draw maps of the world by Greek geographers. One of the most celebrated maps in Antiquity was the so-called orbis terrarum of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, completed in 20CE, which hung on a wall of the Portico of Vipsania in Rome. Record of it comes down to us from Pliny the Elder, who could not believe that Agrippa "who was very careful and diligent in the field" allowed it to contain errors in the calculation of the distances of its provinces in Spain (6). Although copies of this world map were distributed across the empire, none survive. Reconstructions of it derive from Mediaeval world maps, which are supposedly based on ancient originals. Agrippa’s orbis terrarum appears to have been conceived to show

So convinced were the Romans that their city was at the centre of the world, that in 20 B.C., as part of his program of road building, Augustus placed a gilded milestone (Milliarum aureum) near the great public monuments of the Forum Romanum (8).

In ‘civilised’ Europe there was always great curiosity about the lands and peoples that lay beyond the known world, as the encyclopaedias of Pliny the Elder or the geographies of Strabo and Ptolemy show. These writers assembled snippets of information from a variety of sources and displines – astronomy, economics, zoology, even mythology – to supplement their own observations and measurements. An important source of first-hand information was the travelogues of explorers. Perhaps the ancient world’s most famous explorer was Pytheas the Greek.

In his fascinating book on Pytheas, Barry Cunliffe quotes modern explorer Vilhjalmur Steffanson who wrote in his 1942 book Ultima Thule

Around 320BCE Pytheas published his book Peri Tou Okeanou, translated as ‘On The Ocean’. Now lost to us, parts survive through the writings of other geographers who quoted Pytheas in their own books. 'On The Ocean' described a voyage from Massilia (modern Marseilles) to the northern shores of Europe to find the sources of amber, gold, tin and other commodities of interest to traders in his seaport city. In attempting to retrace Pytheas’ voyage, Cunliffe deduced that the Massaliot had traversed France by land and river to where Bordeaux now stands, and thence by sea to sail around the British Isles, stopping in Cornwall and elsewhere, as far as Iceland; and on his return visited Jutland, possibly even Heligoland, before returning via the coast of modern Netherlands, Belgium and France. For large parts of his journey it seems that he hitched rides aboard boats and ships of traders who visited these lands to buy the precious commodities direct from their suppliers. In the years following his return to Massalia, copies of his book reached Athens and Alexandria and influenced the leading historians and geographers of his day.

The comparisons between Columbus and Pytheas are fascinating. Both were driven by commercial objectives – the Genoan to find a route to the Indies, the Massaliot to find the sources of prized commodities. Both wrote of their voyages. Both died in relative obscurity – hardly anyone attended the funeral of Columbus, and we know nothing of Pytheas’ later years and death. More importantly, in different ways, their explorations put regions unknown to most Europeans of their day ‘on the map’ and, by demystifying these lands, opened up them to settlement and exploitation by outsiders. Whether it was a good or bad thing to expose indigenous peoples and their cultures to foreign invasion is still the subject of debate. Yet, whether it is to find the source of amber, a western sea route to China or to land on Mars to find evidence of life, the need "to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations" is central to what it is to be human.

As Picard would say, "Engage!"

Rodney Broome, Terra Incognita: The True Story of How America Got Its Name, Educare Press, Seattle, 2001

Barry Cunliffe, The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek, Walker and Company, New York, 2001,2002

Robin Lane Fox, The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian, Allen Lane, London, 2005

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STNG
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Alonzo_Pinz%C3%B3n and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palos_de_la_Frontera
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maps
5. Fox, p485
6. Pliny The Elder, Naturalis Historiae (Natural History), III, 17: Baeticae longitudo nunc a Castulonis oppidi fine Gadix CCL et a Murgi maritima ora XXV p. amplior, latitudo a Carteia Anam ora CCXXXIIII p. Agrippam quidem in tanta viri diligentia praeterque in hoc opere cura, cum orbem terrarum orbi spectandum propositurus esset, errasse quis credat et cum eo Divum Augustum? is namque conplexam eum porticum ex destinatione et commentariis M. Agrippae a sorore eius inchoatam peregit. http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/L/Roman/Texts/Pliny_the_Elder/3*.html#17
7. http://www.henry-davis.com/MAPS/AncientWebPages/118mono.html
8. http://vitruviidearchitectura.blogspot.com/2006/10/marcus-vipsanius-agrippa.html. For a detailed explanation of a geometrical explanation of the orbis terrarum, see http://www.arqweb.com/vitrum/orbis.asp
9. Cunliffe, p172