Taking Risks and Measuring Up: The Literature of Chance and Fortune
Spring 2020
We all take measured risks—but how do we know if it’s rational to do so? How do we measure successful risk-taking? These questions can be highly personal—what career should I choose?—or reflect global concerns—what interventions will mitigate the effects of climate change? In this course, we will consider how attitudes towards risk-taking and success have changed over time: from early fears that luck, fortuna, was a capricious goddess who could not be understood, to the Enlightenment hopes that the mastering of mathematical probability would give us the tools to solve most human problems. Through attentive readings of literary, philosophical, and scientific texts, we will explore the links between the literature, ethics, and the mathematics of measuring every aspect of human life in our attempts to change the odds in our favor.
This course will include a digital project focusing on the three primary voyages of Captain James Cook (1726-1779), whose exploration of the Hawaiian Islands, New Zealand, and Australia put coastlines of the South Pacific on European maps for the first time. Cook also wrote an extensive and detailed journal on these voyages that discuss, among other things, the risky and evaluative nature of engaging with foreign plants, animals, and indigenous populations. These accounts are publicly available and collected in a single volume, and thus will be easy for students to access. They are also available in digital format. We will use this digital version, which contains the travel journals of James Cook, Joseph Banks, and Sydney Parkinson on the ship Endeavour during 1768-1771, to create three concurrent datasets detailing the voyage.
First, prior to working with the datasets, the class will spend a week at the Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library to work with the following texts:
Aa, Pieter van der. Le nouveau théâtre du monde. Leiden, 1713.
Moll, Herman. The Compleat geographer. London, 1723
Moll, Herman Atlas minor: or a new and curious set of sixty-two maps London, 1736
Atlas [Nuremberg] : [Homann Erben], [1756]
Dury, Andrew. A New General and Universal Atlas. London, 1761
Zatta, Antonio. Atlante Novissimo... Venice, 1775
Cook, James. A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean. London, 1784.
Second, students will read selected excerpts from Cook’s accounts in order to trace a geographic narrative of the decisions undertaken during the voyage. Students will then map Cook’s movements using ArcGIS, tracing the stops made on his three voyages using in order to understand the challenges, risks, and assessments that went into such a voyage. Students will then compare the map they created with 18th century cartographic innovations that attempted to account for the newly discovered lands. Alongside their visualization, students will present their findings in a final project to the class.
The driving questions of this exercise center on the notion of “discovery” by Europeans of new world: where did Cook stop, and why? How long did he stay in each new place, what was his objective in the “discovery” of each new location, and what factors contributed to his evaluation of a successful voyage? We will also ask students to consider how geographical, naturalist, and—most contentiously—ethnographical representations of the Southern Hemisphere and its peoples changed Cook’s and his readers’ perception of what it means to be human in an expanding world.
This exercise was developed in consultation with Rachel Gevlin.