Dear friend,
I have tried to write this letter a dozen times or more but I don’t know where to begin.
I’ll start with a field of flowers I saw yesterday not because it is the beginning but because I can picture you laughing at me for my sentimentality. You’d tell me how cliché it all is but to me that moment felt like the first time I was allowed to look without purpose.
Do you remember when I told you about Tahiti? About when we were sent to map the transit of Venus. I remember my anticipation when I heard the pounding of boots and the shouts of the sailors and realized that we had arrived.
I wanted so much to see this new place but was carried in my hay filled palanquin directly to a dark canvas tent where I remained, my eye pointed only towards the sky.
When the day of the transit finally came the men scuttled in and out of my quarters, the warm, damp air laminating their clothing to their bodies until the garments looked like carapaces made of wool and linen and salt and sweat.
And as we watched Venus make her way across our sun I could think only of how ridiculous we must look like children in school uniforms on a hot summer day.
After the transit was complete, we returned to the ship and the captain opened a second secret set of instructions. We were to map and annex the fabled southern continent.
We spent another year looking for a place that did not exist, declaring the lands that we came across as empty in order to claim them for a king who would never leave the South of England.
How strange it is to demand an empire that you will never see.
On our journey back, I lay in my crate choked by the smell of dead flowers. Specimens that had been deracinated and then crushed between sheets of heavy paper dirt still damp on their roots.
I think about you often. About how each of us are gazing at the same star, separated by a quarter of a millennia, but linked by our indenture to a colonial eye.
I have come to understand that Western scientific exploration is like a symbiont, the ambitions of imperialists its host.
Years after our journey other colonists followed using our maps and calculations as their guide.
I saw a picture of you recently. You were surrounded by a group of men. The pursuit of knowledge, enhancing human understanding of the world, exploration and innovation for the benefit of all mankind, these words spill past the lips of schoolchildren and businessmen and politicians whose eyes are fixed hungrily on the mirage of a new frontier, ignoring the fact that what they’re seeing isn’t really there.
I pictured what happened after that photograph. How you were wrapped and lifted onto the bed of a truck. How the protestors stood in your path and sang and danced. I heard that they were criticized for being anti-science and anti-progress. I wonder when you were inside that truck could you hear them singing outside?