The Route to China: Northern Europe's Arctic Delusions

I think that this hiatus is not a matter of chance, that it does not spring from the historian's oversight but more from economic, political, ideological, and scientific developments that have taken place. in the Christianized West since the Renaissance. These developments have gradually pushed back the unreal in the Western person's mind to make way for "logical thought" and "efficiency", thus .creating in the realm of knowledge vast patches of shadow beside those areas of.bright illumination. These developments have also led to a historical science whose objecfivity has given way to a creed that too often hides the fact that "revolutions" - the ap- pearance of new independent states and the specialization of knowledge - have brought with them a divergence in points of view and a. breaking up of geographical representation, notably in the arctic-regions.* This should not surprise us if we consider that the .protagonists of today's science are the an- tagonists of yesterday in the Arctic, among them the Anglo- Saxons, French, Dutch, .Danes, and Russians, who- vied with each other each from their own economic, political, and religious standpoints. By an easily. understood and perhaps even unconscious reflex, the states that tday control the .real "arctic empires" of Siberia, Alaska, the Canadian North, Greenland and, to a lesser extent, the Scandinavian North - indisputably the last great colonial empires left in the world - seem to try to avoid any global historical perspective that would bring them, in a somewhat less glorious fashion, face to face with the illusions and rivalries that tarnished their beginnings in and appropria- tions of arctic lands: particularly the illusion of the existence of a northern passage between Europe and China, which would have been an alternative to the known southern ronrtes monopolized by the powerful Iberians. Is it not a symptom of our era of satellite mapping that the use of the terrestrial globe has become so obsolete that it is now only used by a few specialists or in schools, whereas up to the end of the eighteenth century - when the scientific .measuring of longitude at sea. was .made possible by the port- able chronometer - it was considered .absolutely indispens- able for geographical study, whether the aim was pedagogic, economic, political, religious, or-purely scientific? The globe was present in every house, every institution, and on every ocean-going vessel, wherever anyone was interested in acquir- ing geographical knowledge, either through personal inclina- tion or necessity. Certainly the information displayed on the terrestrial globe is at the root of innumerable errors and geographical delu- sions, beginning with those of Christopher Col~mbus.~ A globe is a finite space asking to be filled up, and people did not hesitate to do so, even when they had no precise data at hand. But. the globe is also an incomparable source for synthesized thought and the only three-dimensional way of looking at the earth's surface that avoids the deformations resulting from the choice of projection or angle imposed by a map on the plane; it is.also the only way of making us see the real.importance of the Arctic as an intermediary stage between China and northern Europe. The ill effects of the employment of the "flat map policy", which one has to admit has practical value at the analytical level, can be seen in the presentday splitting .up of "learned societies" into their separate entities of Orientalists, Americanists, Africanists, and Oceanists - who no longer know .what to do with the arctic regions, and with good rea~on.~ I should, therefore, like to stress the importance of giving back to the globe the role in research and teaching it should never have l0st.5