or nuts were ripe, we were there. We followed the herds in their annual migrations. We rejoiced in fresh meat. through stealth, feint, ambush, and main-force assault, a few of us cooperating accomplished what many of us, each hunting alone, could not. We depended on one another. Making it on our own was as ludicrous to imagine as was settling down.
Working together, we protected our children from the lions and the hyenas. We taught them the skills they would need. And the tools. Then, as now, technology was the key to our survival.
When the drought was prolonged, or when an unsettling chill lingered in the summer air, our group moved on—sometimes to unknown lands. We sought a better place. And when we couldn’t get on with the others in our little nomadic band, we left to find a more friendly bunch somewhere else. We could always begin again.
For 99.9 percent of the time since our species came to be, we were hunters and foragers, wanderers on the savannahs and the steppes. There were no border guards then, no customs officials. The frontier was everywhere. We were bounded only by the Earth and the ocean and the sky—plus occasional grumpy neighbors.
When the climate was congenial, though, when the food was plentiful, we were willing to stay put. Unadventurous. Overweight. Careless. In the last ten thousand years—an instant in our long history—we’ve abandoned the nomadic fife. We’ve domesticated the plants and animals. Why chase the food when you can make it come to you?
For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game—none of them lasts forever. It is beyond our powers to predict the future. Catastrophic events have a way of sneaking up on us, of catching us unaware. Your own life, or your band’s, or even your species’ might be owed to a restless few—drawn, by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds.
Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, spoke for wanderers in all epochs and meridians: “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas…”
To the ancient Greeks and Romans, the known world comprised Europe and an attenuated Asia and Africa, all surrounded by an impassable World Ocean. Travelers might encounter inferior beings called barbarians or superior beings called gods. Every tree had its dryad, every district its legendary hero. But there were not very many gods, at least at first, perhaps only a few dozen. They lived on mountains, under the Earth, in the sea, or up there in the sky. They sent messages to people, intervened in human affairs, and interbred with us.
As time passed, as the human exploratory capacity hit its stride, there were surprises: Barbarians could be fully as clever as Greeks and Romans. Africa and Asia were larger than anyone had guessed. The World Ocean was not impassable. There were Antipodes.[1] Three new continents existed, had been settled by Asians in ages past, and the news had never reached Europe. Also the gods were disappointingly hard to find.
The first large-scale human migration from the Old World to the New happened during the last ice age, around 11,500 years ago, when the growing polar ice caps shallowed the oceans and made it possible to walk on dry land from Siberia to Alaska. A thousand years later, we were in Tierra del Fuego, the southern tip of South America. Long before Columbus, Indonesian argonauts in outrigger canoes explored the western Pacific; people from Borneo settled Madagascar; Egyptians and Libyans circumnavigated Africa; and a great fleet of ocean going junks from Ming Dynasty China crisscrossed the Indian Ocean, established a base in Zanzibar, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and entered the Atlantic Ocean. In the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, European sailing ships discovered new continents (new, at any rate, to Europeans) and circumnavigated the planet. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, American and Russian explorers, traders, and settlers raced west and east across two vast continents to the Pacific. This zest to explore and exploit, however thoughtless its agents may have been, has clear survival value. It is not restricted to any one nation or ethnic group. It is an endowment that all members of the human species hold in common.
Since we first emerged, a few million years ago in East Africa, we have meandered our way around the planet. There are now people on every continent and the remotest islands, from pole to pole, from Mount Everest to the Dead Sea, on the ocean bottoms and even, occasionally, in residence 200 miles up—humans, like the gods of old, living in the sky.
These days there seems to be nowhere left to explore, at least on the land area of the Earth. Victims of their very success the explorers now pretty much stay home.
Vast migrations of people—some voluntary, most not—have shaped the human condition. More of us flee from war, oppression, and famine today than at any other time in human history. As the Earth’s climate changes in the coming decade. there are likely to be far greater numbers of environmental refugees. Better places will always call to us. Tides of people will continue to ebb and flow across the planet. But the lands we run to now have already been settled. Other people, often unsympathetic to our plight, are there before us.
Late in the nineteenth century, Leib Gruber was growing up 111 Central Europe, in an obscure town in the immense, polyglot, ancient Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father sold fish when he could. But times were often hard. As a young man, the only honest employment Leib could find was carrying people across the nearby river Bug. The customer, male or female, would mount Leib’s back; in his prized boots, the tools of his trade, he would wade out in a shallow stretch of the river and deliver his passenger to the opposite bank. Sometimes the water reached his waist. There were no bridges here, no ferryboats. Horses might have served the purpose, but they had other uses. That left Leib and a few other young men like him. They had no other uses. No other work was available. They would lounge about the riverbank, calling out their prices, boasting to potential customers about the superiority of their drayage. They hired themselves out like four-footed animals. My grandfather was a beast of burden
I don’t think that in all his young manhood Leib had ventured more than a hundred kilometers from his little hometown of Sassow. But then, in 1904, he suddenly ran away to the New World to avoid a murder rap, according to one family legend. He left his young wife behind. How different from his tiny back-water hamlet the great German port cities must have seemed, how vast the ocean, how strange the lofty skyscrapers and endless hub-bub of his new land. We know nothing of his crossing, but have found the ship’s manifest for the journey undertaken later by his wife, Chaiya joining Leib after he had saved enough to bring her over. She traveled in the cheapest class on the Batavia, a vessel of Hamburg registry. There’s something heartbreakingly terse about the document: Can she read or write? No. Can she speak English? No. How much money does she have? I can imagine her vulnerability and her shame as she replies, “One dollar.”
She disembarked in New York, was reunited with Leib, lived just long enough to give birth to my mother and her sister, and then died from “complications” of childbirth. In those few years in America, her name had sometimes been anglicized to Clara. A quarter century later, my mother named her own firstborn, a son, after the mother she never knew.
Our distant ancestors, watching the stars, noted five that did more than rise and set in stolid procession, as the so-called “fixed” stars did. These five had a curious and complex motion. Over the months they seemed to wander slowly among the stars. Sometimes they did loops. Today we call them planets, the Greek word for wanderers. It was, I imagine, a peculiarity our ancestors could relate to.
We know now that the planets are not stars, but other worlds, gravitationally lashed to the Sun. Just as the exploration of the Earth was being completed, we began to recognize it as one world among an uncounted multitude of others, circling the Sun or orbiting the other stars that make up the Milky Way galaxy. Our planet and our solar system are surrounded by a new world ocean the depths of space. It is no more impassable than the last.
Maybe it’s a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet. But those other worlds—promising untold opportunities—beckon.
In the last few decades, the United States and the former Soviet Union have accomplished something stunning and historic—the close-up examination of all those points of light, from Mercury to Saturn, that moved our ancestors to wonder and to science. Since the advent of successful interplanetary flight in 1962, our machines have flown by, orbited, or landed on more than seventy new worlds. We have wandered among the wanderers. We have found vast volcanic eminences that dwarf the highest mountain on Earth; ancient river valleys on two planets
