In old-fashioned slang, a ‘chancer’ is someone who takes risks but prefers other people to pay for them. In this sense, Christopher Columbus was a prince among chancers. He persuaded two credulous European monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, that he could find a land full of fabulous wealth on the far side of the world if only they would pay the enormous cost of his voyages. They paid, he sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred and ninety-two, and the rest is quite literally history. Today, we celebrate the life and achievements of this astonishing man with varying degrees of enthusiasm. There will be parades, some protests, and yes, the post office will be closed.
Columbus may have been a great persuader, but he was not a great planner. To be fair, it was hard for him to plan his voyages because he didn’t know where he was going. In fact, he didn’t even know where he arrived. His assignment was to find a westward passage to this semi-mythical land of unlimited wealth, where the streets were literally paved with gold. In this, he totally failed. The map makers of his time forgot to show that there was an enormous continent blocking the way between Europe and Asia, and Columbus ran right into it. On his various voyages, he landed in Watling Island, Cuba, Haiti, Honduras, and Panama, but never on the North American mainland, or even on Long Island, which is hard to miss. To his dying day, he believed that he had in fact discovered a passage to India, although how he could have mistaken the Bahamas for India, given their very different tastes in food and music, remains a mystery.
What we admire about chancers like Columbus is precisely that they do take risks which most of us would prefer not to. When we travel, it is all planned in advance every step of the way. The great explorers of the past, like Captain Cook, David Livingstone, Marco Polo, Lewis and Clarke, ventured into the unknown. As modern tourists, we venture only into the known. We know what to expect or can easily find out. Guidebooks to Baghdad, Tehran, Kabul, and Somalia are readily available, in case you feel the urge to go there for your next vacation.
What this means is that the history of exploration on this planet is, literally, history. There may be scientific discoveries to be made in the depths of jungles or oceans, but essentially, we have the complete map. Ancient maps had great blank spaces labeled “Here be monsters.” Now there are no such blanks apart from some odd corners of New York City.
This lack of unknowns in the geographical world is strangely deflating. No wonder we look for artificial excitement and simulated ‘mysteries,’ and no wonder we still stand in awe of the great chancers of the past, like Señor Columbus, who dreamed of new worlds and went looking for them regardless of the risks. Elon Musk, a modern chancer on the grand scale, may dream of going to Mars, and nobody is stopping him, but the rest of us are stuck here. We may wonder, as the future stretches infinitely ahead on the same old familiar planet with no new place left to discover, where on earth we will find our next big adventure.
