Granville Allen Mawer Ordre des livres

‘Who is Colnett?’ So asks Jack Aubrey in Patrick O’Brian’s Far Side of the World . Who indeed. As an adventurous teenager, James Colnett had sailed with Cook in the Resolution. He later became a pioneer in the Pacific sea otter trade, nearly starting a war with Spain in the process. He attempted to force Japan and Korea to admit British trade, and failing that smuggled pelts into China. He conducted a whaling reconnaissance to the Galapagos Islands and transported convicts to New South Wales. One way or another, James Colnett managed to intersperse fighting his country’s enemies in the American and French wars with thirteen years plying the South Seas. Seeing himself as a latter-day Argonaut, he reflected that his working life had been devoted to ‘enlarging the bounds of Navigation and Commerce’. The Pacific gave him ample scope.

The southern hemisphere is mainly land. So said medieval Europeans, raised on a heady brew of folklore, biblical revelation and geographical theory. It is how they imagined it. So powerful was the hold of this received wisdom that when geographical discoveries, however insignificant, were made in the southern oceans, they were greeted as evidence that the expected continental landmasses, rich and fertile, might at last have been found.This predisposition was mercilessly exploited by writers with a view to propound or a barrow to push. The history of southern maritime exploration is therefore one of frustration, deception and self-deception, a process of eliminating the corners in which something bigger and better might still be hiding. This book tells the story of the inventors who sent the dream abroad and the discoverers who brought the reality home, sometimes in spite of themselves.