THE LAST EXPLORERS

I spent a large chunk of a recent Sunday catching up with Neil Oliver’s series on “The Last Explorers” where he told the story of four great Scottish um... explorers and how their ideas have changed the world, and fascinating stuff it was too.

The first one we watched was part three because it was about John Muir and Yosemite Park, a place of which I have become very fond over the years on my visits there. That John Muir set in motion if not the actual idea of the National Park, then the general acceptance that they should be allowed to exist and the preservation of them should be upheld, is a fascinating story in itself. Yosemite is such a beautiful place, that I could just sit and look at pictures of it anyway, no matter what the excuse.

The thing that I most recall from my very few visits there is the sheer scale of the place. You can tell people over and over again how high the sheer granite walls seem rising up from the valley floor, or that the pine trees that you would normally consider to be huge in an ordinary forest are then dwarfed by the mighty redwoods they are next to, or that when you look down into the valley from Glacier Point all of those trees suddenly seem so tiny and the dots scurrying around on the distant mountain tops turn out to be actual people, but unless you see it for yourself, even any pictures you take struggle to get it across. The mind kind of refuses to process the scale of the place until you stand there, and even then it can forget and you find that you need to go back every once in a while to remind yourself. A bit like the slopes of San Francisco, unless you’ve actually walked or driven on them, nothing anyone can tell you about them or images you’ve seen of them, can get the reality across to you. Still, when it comes to Yosemite Park, I’d still rather not spend my time dangling 200 feet up from a Sequoia Redwood tree or being forced against my will to clamber up steep rock faces in an effort to retread the hobnailed boot steps of a Victorian age explorer like they made Neil Oliver do.

I can almost imagine the conversations in the planning meetings:

“In order to fully understand these men, you’ve got to experience the world like they did...”

“In what way exactly?”

“Well, travel up the Zambesi river in Africa...”

“Fair enough... First class...?”

“Naturally.”

“Okay...”

“Then we’d like you to train with some Samurai in Japan...”

“Okay... I’m not going to manage to cut my own leg off am I...?”

“Very, very unlikely...”

“Fine...”

“Then we thought you might climb a couple of things in Yosemite...”

“I’m not really much of a climber...”

“Oh, you’ll be with experts when you scale the mountains and trees...”

“Not quite so sure about that... Couldn’t we just show pictures of mountains and trees and I could talk about them...?”

“The viewers would never understand that...”

“No...?”

“Finally, we want to send you to Antarctica on a three week boat trip...”

“You’re joking...”

“Really, it’ll be fine...”

“I really don’t like boats... Look, can’t I just read from the history books in front of a nice warm log fire whilst you go off and take a few shots...?”

“You need to be seen to be there, Neil...”

“You flew Attenborough there...”

And so on...

Nevertheless, we were so impressed were we by this episode that we immediately decided to watch another which had luckily been sucked up by the hard drive of our inconsistent little DVR. The first was about David Livingstone and his notions of putting an end to the barbaric slave trade in Africa by bringing trade and religion to what was then known as “The Interior” or “Darkest Africa”. Livingstone’s reputation does not emerge from this scrutiny intact, however well-intentioned his lies might have been, but as possibly the best known of the four characters whose stories were being told, it was probably a good one to start with, and he is still held in much reverence in Zambia, it would seem, because of his attempts to stop the trade in people.

Nowadays, Africa looks such a serene and beautiful place and is so much more amenable than when these astonishingly brave (or perhaps naive) explorers were thousands of miles and months away from home and medicine, that I was almost (but not entirely) persuaded to risk the mosquitoes and head off on safari, and yet, despite all of that incredible beauty, we also, with the benefit of hindsight, we now also know so much of the tribal wars and boundary disputes that have plagued that continent since the arrival and departure of the various colonial powers.

Episode two sent our hapless presenter off, as mentioned above, to the Antarctic in order to grow a beard in the footsteps of  William Speirs Bruce, the all-but forgotten polar explorer whose influence on modern climate research is still being felt today, 104 years after he set up his first weather station at latitude 74 degrees south on the south Orkney Islands. I did once have a teacher at school who mentioned that he had once been part of the British Antarctic Expedition and had lived there for six months in the 1950s. The stories of the Penguin-eating Arctic explorers, Scott, Shackleton and the like, has always been an interest to me, and not just because of their diet, so it was nice to find another one to add to the list. He also set up Edinburgh Zoo apparently as well, despite knowing full well the taste of roast Penguin.

The final episode followed that same evening, and told the story of Thomas Glover, the man who laid the foundations for Japan to become the financial superpower that it since has become. This former tea-trader come gun-runner managed to persuade the previously closed society of Japan - for many years outsiders had to remain offshore on an artificial island so as not to contaminate the local culture - to open itself up to the world and in doing so managed to industrialise an entire nation and turn it into an empire-building military power in under fifty years, or less than his own lifetime, so he lived just long enough to see the results of his actions. Much revered by the Japanese as being the person who helped them to achieve them much of their modern international success, you do wonder just how much harm he might yet be found to have caused when you look at his actions from a modern environmental viewpoint, not to mention the bloody role that Japan came to play in their various wars. It was bad enough when we only had one imperial power in the world to bugger things up, and Glover managed to export that notion to the world.

Granted, any kind of personal connection is what tends to draw me into these kinds of programmes, so I imagine that if it hadn’t been for that visit to Yosemite, I might very well have missed out on the whole series. Sometimes a good documentary can stimulate me, and at other times, like the one on the Royal Navy last year that Dan Snow did, I can be dozing off almost before the opening titles have finished. My falling asleep was not Dan’s fault, I suspect, I am, after all, quite dotty about anything about the history of the sea, but I think that it was poor timing to be showing it fairly late on a Friday evening when the working week has just run its course and left me feeling all flaked out...

But I do love a good documentary.