Joyce E. Chaplin's Round About the Earth

Chaplin, Joyce E. Round About the Earth:  Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit.  Simon & Schuster, $35.00.  560 pp.  Publication Date:  Nov. 13, 2012.

Even the feel-good cliché “Think globally, act locally” reveals the modern tendency to interact with the Earth in a totalizing way:  You can and do make a difference, goes the belief.  From Magellan to John Glenn humans have attempted to see, exploit, conquer, experience, and now protect our “globalizing” world with the terrifying result called Modern History. 

Joyce Chaplin has written a heavily-researched and alluring book detailing five centuries of “globestruck” humanity.  She begins with the “ruthless thug” Magellan who brutally subjugated and converted indigenous peoples from East Africa to India and she later discusses what one later circumnavigator called his subsequent “honorable imitators.”  But the point of travelling is not only commerce or experience it is regaling the world with new stories:  “Survivors shared misadventures, crisscrossers of each other’s paths, the men created one final traffic jam at London’s printing presses, where each was determined to get his story out first,” Chaplin writes. 

Her pages are packed with dozens of wild globe-trotting stories—even the marooned basis for Robinson Crusoe who survived on a desert island according to one traveler, “cloth’d in Goat-Skins, who look’d wilder than the first Owners of them.”  Despite the yawns elicited by the later Apollo mission and recent Mars landing, like a hungry Alexander the bright and eager forever seek new worlds to conquer:  scientists plumb the pits for extremophiles and larger telescopes peer across the universe at distant quasars.  Enlightenment rationalism has produced a hunger.  “The overall sense was that mastery of the planet had been achieved, and that humanity had always been meant to achieve it,” Chaplin writes.  “The new impulse—which still exists—is to fulfill an us-too ambition, to join the club of nations able to go round about the Earth, as if humanity might be united in planetary dominion.” 

Yet humanity has now achieved dominion but finds itself boiling in its own bathtub.  Instead of stories of heroism our travelling contemporaries produce cautionary tales of falling ice, disappearing forests, and a heating world.  Chaplin quotes one, regretful of the transformed world:  “So much of what had fascinated me on my first voyage through the world was disappearing—cultures, customs, animals, whole ecologies, all diluted, muddied or driven to extinction.”