Leadership in the History of Exploration

Abstract

In some ways, exploration seems like the ideal context in which to examine techniques of leadership: self-contained expeditions, cleaving oceans or carving paths through wilderness, contending with the elements or with enemies or both. These are circumstances that test mettle. I should make it clear that the kind of exploration I speak of is route-finding: explorations in the broader sense of the word- scientific exploration, investigation of the environment, inquiry into intellectual problems-are the subjects of other contributions to this volume. Explorers of new routes are, by definition, penetrating the unknown. So the normal incentives for journeying, which involve getting to a predictable destination by a route with calculated advantages, are absent. Most expeditions are not under military discipline. Typically, therefore, leaders have to cajole or coerce their followers. All the demands are magnified, and all the qualities we usually associate with leadership are required in abundance: foresight, planning, strategic clarity, logistical thinking, skill in human management, decisiveness, resolution, perseverance, charisma, courage. They are feats of leadership in the most basic sense of the word, since culture follows the pathfinders, who lay what I call the infrastructure of world history-the routes that bind disparate societies together and enable them to interact.