What Is an Explorer?

This essay argues that the undertheorized “Explorer” was a later nineteenth-century back-formation, and not the origin of exploration practices and texts. Comparing diverse early nineteenth-century Greenland voyages to 1730s geodetic expeditions, we can see how and why the Explorer began to appear at the turn of the nineteenth century. The distinct regulatory and corporate domains, predisciplinary vantage points, and bibliographic codes, through which exploration accounts were produced often differed radically from those in commercial authorship in the long eighteenth century. I suggest that the commonplace identification of Explorer with the proprietary commercial Author is misleading, and that it provides an opportunity for discerning asynchronous strands in the history of authorship and print.