They call it armchair adventure, this kind of reading, where the misery of desperate castaways contrasts with the comfort of the reader's goosedown puff, where a bookmark halts Titus Oates in his selfless act of leaving Scott's tent for death in the Antarctic storm, or holds the physician-missionary Dr Grenfell marooned on a Newfoundland ice floe hoisting his grisly distress-signal mast of sled-dog tibia.
These books have their bashers. The category "adventure" implies that the action is more notable than the quality of the writing. Certainly there are clumsy accounts, silly books such as The Swiss Family Robinson, and our own inarticulate contemporaries who hang by frayed ropes over the abyss but can say later only that their Great Thought in the crisis was, "Man, this really bites". But most often the lack of a well-turned phrase indicates the rigour of the situation. Felix Riesenberg once described the log of a storm-battered ship as "without fine writing - only the effect of great necessity, as the words were set down". Critics lambast adventure literature for trumpeting colonialist white supremacy propaganda too. A reductionist Darwinism did season the pages of many earlier accounts - "survival of the fittest" was a popular phrase. In Told at the Explorers Club, a colonial administrator in Uganda could comment with theatrical weariness on "merely a routine day in the life of one whose job it was to help bear the white man's burden in a savage land".
During the 1930s, the extreme exploits of German mountaineers, particularly the assaults on the Eiger's "unclimbable" north wall, were interpreted by others as rash displays of nationalist fervour and Aryan arrogance. Even Herge's popular Tin Tin adventure books for children have been punched around recently for egregious political incorrectness.
To the flash reader, the genre may also seem a completely masculine literature, but women are scattered like loose beads through centuries of factual accounts. The interested reader discovers them in brief entries the way you find the hidden figures in a Where's Waldo? illustration. The first woman to circumnavigate the globe was an "adventurous wench" known only as Bare, assistant to the botanist de Commercon, who sailed to Tierra del Fuego in 1767 on the Etoile. No one - not captain, nor crew, nor botanist - noticed anything out of the ordinary until the ship reached Tahiti, where, as Riesenberg put it in his classic Cape Horn, "the natives, with the instincts of savages, cried out: `It's a woman!' ". Annie Peck, a middle-aged schoolteacher from Rhode Island, was the first to climb the north peak of Huascaran in the Andes, in 1908. Isabelle Eberhardt died at the age of 27 in an Algerian mudslide after a bizarre life that mixed desert travel with ecstatic Sufism, spying, pickup sex, hashish and cigarettes.
Miners, pirates, gunslingers, castaways, cannibals, rustlers, trekkers, mountaineers, deep-water sailors - women were all these, though they rarely made it into the pages of adventure fiction.
What, in such flawed literature, attracts us? Why do we so greedily read these accounts, if not for idle entertainment or voyeuristic thrill? It is because what we take from adventure books enriches our knowledge of the natural world and our place in it, satisfies the central human trait of curiosity, makes us more resourceful, keeps us alive.
A HUNGER for the heart-stopping experience seems built into our genes. We read on into the small hours as two climbers, hands and feet frozen, dehydrated and ill, sleepless, starving, crampons and mittens lost, struggle in darkness down K2's Abruzzi ridge.
But they have made the ascent and we share the euphoria that underlies the exhaustion and pain. When people go forward in perilous conditions the sense of exhilaration can rival any other moment in a life, and some of this surging elation transfers to us through the medium of ink on paper.
The earliest adventures, told with dramatic gestures beside the fire in the cave, were undoubtedly factual first-person accounts that served listeners as lessons in staying alive. This instructional function persists today: mountaineers study the accounts of earlier climbers and sailors read of old winds and weather. We are intensely interested in stories of people who come out alive after terrible experiences. We read to understand how to take care of ourselves, to prepare for the unexpected, to conjecture what we would do in similar situations. This is a cautionary literature, warning us that the natural world is unstable, dangerous and in constant flux.
Once the great motive for embarking on adventure was the search for something of economic, intellectual or scientific value - the source of the Nile, a route to the Spice Islands. There is almost nothing that does not fall into this net - reaching the North and South poles, striking gold, climbing the highest peak on earth, identifying new beetle species, finding a sunken galleon laden with doubloons, tracking down Prester John or the philosophers' stone.
The popular success of the film Titanic, Jon Krakauer's best-selling books Into Thin Air and Eiger Dreams and dozens of new anthologies indicates a sharpened public interest in adventure. But that interest focuses almost exclusively on the starker accounts of loss and death, a literature of disaster in contrast to the older concern with exploratory travel and discovery. The notion of discovery for the purpose of knowledge or the advancement of the common good has become less important than adventure for the sake of the personal experience.
