Around the World in Explorer Names
At the Explorers Club, uptown, the American Geographical Society, founded in 1851, celebrated its hundred-and-seventy-fifth year one recent evening by observing its most sacred ritual: a ceremonial globe signing. The society’s Fliers & Explorers Globe, donated in 1929 by the Times editor and A.G.S. president John Finley, was signed by many of his era’s most renowned explorers, including Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, and Sir Edmund Hillary. “Finley interviewed people who came in from their expeditions, and he’d get them to sign it,” Jerome Dobson, an A.G.S. president emeritus, said. His necktie had an antique-map print. Later, the globe was signed by John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, the Apollo 8 crew, and others. That night, it would be signed by the oceanographer, former Navy captain, and retired astronaut Kathryn Sullivan—the first person to both walk in outer space and visit the deepest point of the ocean, in the Mariana Trench.
During cocktail hour, a spiffily dressed group of eminent geographers gathered in the library bar around a Fliers & Explorers replica—a party globe, perhaps. “This is the globe you can touch,” Marie Price, the current A.G.S. president, said. “Spin it around!” (“Let’s not go wild,” Dobson said.) The library had an icy-exploration theme: taxidermied polar bear, signed Shackleton portrait, Admiral Peary’s ice pick, snowy painting of bedraggled men by a tent. “That looks like one of our camp trips, huh, Lee?” Price said to Lee Schwartz, a former GOTUS (Geographer of the United States).
When Dobson joined A.G.S., in 1997, the Fliers & Explorers Globe was underappreciated, he said. “I didn’t even notice it,” he recalled. “It was on a spindly shaft in the corner; we’d go spin it.” It hadn’t seen much action since Glenn had signed it, at the White House, in front of J.F.K., Lyndon Johnson, “and two of Bobby Kennedy’s children—not the one currently in government.” Seeing an opportunity, Dobson had proposed new signings. “Who wouldn’t consider it an honor?” he said. “So we invited Neil Armstrong; Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard, the first people to go to the bottom of the Mariana Trench; and Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones, who first circumnavigated the globe in a balloon.” (Were the Piccards inspiration for Captain Picard, of “Star Trek”? “I never thought of that,” Price said.) The retired Coast Guard captain Lawson Brigham, who resembled a seafaring Lee Iacocca, approached the globe. “I signed through the Bering Strait, but I had been at the North Pole and the South Pole,” he said, pointing. “As close to the South Pole as you get on a Coast Guard icebreaker.”
“Lawson did the circumnavigation pole to pole, not the most common way to go,” Price said. “You need an icebreaker.” (“There is a precedent—names on here of pilots who went that way,” Dobson said.) Nearby, wearing a waterproof modern-adventurer hat, the eighty-five-year-old G.P.S. pioneer Charlie Trimble chatted about trying to determine whether Mt. Everest was rising or sinking. (Rising, he said.)
During the main event, in a ballroom, Sullivan, a capable-looking seventy-five-year-old with a blond bob and a dark jacket and slacks, approached the globe, accepted a Sharpie, and said, “Right under my very good friend and shipmate Don Walsh.” People craned their necks. A partygoer whispered, “Where do you sign the globe if you’re an astronaut?”
Afterward, Sullivan retired to the terrace. Deep-sea exploration, she said, “is not a bad analogue for going into space.” Both require a vehicle “that can take your squishy little body to a place that it clearly doesn’t belong. I’m comfortable inside, and I look through a window and know that right out there I would die. How is it possible for me to be here, eating my tuna-fish sandwich?” She went to Challenger Deep, the bottom of the trench, in 2020. “The word that kept coming to mind was ‘moonscape,’ ” she said. “A fine, silty sediment, gently rolling bottom, a little more tan than the gray of the moon”; barren, to our eyes, with “typically unsexy critters like burrowing worms.” As for space, “It’s a very dramatic experience, getting off the planet,” she said. “You’re basically riding a bomb for eight and a half minutes. And then you have the magical experience of being effectively weightless, maneuvering and living and working in zero gravity, which is great, great, great fun. And the view is stupendous.” Her crews’ data collection would seem tedious to outside observers, she said, but on one mission, “we deployed the Hubble Space Telescope.” Many of the people whose signatures appear on the globe had been meaningful to her (Earhart, Walsh, Armstrong, “the whole Apollo 8 crew”); as a kid, she’d admired astronauts and Jacques Cousteau. “These were people living inquisitive and adventurous lives,” she said. “I wanted my life to be like that.” ♦