Outback Reckoning
Contents:
Outback Steakhouse's New Appetizer May Single-Handledly Ruin Diets Everywhere | Food & Wine
During the s, the Western world's knowledge of the earth's geography, natural sciences, indigenous peoples, and flora and fauna took a quantum leap. In the century's youth, no one knew where the Nile had its source, or what effect altitude had on the body, or whether the North and South Poles consisted of land or sea, or whether the Northwest Passage through North America to Asia was real or imagined. There was no such thing as radar or radio, an icebreaker or artificial oxygen, synthetic clothing or nylon rope.
If you lost your compass and the sky was cloudy, you resorted to dead reckoning, divining your direction by its relation to something fixed, such as the motion of the waves, a distant mountain or even a log thrown overboard. And if your journey didn't go as planned, such as for Robert O'Hara Burke and William Wills who missed a relief party by just eight hours and starved to death in the Australian outback, your prospects of survival were slim to none.
GEAR FOR LIFE
In the face of the extravagant hardships possible in such vast unknowns — one couldn't prepare for what one didn't know existed — risk hardly had to be sought; it was part of the package. The depth of isolation possible up until the early s can scarcely be imagined in modern times. Because travel was by boat, pack-animal, and primarily on foot, wilderness journeys of any significance took years, sometimes many years, to complete. These explorers were entirely on their own when it came to medical help, foraging for food when supplies ran out, navigating without instruments, plotting their own maps, understanding the customs and languages of native people, burying their dead.
One of the most famous stories of the nineteenth century is that of Sir John Franklin, a British admiral who in departed for the Arctic with men and two boats, the Erebus and the Terror , on a search for the Northwest Passage. For eleven years their fate was unknown, and during that time more than thirty rescue expeditions from England and America were sent in search of them, many of which experienced disastrous journeys themselves with considerable loss of life.
The men had abandoned their ship to its prison of ice was the coldest winter on record , and then died a slow and excruciating death from lead poisoning, scurvy, and starvation, some resorting to cannibalism in a futile effort to save themselves. Franklin's fate was a shocking one, even in the era of high-risk exploration.
His had been the most elaborately and expensively outfitted polar expedition ever launched, and yet all had disappeared without a trace not long after leaving England's shores.
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The Franklin story illustrates how much larger and labyrinthine the globe must have seemed in the s, with all of its blank spaces and empty quarters. It turns out they were not far into Canada's arctic archipelago, where icebreaker luxury cruises routinely take tourists today. As time and space have been compressed by technology, the quality and nature of adventure have changed inestimably.
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