A Timewatch Guide

For centuries,

explorers have travelled to the ends of the Earth

in the name of discovery.

Along the way, they created our maps...

...captured our imagination

and became rooted in our history.

Exploration has given us some of our greatest heroes

and most memorable tales.

But discovery is not all romance and glory.

As exploration has been studied and re-examined,

the very notion of discovery has been called into question.

In this film,

I'll be digging through the BBC's incredible archive -

nearly 70 years of documentary footage -

to pinpoint the monumental shifts in the story of exploration.

Along the way, I'll discover why some explorers

have remained our heroes...

...but others have been reinterpreted.

One immediately takes issue with the cult of the hero.

I'll examine the changing face of the first-hand account...

Had I been facing the other way, it would have killed me.

...and follow the rise of the amateur explorer.

We crossed by a horrifying bridge about 400 feet long.

In this programme, I'll discover not only how television has followed

explorers and told their stories,

but also how film has actually changed

the entire enterprise of exploration.

This is the Timewatch Guide to Explorers.

Discovery -

the word alone conjures up wooden ships sailing across the globe,

a captain at the helm poring over a map and compass.

For centuries, that was the enduring image of the explorer -

fearless, full of ambition, poised for glory.

But over the last 50 years

our attitudes towards the heroic navigators of old have shifted,

starting with Christopher Columbus.

In 1492, he sailed from Europe to the Americas,

discovering the New World and claiming it for Spain.

The BBC reconstructed his voyage and landing in 1963,

telling the age-old story for a growing television audience.

In the name of Their Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella,

King and Queen of Castille, Leon and Aragon,

I now take possession of this land and name it San Salvador.

I declare that this is Spanish soil for all time,

drawn up this 12th day of October in the year of Our Lord,

1492.

In the traditional tellings of the explorers' story,

it's generally from the point of view of the explorer.

So you will see the classic trope of an explorer arriving on the beach,

falling on their hands and knees, giving praise to God,

and claiming the land.

It's always about planting a flag.

Or if not planting a flag, extending the influence of your people.

The British answer to Columbus was Captain James Cook.

He sailed across the world,

mapping new lands and claiming them for empire.

He also brought back hundreds of artefacts -

trophies of his encounters with exotic far-away cultures.

Two centuries later,

The Cook Legacy joined curators,

only now taking on the challenge of

understanding what these objects actually were.

Their first stop was the British Museum's Museum of Mankind.

It is one of the unfortunate accidents in the history

of museums that although the Museum Of Mankind

probably has the most extensive collection of objects

collected on Cook's voyages, much of it cannot be identified.

The problem is not that the objects are missing, lost or dispersed,

as might have happened in other museums.

The problem is missing documentation.

What the experts really needed was a paper trail

that would give them more information.

They finally found one in Oxford.

The Forster Collection here at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford

is important to our research for two reasons.

Firstly, the material is of very good quality indeed.

Secondly, we have a great deal of documentation,

both published and unpublished.

And this means that we are able to tie down the date of collection

very precisely, we sometimes know from whom it comes,

and we can even localise the specimens,

in many cases, to particular parts of the island in question.

Pinning down where the objects came from was the first step towards

understanding the people they had once belonged to.

So the search goes on,

for every piece that can be documented

to collection on Cook's voyages

tells us something more about Pacific Islanders

as they were before the voyages of Captain Cook and others

irrevocably changed their lives.

The Cook Legacy was not about Captain Cook at all.

It was about discovering the people he'd met on his voyages,

as revealed through the objects that Cook had taken from them.

The material artefacts of voyages of explorations like, for example,

James Cook's, they become very important because they, in a way,

are a physical reminder that these objects have a creator,

they have a history of their own,

they have a biography.

The artefacts now told a new and forgotten story.

Scholars have begun to pay more and more attention

to the other side of exploration.

The story of the people already living in the places

being discovered.

In the 1990s, the BBC decided to tackle this other side directly.

For the 500th anniversary of Columbus's crossing,

film-makers travelled to the USA

to find out what ordinary people thought

of the so-called discoverer of their continent.

In New York City on October 12th, Columbus Day, he is an Italian hero.

It's something to be proud of, an Italian heritage,

that an Italian discovered America.

With no Christopher Columbus, we wouldn't be here right now.

And irrespective of whether or not you hear about other people

that discovered America,

Columbus was the man that opened up the Americas to the world.

But the programme also revealed that while Americans celebrated Columbus

as a hero, local people in Mexico had a rather different take

on his actions.

To many of the Americas' native peoples,

contact with Europe is still seen as having brought with it

little but disease, servitude and deprivation.

The Mayans who live here share the view of many Native Americans

throughout the Americas towards the quincentenary.

The Indian point of view is that it shouldn't be celebrated,

because the conquest, it means domination,

the end of our own history as Indians.

And that, of course, is not an occasion of celebration.

As indigenous people finally got to tell their own story,

the traditional European narrative was forced to change.

Over the last 40 years,

we've increasingly realised that if we want to tell

the story of exploration,

we've got to pay much more attention to the people who were

already there,

who were living in these lands that the Europeans went

to discover and colonise.

One then immediately takes issue with the cult of the hero.

From an indigenous point of view, from a post-colonial point of view,

this is just a tale that Europeans tell.

A growing suspicion of the European explorer had emerged,

and that's led to a startling shift on television too.

2002's The Ship was a very different type of documentary -

a living history experiment

that invited members of the public to recreate life

as one of Captain Cook's crew.

During their gruelling weeks-long journey

up the east coast of Australia,

the film-makers explored the full picture of Cook's legacy,

warts and all.

This is the story of an 18th-century voyage and a 21st-century adventure.

Our volunteer crew includes Royal Navy sailors, scientists,

medics and historians.

Also part of our crew,

some of the people most affected by Cook's arrival in this part

of the world - New Zealand Maori and Australian Aborigines.

Along the way, audiences got a taste of the dangers and discomforts

that Cook and his crew had experienced.

Sailing a tall ship is a 24-hour operation.

Alex, an Australian historian,

is now clinging to a yardarm 130 feet above a rolling ocean.

I've always felt that it was a dangerous temptation

for historians to get their history exclusively from books,

and coming here to a place like this to think about history

is an extraordinary experience.

It's certainly an extreme context in which to think about history.

Down to lunch. Go, go, get.

The programme also didn't shy away from the contentious aspects

of Cook's journey and his legacy.

In fact, it embraced the complexity of the story.

I don't see him as a hero,

but I certainly acknowledge what he achieved.

His accomplishments. His accomplishment.

But the story is about Cook.

But what about the people that were affected,

and what about the amount of massacres that went on?

You mean after Cook? After Cook.

And how the Aboriginal people were affected, and the Maori people?

The film interwove the indigenous perspective

with the traditional story of Captain Cook.

Bruce had hoisted the Aboriginal flag on the first day of our voyage.

It's a moving symbol.

I mean...

...Cook's too easily been assimilated to a kind of white myth,

but the story is also a story of...

...of colonialism, of dispossession of indigenous peoples,

and it's very important that we don't elide that.

Post-colonialism has meant for historians the need to,

in a beautiful phrase, provincialize Europe -

to look from the wider world back at Europe

and to make it a rather little place.

What we're now dealing with is a much more richly textured history

than we had before,

when you've got the points of view and the experiences of the different

groups who were encountered.

Back in the 1960s,

the BBC had presented discovery as a heroic, white,

European tale.

But by the 21st century,

film-makers not only saw a more complicated and ambiguous story,

they'd also created new ways of telling it.