These chronicles of dangerous exploits thrill, but in some cases they also prompt us to attempt hazardous forays ourselves. Inexperienced and unfit Americans, egged on by outdoor magazines that brilliantly feature extreme feats, dazzled by the technology of helicopters, global-positioning devices and cell-phones, are rushing to high altitudes and deep water in ignorance of the harshness of nature and the high risk of misadventure. The "death zone," a phrase referring to the frigid, oxygen-deficient upper regions of the Himalayas, descends almost to sea level for these new adventurers.
Irrevocable accidents can happen suddenly and to anyone, even in apparently benign situations, as we're reminded by the haunting fate last summer of the minister from Idaho on a hiking adventure in the Wind River Range of Wyoming. As he walked with his dog through rocks near a mountain lake, a large stone dislodged and pinned his legs between two boulders. He was unable to free himself. The days crawled by and he could not reach the water so cruelly and tantalizingly near. No one knew where he was because he had changed his scheduled route in transit. His dog did not go for help but stayed with him. After nine days, he came to the inevitable end.
My Wyoming neighbour, the climber-writer Mark Jenkins (To Timbuktu), who has packed several lifetimes of adventure into his 40 years, remarks: "You are nothing to the mountain, nothing to the ocean. You can sometimes make one mistake, sometimes two. Then you die."
The beguilement by technology and a sense of invulnerability particularly disturb him. "In earlier times the possibility of death was a given - now we have this cellphone culture where you always expect to be saved. Suddenly people are shocked when somebody dies." Clint Willis, the editor of the Adrenaline Books adventure anthologies, is a ferocious reader of the literature, and he puts it a little differently: "To enter into danger ignorantly has become a civil right in the latter half of the 20th century". Adventure stories profoundly and repeatedly correct these presumptions.
A central characteristic of the older adventure tradition was the sense of self-responsibility that permeated the literature. Self-responsibility incorporates a frank knowledge of personal abilities, gained through cumulative experience, recognition of all that could happen, advance preparation and study and the resourcefulness and nimbleness of mind to think a way through unanticipated difficulties.
Although popular myth holds that strong individualism and commanding leadership are requisite characteristics for the adventurer, we learn from hundreds of accounts that those are not the crucial qualities of survival. Flexibility and reassessment of changing conditions, an ability to think through the problems and make decisions that fit the circumstances (often difficult or repugnant decisions intertwined with searching moral questions, as in cannibalism or abandoning a member of the party) bring people through alive. Inflexible and dictatorial attitudes break small groups apart.
The castaway Pedro de Serrano, who lived for years on a small island off the coast of Peru, quarreled with a shipwrecked sailor who came to the island later; they ended up dividing the island in half to avoid seeing each other. A 1975 American expedition of climbers on K2 cracked apart with internal wrangling. Deborah Scaling Kiley's Albatross is an account of a drunken, discordant and deadly voyage.
While examples of dissension and quixotic Queeg-like personalities emerge from the pages of journals and logs, throwing harsh light on the nature of people in situations of extreme stress, the literature more generally reflects examples of selfless comradeship and intense caring for the welfare of companions.
What readers take away from such stories is the stark need for co-operative and thoughtful behaviour in times of adversity. Hubris and rigidity are punished by death.
In our protected world, where little beyond irritation and consumer-related angst tests most of us, it is good to know what extremities the human body and mind can bear. From adventure accounts we see ourselves as living creatures on earth, get a sense of our bodies against the elements, wind and tide, storm and season, altitude and precipitation. We recognise the menace of the falling glass.
Adventure books can transport us away from the cramped airline seat, away from the dead-end neighbourhood or isolated ranch, from the pain of illness. The dying Franz Schubert begged for James Fenimore Cooper's novels. In the 1970s, the New Zealand solo sailor David Lewis tried to circumnavigate Antarctica in his boat, Ice Bird. In the most remote water on earth, a Force 10 storm dismasted the boat and left it seriously crippled. Lewis, constantly in extreme danger, removed himself from the immediate peril by reading "escapist novels." One would like to know what novels those were.
Adventure permeates the vast human experience of life, and so it is that adventure books are not a narrow genre but are found in every category of literature - fiction, biography, essays, poetry, science, exploration, travel, memoir. There is an obvious connection between adventure literature and the millennium. If we accept the arbitrary date 2000 as a significant marker, it can represent the beginning of a great adventure. It will be for some of us, perhaps all of us, a time of self-examination, a measure of our resilience and ability to fit changing circumstances both as individuals and as the mass of humanity that crowds the earth. Adventure literature offers a series of object lessons on keeping your balance in the midst of chaos and danger, on being flexible enough to run the equations again and again, adding in new factors. So with life.
1999 Annie Proulx/New York Times Syndication
Annie Proulx is the author, most recently, of Close Range, a collection of short stories. She lives and works in Wyoming